Coun­ter­fac­tual Think­ing and the First Instinct Fal­lacy (pdf); a research paper on whether or not it’s bet­ter to change your answer when tak­ing multiple-choice tests. The abstract:

Most peo­ple believe that they should avoid chang­ing their answer when tak­ing multiple-choice tests. Vir­tu­ally all research on this topic, how­ever, sug­gests that this strat­egy is ill-founded: most answer changes are from incor­rect to cor­rect, and peo­ple who change their answers usu­ally improve their test scores. Why do peo­ple believe in this strat­egy if the data so strongly refute it? We argue that the belief is in part a prod­uct of coun­ter­fac­tual think­ing. Chang­ing an answer when one should have stuck with one’s orig­i­nal answer leads to more “if only…” self-recriminations than does stick­ing with one’s first instinct when one should have switched. As a con­se­quence, instances of the for­mer are more mem­o­rable than instances of the latter.

via Over­com­ing Bias

(As a side­note, I really do like see­ing the word ‘data’ used correctly.)