What About Intuition and Common Sense?

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2-1 How does our everyday thinking sometimes lead us to a wrong conclusion?

Some people suppose that psychology merely documents and dresses in jargon what people already know: “You get paid for using fancy methods to prove what my grandmother 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). Today’s psychological science does document a vast intuitive mind. As we will see, our thinking, memory, and attitudes operate on two levels—conscious and unconscious—with the larger part operating off-screen, automatically. Like jumbo jets, we fly mostly on autopilot.

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?

This much seems certain: We often underestimate intuition’s perils. My [DM’s] geographical intuition tells me that Reno is east of Los Angeles, that Rome is south of New York, that Atlanta is east of Detroit. But I am wrong, wrong, and wrong. As novelist Madeleine L’Engle observed, “The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument” (1973). Three phenomena—hindsight bias, overconfidence, and our tendency to perceive patterns in random events—illustrate why we cannot rely solely on intuition and common sense.

DID WE KNOW IT ALL ALONG? HINDSIGHT BIAS Consider how easy it is to draw the bull’s-eye after the arrow strikes. As we often say, “Hindsight is 20/20.” 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. After a war or an election, its outcome usually seems obvious. Although history may therefore seem like a series of inevitable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen. No one’s diary recorded, “Today the Hundred Years War began.”

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. Tell the first group, “Psychologists have found that separation weakens romantic attraction. As the saying goes, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’” Ask them to imagine why this might be true. Most people can, and nearly all will then view this true finding as unsurprising.

Tell the second group the opposite: “Psychologists have found that separation strengthens romantic attraction. 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. When opposite findings both seem like common sense, there is a problem.

Such errors in our recollections and explanations show why we need psychological research. Just asking people how and why they felt or acted as they did can sometimes be misleading—not because common sense is usually wrong, but because common sense better describes what has happened than what will happen.

More than 800 scholarly papers have shown hindsight bias in people young and old from across the world (Roese & Vohs, 2012). Nevertheless, Grandma’s intuition is often right. As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot by watching.” (We have Berra to thank for other gems, such as “Nobody ever comes here—it’s too crowded,” and “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop ’em.”) Because we’re all behavior watchers, it would be surprising if many of psychology’s findings had not been foreseen. Many people believe that love breeds happiness, for example, and they are right (we have what researchers identify as a deep “need to belong”).

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OVERCONFIDENCE We humans tend to think we know more than we do. Asked how sure we are of our answers to factual questions (Is Boston north or south of Paris?), we tend to be more confident than correct.² Or consider these three anagrams, which Richard Goranson (1978) asked people to unscramble:

About how many seconds do you think it would have taken you to unscramble each of these? Knowing the answers tends to make us overconfident. (Surely the solution would take only 10 seconds or so.) In reality, the average problem solver spends 3 minutes, as you also might, given a similar anagram without the solution: OCHSA.³

Are we any better at predicting social behavior? Psychologist Philip Tetlock (1998, 2005) collected more than 27,000 expert predictions of world events, such as the future of South Africa or whether Quebec would separate from Canada. His repeated finding: These predictions, which experts made with 80 percent confidence on average, were right less than 40 percent of the time. Nevertheless, even those who erred maintained their confidence by noting they were “almost right”: “The Québécois separatists almost won the secessionist referendum.”

PERCEIVING ORDER IN RANDOM EVENTS We have a built-in eagerness to make sense of our world. People see a face on the Moon, hear Satanic messages in music, or perceive the Virgin Mary’s image on a grilled cheese sandwich. Even in random data, we often find patterns, because—here’s a curious fact of life—random sequences often don’t look random (Falk et al., 2009; Nickerson, 2002, 2005). Flip a coin 50 times and you may be surprised at the streaks of heads and tails. In actual random sequences, patterns and streaks (such as repeating digits) occur more often than people expect (Oskarsson et al., 2009).

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Some happenings, such as winning the lottery twice, seem so extraordinary that we find it difficult to conceive an ordinary, chance-related explanation. “But with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen,” note statisticians Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller (1989). An event that happens to but 1 in 1 billion people every day occurs about 7 times a day, more than 2500 times a year.

The point to remember: Hindsight bias, overconfidence, and our tendency to perceive patterns in random events often lead us to overestimate our intuition. But scientific inquiry can help us sift reality from illusion.