![]() When two opposite findings both seem like common sense, there is a problem. As the saying goes, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’” People given this untrue result can also easily imagine it, and most will also see it as unsurprising. Tell the second group the opposite, “Psychologists have found that separation strengthens romantic attraction. Most people can, and nearly all will then view this true finding as unsurprising. As the saying goes, "Out of sight, out of mind." Ask them to imagine why this might be true. Tell the first group, “Psychologists have found that separation weakens romantic attraction. This hindsight bias (also known as the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon) is easy to demonstrate: Give half the members of a group some purported psychological finding, and give the other half an opposite result. No one’s diary recorded, “Today the Hundred Years War began.” Although history may therefore seem like a series of inevitable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen. After a war or an election, its outcome usually seems obvious. After the stock market drops, people say it was “due for a correction.” After the football game, we credit the coach if a “gutsy play” wins the game, and fault the coach for the “stupid play” if it doesn’t. Three phenomena - hindsight bias, judgmental overconfidence, and our tendency to perceive patterns in random events - illustrate why we cannot rely solely on intuition and common sense.Ĭonsider how easy it is to draw the bull’s eye after the arrow strikes. Indeed, observed novelist Madeleine L’Engle, “The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument” (1973). As a Nobel Prize-winning physicist explained, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool” (Feynman, 1997). Modules to come will show that experiments have found people greatly overestimating their lie detection accuracy, their eyewitness recollections, their interviewee assessments, their risk predictions, and their stock-picking talents. ![]() My geographical intuition tells me that Reno is east of Los Angeles, that Rome is south of New York, that Atlanta is east of Detroit. This much seems certain: We often underestimate intuition’s perils. So, are we smart to listen to the whispers of our inner wisdom, to simply trust “the force within”? Or should we more often be subjecting our intuitive hunches to skeptical scrutiny? ![]() Like jumbo jets, we fly mostly on autopilot. As we will see, our thinking, memory, and attitudes operate on two levels - conscious and unconscious - with the larger part operating automatically, off-screen. Prince Charles has much company, judging from the long list of pop psychology books on “intuitive managing,” “intuitive trading,” and “intuitive healing.” Today’s psychological science does document a vast intuitive mind. Some people suppose that psychology merely documents and dresses in jargon what people already know: “So what else is new - you get paid for using fancy methods to prove what everyone knows?” Others place their faith in human intuition: “Buried deep within each and every one of us, there is an instinctive, heart-felt awareness that provides – if we allow it to – the most reliable guide,” offered Prince Charles (2000). ![]() FOCUS QUESTIONS: How do hindsight bias, overconfidence, and the tendency to perceive order in random events illustrate why science-based answers are more valid than those based on intuition and common sense?
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