-->PONE-D-25-61437-->-->Patterns between evidence seeking behaviors, reasoning, and cognitive reflection: a supervised clustering approach-->-->PLOS One

Dear Dr. Tovissodé,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.-->-->

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Additional Editor Comments:

First of all, I would like to apologize for the delay in making a decision. It has been particularly difficult to obtain two reviews from experts in the field, and this problem is becoming more common in recent times.

Finally, I have received the two expert reports and I believe that, although they recognize the merit and interest of some aspects of the work (especially the analytical strategy) there are areas for improvement that should be addressed in order to allow the publication of the article.

First, the Introduction section should explain all the relevant concepts needed to understand the research presented (e.g., reflection…) including the appropriate references. Both reviewers agree on this point.

Similarly, in other sections of the article there is a lack of detail necessary to fully understand what is being presented (e.g., sampling procedures). A rewriting is required in order to incorporate this information.

It is also necessary to incorporate some comments (mainly those specifically raised by Reviewer 2) as limitations of the study: for example, how the present proposal fits within a body of literature in which more ecological tests of online information search already exist. The Discussion section needs to be overhauled to include a deeper discussion of the results and the limitations.

In general, I believe that most or all of the reviewrs’ comments can be incorporated into the article without the need to obtain new data, by rewriting it to: (a) include all the necessary information and references to understand and contextualize the research, (b) clearly present the issues of interpretation and generalization described by the reviewers as limitations (Discussion section). Both reviewers have provided useful ideas to achieve this.

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Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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-->2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #2: Yes

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-->5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #1: This project cleverly uses evidence gathering behavior and reflection tests to find new evidence that insufficient evidence gathering can be explained by unreflective heuristics such as base rate neglect. I like how the authors draw on and return insight to multiple fields in cognitive and health sciences. Their data, materials, and paper seem to be worth publishing. However, I hope the editor will request some minor revisions (or else clarifications) about the following items:

1. "Reflection". This term is used many times in every section of the paper, but almost nothing about the construct, measure(s), or validation is mentioned until the Discussion section on page 11. I recommend defining the construct -- e.g., "conscious and deliberate reconsideration of an initial intuition" (Byrd 2025) —- and the process tracing evidence showing that reflection tests/scores usually track such conscious and deliberate reasoning (Byrd et al. 2023).

2. Table V reports Silhouette values for unsupervised clustering are GREATER THAN or EQUAL TO (.15, .16, .18, .18, .15) the values for supervised clustering (.11, .08, .09, .11, .15). Its caption indicates this means that unsupervised clustering yielded MORE well-separated observations (values closer to 1). However, the paper seems to report the opposite: "unsupervised clustering actually results in LESS well-separated... clusters". So there seems to be an error in the caption or interpretation of the cluster validation. Given that this reported result was used to argue for the use of the SHAP values in the analysis, this seems to require correction or clarification. If in fact the unsupervised clustering yielded superior separation, then it would seem (according to the logic of the paper), the analysis and results may need to be adjusted (according to the unsupervised clustering).

3. Another simple and potentially obvious test of something like Hypothesis 1 is that correct reflection test answers will predict significantly higher odds of choosing secondary evidence (compared to not) when given the opportunity to gather additional evidence. I was surprised not to find this analysis or plot in the paper (or its supplement). Perhaps I missed it or there is a reason against this test that I have failed to consider.

4. The paper states, “It is obviously not possible to directly measure which information respondents actually processed in such an information-diverse setting,....". I agree that THIS PAPER'S methods cannot directly measure what information was processed. However, process tracing researchers have a variety of methods for directly measuring what information people consider —- e.g., online think aloud protocols (Byrd et al. 2023), eye-tracking (Purcell et al. 2021), or even written reflection prompting (Cullen et al., 2022). Fortunately, this sentence is easily revised into a point about opportunities for further research: "Our design did not allow direct measurement of what information respondents considered, but process tracing methods could be used to triangulate on the unreflective base rate neglect we seem to have detected (Byrd et al....)."

Typos? (see CAPS)

- "Fig 3.... evidence proposed to respondents MISSING PERIOD?..."

- "Fig 3.... groupS labels refer to...."

- "Fig 4.... respondents (N = 2905)BERT as a function of..."

- "gender... MALE" — 'man' seems more apt (unless the online survey item asked about 'sex'). This gender/sex mixup appears throughout the paper.

Minor issues

A. The statistical analysis section exhibited lots of redundancy with the second half of the intro (and with the supplementary materials). It felt almost as if these sections were written independently and then combined without removing overlapping content. This is not catastrophic, but it may frustrate readers a bit.

B. I found the supplement to contain info I consider essential (Sections 1.1-1.3) and was surprised not to find it in the main text. If this was to satisfy an arbitrary word limit, then perhaps the above-mentioned redundancy could be removed to make room for this seemingly important info in the main text.

C. Plots.

- The labels were often just the strings of characters from the dataset (e.g., "india_health_authorities") rather than normally formatted text (e.g., "India health authorities"). This made the plots seem unfinished.

- The plots in the manuscript I received were pixelated. I hope the published version will feature the vector-graphic versions of the plots that R and Python can provide (e.g., PDF or SVG output). Vector graphics ensure infinite resolution and even encode the text into the image so that labels are machine readable, searchable, annotat-able, etc. So vector graphics are needed for accessibility (and not merely for, say, aesthetics).

Nick Byrd

(I sign all of my reviews)

References

Byrd, N. (2025). A Two-Factor Explication of “Reflection”: Unifying, Making Sense of, and Guiding the Philosophy and Science of Reflective Reasoning. Res Philosophica, 102(3), 373–392. https://doi.org/10.5840/resphilosophica2711

Byrd, N., Joseph, B., Gongora, G., & Sirota, M. (2023). Tell Us What You Really Think: A Think Aloud Protocol Analysis of the Verbal Cognitive Reflection Test. Journal of Intelligence, 11(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence11040076

Cullen, S., Byrd, N., Chapkovski, P., & Thomason, N. (2022). Thinking Alone, and Together: Dissenting Pairs Corrected More Faulty Decisions Than Solitary Reasoners Across Four Tasks. Reflection on intelligent systems: towards a cross-disciplinary definition, Universität Stuttgart. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390335508

Purcell, Z. A., Howarth, S., Wastell, C. A., Roberts, A. J., & Sweller, N. (2021). Eye tracking and the cognitive reflection test: Evidence for intuitive correct responding and uncertain heuristic responding. Memory & Cognition. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01224-8

Reviewer #2: This paper presents a novel analytical approach, supervised clustering, to investigating patterns of evidence seeking behaviours, a timely and relevant topic. The authors refer to major literature in the field and present an interesting paradigm with a large amount of data. However, the structure of the argumentation and lack of support for the claims of the article make it unsuitable for publication at the current time.

Abstract:

- The abstract lacks a typical structure of clearly and briefly presenting the main research question and findings. It introduces several terms without defining them.

Introduction:

- Line 13: this is a good point about research needing to "zoom in" by controlling variables and how that affects ecological validity. It is also great to use a topic with "skin in the game."

- The emphasis on the idea of information processing and evidence gathering having "analogs" is unclear to me--why is that an important question, or why should it be phrased that way? This idea is not brought back up in the discussion.

- At several points it seems like the main research gap is about the lack of study on deference behavior, but you never define deference and it's not emphasized as a main question in the title, abstract, or literature review. If it is a main idea, it needs to be defined and reviewed. In other places, the emphasis is on heuristics, but they are likewise not fully introduced.

- "Expert source" is never defined in the context of your work

- Similarly, line 129 introduces the idea of cognitive reflection, a complex topic. It is never defined or reviewed and you do not explain the relationship between cognitive reflection and heuristic reasoning.

- In general, the theoretical background is very weak. All terms need definitions and important concepts need more space in the review, especially since these topics are very complex and their definitions have sometimes been unclear in prior literature.

- It would help to add subsections to the introduction to introduce the reader to the different ideas and organize your aims and predictions in a "current study" section.

Methods, Results:

- The data being a convenience sample collected online over a single day is of course a limitation. You mention that it is a representative sample, but in supplement section 1.1 it seems that this claim is based on the numbers just being similar to census data, without a formal analysis. There are only two gender categories and three political affiliation categories, which, although is probably based on the restrictions of the census data, is also a limitation.

- You did not find effects of political ideology, so this idea does not need to be emphasized, but you do need to briefly introduce why you might think there may be an effect (or a confounding effect) based on previous research.

- Where did the items in supplement table II come from? Was there any piloting of the items?

-ev1-ev4 are very similar and at least conceptually complementary pairwise (we don't know how many total employees the company has, so maybe the math doesn't add up), whereas the rest of the items are more independent from each other. How does this affect the participant behavior and the analysis? You mention that some of those items are correlated (line 276) so it seems intentional. It is also unclear how the base rate neglect and confounders neglect heuristics apply to these 4 evidence items vs the rest of the items in terms of how respondents use the information, especially when they can control how many pieces of evidence they are exposed to.

- CRT is in Table 1 and in the analysis but is not mentioned in the methods or discussed in the introduction, which is necessary as again it is a complex topic with some debate over what the CRT actually indexes.

- The idea of "first-order evidence" and how it relates to "deference" is unclear throughout the article; e.g. line 286-288 it is unclear what is meant by "conclusive evidence by deference." If there are some evidence items that are categorized as belonging to "deference," then this needs to be explained.

- Generally it is unclear whether you intend to use political ideology as a main predictor or a confounder. If a main predictor, it should be given more discussion.

- Supplement figure II refers to "primary" and "secondary" evidence, but these terms are not used or discussed anywhere in the main article although the idea of secondary evidence is mentioned once in the introduction.

Discussion:

- Throughout the paper, "folks" is used interchangeably with "respondents"--"folks" is nonstandard for academic English and may imply people outside the participants of the study.

- Line 359 says that the focus of the paper is "how people navigate data that need processing versus

deference to outside sources" but this is not clear in the actual paper.

- Lines 366-388: for me, the claims of ecological validity and granularity are too strong. There are a limited set of items here, in what is essentially a restricted exploration space and a fictional scenario. Other studies have clearly controlled for deference to different types of authorities, trustworthiness, scientific validity of evidence, etc. and the results of this work are not contextualized with those recent studies

- Line 447+: Is this discussion about categorical and associative standards of evidence proposing it as a new typology? Or do these terms come from somewhere else? Are they intended to be the converse of each other (they are not)? Is the associative standard not similar to existing theories of evidence evaluation using multiple sources?

- Throughout the paper, I am missing some details, definitions and connections between the ideas of evidence seeking/gathering, information processing, deference, heuristic reasoning, and cognitive reflection. In general, the claims are not adequately supported.

Limitations:

- a major limitation is the simplicity of your items

- many of the "future directions" you suggest have already been done, such as allowing participants to do free web searches or more freely explore realistic and more extensive information platforms, and including misinformation and conflicting information. In light of that, how is this work justified as a novel contribution to the field? I would focus more on the real novelty--the analytical approach.

In general, this paper presents a potentially useful analytical method, but the ideas, reasoning flow, and contextualization within the literature of the field need much more work.

**********

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Nick Byrd

Reviewer #2: No

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-->PONE-D-25-61437R1-->-->Patterns between evidence seeking behaviors, reasoning, and cognitive reflection: a supervised clustering approach-->-->PLOS One

Dear Dr. Tovissodé,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.-->-->

EDITOR'S COMMENT: I would like to reiterate my apologies for the lengthy review process. However, I am satisfied with the quality and expertise of the two reviewers who have worked on this review, and I would like to thank them for their dedication.

The revisions in this version of the article are both positive. I agree with Reviewer 2’s comment regarding the concept of ‘deference’, so my decision is to accept the article with the condition that a definition and a more detailed explanation are provided, as suggested by this reviewer. Additionally, the inclusion of the reflection test results and predictions in the abstract, as suggested by Reviewer 1, would be a good idea.

In any case, I agree with both reviewrs in that the article has improved substantially and is almost ready for acceptance. I do not think that I will need to send for review the next revision of the paper.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 03 2026 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Fernando Blanco

Academic Editor

PLOS One

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Additional Editor Comments:

Firstly, I would like to reiterate my apologies for the lengthy review process. However, I am satisfied with the quality and expertise of the two reviewers who have worked on this review, and I would like to thank them for their dedication.

The revisions in this version of the article are both positive. I agree with Reviewer 2’s comment regarding the concept of ‘deference’, so my decision is to accept the article with the condition that a definition and a more detailed explanation are provided, as suggested by this reviewer. I consider that the article has improved substantially and is almost ready for acceptance.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.-->

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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-->2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. -->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

-->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

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Reviewer #2: Yes

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-->6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #1: I found the revisions satisfactory and, thus, can recommend them for publication.

I also appreciated some of the improvements that Reviewer 2 elicited. But, for whatever this is worth, I found some of the authors' replies to Reviewer 2 to be supererogatory. For example, 'folk' is standard terminology in some of my fields (e.g., experimental philosophy) and, thus, I found no need for Reviewer 2's comment about it (or the author's compliant removal of the term). So even if Reviewer 2 were insufficiently satisfied with the revisions, I would not consider that — by itself — a reason to reject the revised manuscript. I think the authors did more than their duty.

If, however, the editor were to request further revision, I think one very minor opportunity to improve the paper would involve explicit integration of the reflection test result(s) into the paper's abstract. As far as I can tell, the fact that reflection test performance predicts less neglect of relevant evidence provides some independent evidence of some of the authors' claims. So without explicit mention of what reflection test performance predicts, the abstract may not relay as much of the paper's supporting evidence as it could.

In case itemized responses are beneficial for the final decision, I include them below:

Re: My Comment 1

The authors adequately integrated the explication of 'reflection' and the psychometric investigations of its tests.

Re: My Comment 2

The authors explained that I may have been looking at the wrong table in the ancillary materials (V instead of IV). I seem to have been confused by the cross-reference in this sentence: "unsupervised clustering actually results in LESS well-separated... clusters (Table V)." The new Supplement seems to confirm what the authors claim in the paper (and explain in their replies): "Table II displays cluster validation measures for supervised and unsupervised hierarchical clustering methods. It appears that supervised clustering provides the most well separated (higher silhouette score) and most stable clusters (lower APN) for all considered k values."

Re: My Comment 3

The authors added something like the simplest valid analysis that I proposed. (I think this is what is now reported in Table VI.)

Re: My Comment 4

My comments about typos and minor issues also seem to have been resolved.

Nick Byrd (I sign all of my reviews)

Reviewer #2: I thank the authors for addressing my comments and commend them for improving their paper immensely. I have only a minor revision request at this point.

The abstract is now much more clear and the goals of the paper are clearer as well. However, the concept of "deference" still comes into the abstract at the very end, with no mention of what it is or why it is involved with the main results. Additionally, the sentence "Consequently, evidential categories in information seeking research are likely overly monolithic, despite their advantage of studying a wider range of evidential categories used in decision making" is difficult to understand.

The introduction is much improved! The new structure greatly helps clarify your position and goals and addressed most of my comments.

I would still need more of an actual definition for "deference"--line 70; if it is an important construct in the paper, it should be defined explicitly, not obliquely. I appreciate that the distinctions between "first-order" and "second-order" evidence are mixed in the literature. But it is also still a bit unclear to me how "deference" differs from theories of epistemic justifications as you've mentioned briefly, e.g. justification by authority (for example, Meng-Jung Tsai, Ching-Yeh Wang, An-Hsuan Wu, Ivar Bråten, Differences in epistemic justification profiles during conflicting socio-scientific information processing: A study of visual and memory-based behavior via eye-tracking, Acta Psychologica, Volume 252, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104680. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691824005584). And additionally it is unclear where the construct comes from. Is it a novel idea meant as an umbrella for several related constructs? Or something coming from previous literature? You mention that you use deference to avoid making assumptions about who participants would believe are "experts" (and thus, authorities?). The ideas are almost there in the discussion around lines 58-79, but it is still unclear how deference relates to the existing concept of a "source feature" of evidence, which as I understand it, would be related to second-order evidence. It is very important to be clear about your claims about this construct, since your analytical approach uses weights on information *sources*. Deference would then be directly related to the "source features" as participants understand them, e.g. authority, trustworthiness, expertise, etc.

Overall, this manuscript has been greatly improved. I only have the last comments about the importance of the "deference" construct in relation to the authors' claims and use of it and its relationship to existing similar constructs. If the authors would address this issue, then I would find the paper suitable to publish.

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-->7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Nick Byrd

Reviewer #2: No

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Patterns between evidence seeking behaviors, reasoning, and cognitive reflection: a supervised clustering approach

PONE-D-25-61437R2

Dear Dr. Tovissodé,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Fernando Blanco

Academic Editor

PLOS One

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