The intuition blindspot: just because you like going with your gut doesn ’t mean you’re good at it

By Emma Young In 1750, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.” Since then, plenty of research has proven him right: we’re not much good at knowing ourselves and, sadly, we’re especially bad when it comes to judging traits in ourselves that we care about the most. Now Stefan Leach and Mario Weick at the University of Kent, Canterbury, have added to this sorry picture of human delusion, reporting in Social Psychological and Personality Science that people who believe they’re intuitive are no better than anyone else at tasks that require intuition. Leach and Weick recruited 178 students who completed the Preference for Intuition Scale (which asks respondents to indicate how much they agree or disagree with statements like “With most decisions, it makes sense to completely rely on your feelings”). Some also completed the Faith in Intuition Scale (which includes statements such as “I believe in trusting my hunches”). Then the participants completed a task that involved copying out several non-sensical strings of between two and four letters. Unbeknown to the participants, there were complex rules that determined the ordering of these letter strings. After this, they were told that the strings all adhered to hidden grammatical rules and their next challenge was to use their “gut feelings” to decide whether new strings of letters adhered to the rules or not (in these kinds of...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Decision making Thought Source Type: blogs