25-3 What is intuition, and how can the availability heuristic, overconfidence, belief perseverance, and framing influence our decisions and judgments?

When making each day’s hundreds of judgments and decisions (Should I take a jacket? Can I trust this person? Should I shoot the basketball or pass to the player who’s hot?), we seldom take the time and effort to reason systematically. We just follow our intuition—our fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings and thoughts. After interviewing policy makers in government, business, and education, social psychologist Irving Janis (1986) concluded that they “often do not use a reflective problem-solving approach. How do they usually arrive at their decisions? If you ask, they are likely to tell you . . . they do it mostly by the seat of their pants.”

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When we need to act quickly, the mental shortcuts we call heuristics enable snap judgments. Thanks to our mind’s automatic information processing, intuitive judgments are instantaneous. They also are usually effective (Gigerenzer & Sturm, 2012). However, research by cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1974) showed how these generally helpful shortcuts can lead even the smartest people into dumb decisions.³ The availability heuristic operates when we estimate the likelihood of events based on how mentally available they are—how easily they come to mind. Casinos entice us to gamble by signaling even small wins with bells and lights—making them mentally vivid—while keeping big losses invisible.

The availability heuristic colors our judgments of other people, too. Anything that makes information pop into mind—its vividness, recentness, or distinctiveness—can make it seem commonplace. While this generally helps us to evaluate people and situations quickly, it can also distort our perceptions. If someone from a particular ethnic or religious group commits a terrorist act, as happened on September 11, 2001, our readily available memory of the dramatic event may shape our impression of the whole group.

Even during that horrific year, terrorist acts claimed comparatively few lives. Yet when the statistical reality of greater dangers (see FIGURE 25.5) was pitted against the 9/11 terror, the memorable case won: Emotion-laden images of terror exacerbated our fears (Sunstein, 2007).

Although our fears often protect us, we sometimes fear the wrong things. (See Thinking Critically About: The Fear Factor below.) We fear flying because we visualize air disasters. We fear letting our sons and daughters walk to school because we see mental snapshots of abducted and brutalized children. We fear swimming in ocean waters because we replay Jaws with ourselves as victims. Even passing by a person who sneezes and coughs can heighten our perceptions of various health risks (Lee et al., 2010). And so, thanks to such readily available images, we come to fear extremely rare events.

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Meanwhile, the lack of available images of future climate change disasters—which some scientists regard as “Armageddon in slow motion”—has left most people little concerned (Pew, 2014). What’s more cognitively available than slow climate change is our recently experienced local weather, which tells us nothing about long-term planetary trends (Egan & Mullin, 2012; Zaval et al., 2014). Unusually hot local weather increases people’s worry about global climate warming, while a recent cold day reduces their concern and overwhelms less memorable scientific data (Li et al., 2011). After Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, its residents’ vivid experience of extreme weather increased their environmentalism (Rudman et al., 2013).

Dramatic outcomes make us gasp; probabilities we hardly grasp. As of 2013, some 40 nations have sought to harness the positive power of vivid, memorable images by putting eye-catching warnings and graphic photos on cigarette packages (Riordan, 2013). This campaign has worked (Huang et al., 2013). As psychologist Paul Slovic (2007) points out, we reason emotionally and neglect probabilities. We overfeel and underthink. In one experiment, donations to a starving 7-year-old were greater when her image was not accompanied by statistical information about the millions of needy African children like her (Small et al., 2007). “The more who die, the less we care,” noted Slovic (2010).

Sometimes our judgments and decisions go awry simply because we are more confident than correct. Across various tasks, people overestimate their performance (Metcalfe, 1998). If 60 percent of people correctly answer a factual question, such as “Is absinthe a liqueur or a precious stone?,” they will typically average 75 percent confidence (Fischhoff et al., 1977). (It’s a licorice-flavored liqueur.) This tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and judgments is overconfidence.

It was an overconfident BP that, before its exploded drilling platform spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico, downplayed safety concerns, and then downplayed the spill’s magnitude (Mohr et al., 2010; Urbina, 2010). It is overconfidence that drives stockbrokers and investment managers to market their ability to outperform stock market averages (Malkiel, 2012). A purchase of stock X, recommended by a broker who judges this to be the time to buy, is usually balanced by a sale made by someone who judges this to be the time to sell. Despite their confidence, buyer and seller cannot both be right.

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Overconfidence can also feed extreme political views. People with a superficial understanding of proposals for cap-and-trade carbon emissions or a national flat tax often express strong pro or con views. Asking them to explain the details of these policies exposes them to their own ignorance, which in turn leads them to express more moderate views (Fernbach et al., 2013). Sometimes the less people know, the more immoderate they are.

Classrooms are full of overconfident students who expect to finish assignments and write papers ahead of schedule (Buehler et al., 1994, 2002). In fact, these projects generally take about twice the number of days predicted. This “planning fallacy” (underestimating the time and cost of a project) routinely occurs with construction projects, which often finish late and over budget.

Overconfidence can have adaptive value. People who err on the side of overconfidence live more happily. Their seeming competence can help them gain influence (Anderson et al., 2012). Moreover, given prompt and clear feedback, as weather forecasters receive after each day’s predictions, we can learn to be more realistic about the accuracy of our judgments (Fischhoff, 1982). The wisdom to know when we know a thing and when we do not is born of experience.

Our overconfidence is startling. Equally so is our belief perseverance—our tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. One study of belief perseverance engaged people with opposing views of capital punishment (Lord et al., 1979). After studying two supposedly new research findings, one supporting and the other refuting the claim that the death penalty deters crime, each side was more impressed by the study supporting its own beliefs. And each readily disputed the other study. Thus, showing the pro- and anti-capital-punishment groups the same mixed evidence actually increased their disagreement.

To rein in belief perseverance, a simple remedy exists: Consider the opposite. When the same researchers repeated the capital-punishment study, they asked some participants to be “as objective and unbiased as possible” (Lord et al., 1984). The plea did nothing to reduce biased evaluations of evidence. They asked a different group to consider “whether you would have made the same high or low evaluations had exactly the same study produced results on the other side of the issue.” Having imagined and pondered opposite findings, these people became much less biased.

The more we come to appreciate why our beliefs might be true, the more tightly we cling to them. Once beliefs form and get justified, it takes more compelling evidence to change them than it did to create them. Prejudice persists. Beliefs often persevere.

Framing—the way we present an issue—sways our decisions and judgments. Imagine two surgeons explaining a surgery risk. One tells patients that 10 percent of people die during this surgery. The other tells patients that 90 percent survive. Although the information is the same, the effect is not. Both patients and physicians perceive greater risk when they hear that 10 percent die (Marteau, 1989; McNeil et al., 1988; Rothman & Salovey, 1997).

Framing can be a powerful persuasion tool. Carefully posed options can nudge people toward decisions that could benefit them or society as a whole (Benartzi & Thaler, 2013; Thaler & Sunstein, 2008):

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The point to remember: Those who understand the power of framing can use it (for good or ill) to nudge our decisions.

25-5 How do smart thinkers use intuition?

The perils of intuition—irrational fears, cloudy judgments, illogical reasoning—feed gut fears and prejudices. Irrational thinking can persist even when people are offered extra pay for thinking smart, even when they are asked to justify their answers, and even when they are expert physicians or clinicians (Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002). Highly intelligent people (including U.S. federal intelligence agents, in one study) are similarly vulnerable to intuition’s distortions of reality (Reyna et al., 2014; Stanovich et al., 2013). Even very smart people can make not-so-smart judgments. So, are our heads indeed “filled with straw,” as T. S. Eliot suggested?

Throughout this book you will see examples of smart intuition. In brief,

Critics note that some studies have not found the supposed power of unconscious thought and remind us that deliberate, conscious thought also furthers smart thinking (Lassiter et al., 2009; Newell, 2015; Nieuwenstein et al., 2015; Payne et al., 2008). In challenging situations, superior decision makers, including chess players, take time to think (Moxley et al., 2012). And with many sorts of problems, deliberative thinkers are aware of the intuitive option, but know when to override it (Mata et al., 2013). Consider:

A bat and a ball together cost 110 cents.
The bat costs 100 cents more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

Most people’s intuitive response—10 cents—is wrong, and a few moments of deliberate thinking reveals why.⁴

The bottom line: Our two-track mind makes sweet harmony as smart, critical thinking listens to the creative whispers of our vast unseen mind and then evaluates evidence, tests conclusions, and plans for the future.