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Thinking Fast, Thinking Wrong: Intuitiveness Modulates LLM Counterfactual Reasoning in Policy Evaluation

Yanjie He · Apr 12, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics
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How to use this page

Low trust

Use this as background context only. Do not make protocol decisions from this page alone.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Low

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored. We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn from economics and social science, each grounded in peer-reviewed evidence and classified by intuitiveness -- whether the empirical finding aligns with (obvious), is unclear relative to (ambiguous), or contradicts (counter-intuitive) common prior expectations. We evaluate four frontier LLMs across five prompting strategies with 8,000 experimental trials and analyze the results using mixed-effects logistic regression. Our findings reveal three key results: (1) a chain-of-thought (CoT) paradox, where chain-of-thought prompting dramatically improves performance on obvious cases but this benefit is substantially attenuated on counter-intuitive ones (interaction OR = 0.278, $p < 0.001$); (2) intuitiveness as the dominant factor, with case-level variance exceeding that of model choice or prompting strategy (ICC = 0.671); and (3) a knowledge-reasoning dissociation, where citation-based familiarity is unrelated to accuracy ($p = 0.84$), suggesting models possess relevant knowledge but fail to reason with it when findings contradict intuition. We frame these results through the lens of dual-process theory (System 1 vs. System 2) and argue that current LLMs' "slow thinking" achieves only partial inhibition of intuitive priors -- producing the form of deliberative reasoning without fully delivering its substance.

Abstract-only analysis — low confidence

All signals on this page are inferred from the abstract only and may be inaccurate. Do not use this page as a primary protocol reference.

  • This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.
  • The available metadata is too thin to trust this as a primary source.
Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

This paper looks adjacent to evaluation work, but not like a strong protocol reference.

Trust level

Low

Usefulness score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 35%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored."

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored."

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Our findings reveal three key results: (1) a chain-of-thought (CoT) paradox, where chain-of-thought prompting dramatically improves performance on obvious cases but this benefit is substantially attenuated on counter-intuitive ones (interaction OR = 0.278, $p < 0.001$); (2) intuitiveness as the dominant factor, with case-level variance exceeding that of model choice or prompting strategy (ICC = 0.671); and (3) a knowledge-reasoning dissociation, where citation-based familiarity is unrelated to accuracy ($p = 0.84$), suggesting models possess relevant knowledge but fail to reason with it when findings contradict intuition."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: General

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Low
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

accuracy

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored.
  • We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn from economics and social science, each grounded in peer-reviewed evidence and classified by intuitiveness -- whether the empirical finding aligns with (obvious), is unclear relative to (ambiguous), or contradicts (counter-intuitive) common prior expectations.
  • We evaluate four frontier LLMs across five prompting strategies with 8,000 experimental trials and analyze the results using mixed-effects logistic regression.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Accuracy

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored.
  • We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn from economics and social science, each grounded in peer-reviewed evidence and classified by intuitiveness -- whether the empirical finding aligns with (obvious), is…
  • We evaluate four frontier LLMs across five prompting strategies with 8,000 experimental trials and analyze the results using mixed-effects logistic regression.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored.
  • We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn from economics and social science, each grounded in peer-reviewed evidence and classified by intuitiveness -- whether the empirical finding aligns with (obvious), is…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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