Beyond Self-Report: Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap in Critical Thinking Assessment via Interpretable Multi-Agent System

Accurate assessment of critical thinking is historically limited by the Intention Behavior Gap in psychology: the disconnect between what individuals self-reported disposition and their actual practical behaviors. We try to bridge this gap with MASA (Multi-Agent Scenario-based Assessment), a framework that operationalizes cognitive assessment into an interpretable and interactive multi-agent workflow with Assessment Chain-of-Thought (AsCoT). Validating on both large-scale simulations (N =1,161) and human participants (N =70), we find that MASA aligns better with human expert ratings (r=0.882) than traditional gold-standard inventories (r=0.720), with an average cost of only $0.41 per participant. These results suggest that by shifting from selfreport inventory to behavior-grounded dialogue, MASA offers a more accurate, cost-effective, and transparent solution for real-world cognitive evaluation.