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PS 416: Intuition |
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What is Intuition? Intuition is our power to attain immediate apprehension or cognition, or quick and ready insight, without evident rational thought or inference.
Should We Listen to Our Hearts or Our Heads? In a famous phrase, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) once wrote: "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of...We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart." His observation was, and is, controversial, because it contrasts with advice we have all heard and given: to listen to reason and ignore our gut feelings and intuitions. For Pascal, matters of emotion and will can work independently of and sometimes even antagonistically to the cold voice of reason. Is rational deliberation superior to gut intuition? Skeptics argue that intuition is little more than a sense of confidence about being right, regardless of whether we are right or wrong. In contrast, "intuitives" believe that people should listen to their inner wisdom, and let empathy and compassion be their guide to action. I have a sense (call it an intuition) that the truth of the matter is somewhere between the cautious prescriptions of skeptics and the naivety of intuitives. Indeed, as Pascal recognized, we know truth not only by the reason. What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Intuition? The primary advantage of intuition is that it allows us to perform complex tasks rapidly, efficiently, and with minimal attentional resources. In everyday life, we employ intuition automatically as a guide to making sense of our worlds. We make classifications, we generalize, we infer. Intuition frees up our attentional resources so that we can focus on the deep structure of a problem or situation. In some circumstances, overthinking a problem can even lead to poor judgments. But, there are drawbacks to the efficiency and wisdom of the heart. Intuition depends on natural reactions that are cultivated by experience in a particular domain. It is thus highly dependent on habit and situational cues. The bad side is that because intuitions occur automatically and unconsciously, they they tend to be inflexible, and difficult to adjust or prevent, which can be problematic to the extent that an intuitive response occurs inappropriately.
How Can We Study Intuition? Many psychologists would not consider intuition to be a legitimate topic for study. However, this bias reveals many scientist's disgust with pop culture treatments of intuition, which typically reveal deep ignorance of a vast body of cognitive and social psychological research on automatic processing. Examples of excellent psychological-science relevant to the topic of intuition include work on subliminal priming, automaticity and practice, implicit memory, thought heuristics, spontaneous trait inference, right-brain processing, somatic markers, nonverbal communication, empathic accuracy, expertise, creativity and insight.
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