Can we trust our intuitions?
A reader writes, “Years ago I ‘felt’ something was wrong with my sister. I kept trying to call her with no response. At the time I was working on a very busy switchboard and had contacts all over the place, so I rang the local exchange in the town where she was living. Two hours later I had my sister on the phone, telling me her house had burned down around the time I had tried to call her. Luckily everyone managed to get out. It was a very freaky feeling.”
Have you ever felt that you knew something without the use of reasoning or detailed analysis? Perhaps you had a hunch, a piece of knowledge for which you could not account. Are you guided by “gut instincts?” Are there advantages to heeding your intuitions?
Some peak performance gurus advocate intuitive decision making. They suggest turning off the analytical mind, and tuning into the “right brain,” a hidden source of wisdom useful for making important decisions. Is this a valid claim? Is there a reason to trust our intuition?
There is plenty of evidence that we are routinely guided or influenced by automatic or unconscious mental processes, and that these processes can serve us well. When we respond emotionally to situations, for example, we usually do so without extensive deliberative thought or analysis. If experiencing a sense of uneasiness in unfamiliar and dangerous surroundings motivates you to move quickly to a place of safety, that feeling might be considered wise or adaptive.
Irrational or disturbed emotional reactions, however, are often maladaptive. Those who refuse to board an airliner out of fear, but seem unconcerned about using earthbound automobile transportation are ignoring statistics which demonstrate the far greater danger associated with automobile travel.
There are other types of mental processes that occur outside of our awareness. If there is a task that you perform with great regularity and expertise, you probably perform it efficiently with very little conscious thought or effort, seemingly intuitively.
For many of us, driving a car is one such over-learned skill. Having driven daily for many years, we are able to do it more or less automatically, without much effortful thought. We can sing along with the radio, talk on a cell phone, converse with passengers, and even eat a snack while navigating mindlessly and more or less flawlessly through rush hour traffic.
Some people will insist following an event that, “I intuitively knew it all along.” Social psychologists have researched this hindsight judgment and found it to be notoriously error prone. Similarly, people like the above reader, occasionally report experiencing a premonition, unexplained knowledge of events which later occur, or are shown to have occurred. Some people are passionately confident in the validity of premonitions, based upon remarkable experiences like this one.
A scientific explanation of premonitions usually goes like this: A premonition that is confirmed by subsequent events tends to be remembered, while premonitions of events that fail to occur are typically forgotten. The result is that people experiencing premonitions tend to overestimate the reliability of these random experiences, leaving them with a false impression of extrasensory perception.
Psychologist David Dunning and his colleagues were interested in this feeling of overconfidence we have in decisions we make. They allowed students to interview people about their backgrounds, hobbies, interests, and whatever else they wished. Following each interview, the students were asked to predict how the interviewee would respond to 20 two-choice questions.
The students guessed correctly 63% of the time, 13% better than chance; however they felt 75% confident of the accuracy of their predictions. Studies like this have led theorists to conclude that we are biased toward overestimating the accuracy of our judgments and decisions. Could this help explain the confidence of some in the validity of their intuitions?
Human decision making is an interesting area of psychological investigation. I suppose that being human means that we are bound to make errors in our judgments. Nevertheless, as we learn more about the ways in which human decisions go awry, we might likewise sharpen our ability to think critically, possibly improving the precision of our decision making processes.
Have you ever felt that you knew something without the use of reasoning or detailed analysis? Perhaps you had a hunch, a piece of knowledge for which you could not account. Are you guided by “gut instincts?” Are there advantages to heeding your intuitions?
Some peak performance gurus advocate intuitive decision making. They suggest turning off the analytical mind, and tuning into the “right brain,” a hidden source of wisdom useful for making important decisions. Is this a valid claim? Is there a reason to trust our intuition?
There is plenty of evidence that we are routinely guided or influenced by automatic or unconscious mental processes, and that these processes can serve us well. When we respond emotionally to situations, for example, we usually do so without extensive deliberative thought or analysis. If experiencing a sense of uneasiness in unfamiliar and dangerous surroundings motivates you to move quickly to a place of safety, that feeling might be considered wise or adaptive.
Irrational or disturbed emotional reactions, however, are often maladaptive. Those who refuse to board an airliner out of fear, but seem unconcerned about using earthbound automobile transportation are ignoring statistics which demonstrate the far greater danger associated with automobile travel.
There are other types of mental processes that occur outside of our awareness. If there is a task that you perform with great regularity and expertise, you probably perform it efficiently with very little conscious thought or effort, seemingly intuitively.
For many of us, driving a car is one such over-learned skill. Having driven daily for many years, we are able to do it more or less automatically, without much effortful thought. We can sing along with the radio, talk on a cell phone, converse with passengers, and even eat a snack while navigating mindlessly and more or less flawlessly through rush hour traffic.
Some people will insist following an event that, “I intuitively knew it all along.” Social psychologists have researched this hindsight judgment and found it to be notoriously error prone. Similarly, people like the above reader, occasionally report experiencing a premonition, unexplained knowledge of events which later occur, or are shown to have occurred. Some people are passionately confident in the validity of premonitions, based upon remarkable experiences like this one.
A scientific explanation of premonitions usually goes like this: A premonition that is confirmed by subsequent events tends to be remembered, while premonitions of events that fail to occur are typically forgotten. The result is that people experiencing premonitions tend to overestimate the reliability of these random experiences, leaving them with a false impression of extrasensory perception.
Psychologist David Dunning and his colleagues were interested in this feeling of overconfidence we have in decisions we make. They allowed students to interview people about their backgrounds, hobbies, interests, and whatever else they wished. Following each interview, the students were asked to predict how the interviewee would respond to 20 two-choice questions.
The students guessed correctly 63% of the time, 13% better than chance; however they felt 75% confident of the accuracy of their predictions. Studies like this have led theorists to conclude that we are biased toward overestimating the accuracy of our judgments and decisions. Could this help explain the confidence of some in the validity of their intuitions?
Human decision making is an interesting area of psychological investigation. I suppose that being human means that we are bound to make errors in our judgments. Nevertheless, as we learn more about the ways in which human decisions go awry, we might likewise sharpen our ability to think critically, possibly improving the precision of our decision making processes.
posted by Michael | Friday, November 04, 2005
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home