Puzzles

You overtake the runner in second place — what place are you in now?

You're running a race and you pass the person currently in second place. What position are you in now?

Reveal the answer

Second place, not first. Being in second place before you passed them means someone is still ahead of you in first — overtaking the second-place runner just swaps your positions, so you become second. This is one of four new items added to the Cognitive Reflection Test by psychologists Keela S. Thomson and Daniel M. Oppenheimer in their 2016 paper, designed to catch the same snap-judgment error as the classic 'bat and ball' question without relying on arithmetic.

Keela S. Thomson and Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Investigating an Alternate Form of the Cognitive Reflection Test — Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2016

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