“Cognitive Biases: Mistakes or Missing Stakes?”, Benjamin Enke, Uri Gneezy, Brian Hall, David Martin, Vadim Nelidov, Theo Offerman, Jeroen van de Ven2023-07-11 (economics, cognitive bias, forecasting)⁠:

Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, evidence on the effect of large incentives on cognitive biases is scant.

We test the effect of incentives on 4 widely documented biases: base-rate neglect, anchoring, failure of contingent thinking, and intuitive reasoning [CRT]. In laboratory experiments with 1,236 college students in Nairobi, we implement 3 incentive levels: no incentives, standard lab payments, and very high incentives.

We find that very high stakes increase response times by 40% but improve performance only very mildly or not at all. In none of the tasks do very high stakes come close to debiasing participants.

…Our results contrast with the predictions of a sample of 68 researchers, drawn from professional experimental economists and Harvard students with exposure to graduate-level experimental economics. These researchers predict that performance will improve by an average of 25% going from no incentives to standard incentives, and by another 25% going from standard to very high incentives. Although some variation is seen in projected performance increases across tasks, these predictions are always more bullish about the effect of incentives than our experimental data warrant.