Most of us learn early that being smart means being quick. In school, the student who raised their hand first usually seemed to know the most, and that impression tends to follow people into adulthood. So when someone pauses before answering, or takes longer than expected to finish a task, it’s easy to assume they’re struggling .

That assumption is often wrong. Some of the habits most closely tied to deliberate and layered thinking involve slowing down at exactly the moments when others speed up.

To an onlooker, they can look like hesitation. Underneath, they usually reflect a person who has learned not to fully trust their first impression, and who cares more about understanding something than about appearing to understand it.

Here are two of those habits, and the psychology behind why they work.

Habit 1: Hesitating On Questions Everyone Else Finds Easy

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 together, and the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Most people say 10 cents within a second or two. The correct answer is 5 cents, and the people who find it are usually the ones who stopped to check an answer that seemed obviously right.

The puzzle is part of the Cognitive Reflection Test, which measures how readily people question their own intuitive responses. It builds on dual-process theory, the idea that the mind has a fast, automatic way of thinking and a slower, more deliberate one. Everyone uses both.

People differ in how often they notice that the fast answer needs checking, and a 2022 study published in Intelligence found that this tendency is closely tied to general intelligence.

Part of what makes this hard is that intuitive answers come with a sense of certainty attached. Researchers who study metacognition, or how people monitor their own thinking, call this the “feeling of rightness.” When an answer arrives with that feeling, most people stop there. People who tend to pause have learned that feeling sure and being right are not the same thing.

A familiar version of this happens at work. A manager asks the team how long a project will take, and most people offer a number on the spot. One person asks for time to think about it and comes back the next day with a longer estimate, having accounted for the review stage and an upcoming holiday. In the meeting, that person looked less certain than everyone else. Weeks later, theirs is the estimate that held up. Psychologists call the tendency to underestimate how long things will take the planning fallacy, and breaking a task into its parts, as that colleague did, is one of the more reliable ways to counter it.

The pause also carries a social cost. Silence in a group can feel exposing, and many people answer quickly partly to avoid looking slow. Someone willing to sit with that discomfort is usually more focused on getting the answer right than on how they come across.

None of this means slow equals smart. Processing speed is a genuine part of intelligence, and plenty of quick thinkers are also careful ones. What matters is a willingness to doubt an answer that seems too easy.

Habit 2: Working Things Out The Long Way Instead Of Looking It Up

When some people get stuck, their first move isn’t to search for the answer. They try to work it out themselves, even when the solution is only a few seconds away. To anyone watching, this can look stubborn or inefficient.

Picture two colleagues who each need to write a formula in an unfamiliar spreadsheet program. One searches online, copies a solution and moves on in under a minute. The other spends 20 minutes trying different approaches before getting it to work. The following week, a slightly different problem comes up. The first colleague searches again, while the second adjusts the formula in a few moments.

UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork coined the term “desirable difficulties” to describe the kind of learning that feels harder in the moment but tends to last longer. Pulling an answer from your own memory strengthens it more than rereading it does, and a 2021 study published in Psychological Bulletin found that this holds up in real classrooms, not just in the lab.

A related finding, known as the generation effect, shows that people remember information they produce themselves better than information they’re simply given. A 2020 study published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review , which pooled the results of hundreds of experiments, confirmed that the effect is robust.

This habit also protects people from a common trap. When information is easy to take in, people tend to mistake that ease for understanding, a pattern researchers call the fluency illusion.

In a 2019 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , students who sat through polished, easy-to-follow lectures felt they had learned more than students in active-learning classes, where they worked through problems themselves, but they actually learned less. People who work things out for themselves are less likely to fall into this trap, because they find out right away what they do and don’t understand.

The habit is also linked to a trait called need for cognition, which describes how much a person enjoys effortful thinking. People high in this trait don’t experience the long way as a chore. Working through a problem is satisfying to them in its own right.

The habit works best with some judgment attached. Struggling with a problem pays off when it’s followed by checking the answer, so that mistakes get corrected rather than learned, and there’s little to gain from rebuilding something that only needs to be used once. Intelligent people tend to know the difference, and they choose the long way mainly when understanding is worth more than speed .

Do you trust your first answer, or stop to check it? Find out how you use your mental habits to approach problems with this science-inspired test: Cognitive Style Test