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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).

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. As we will see, our thinking, memory, and attitudes operate on two levels—conscious and unconscious—with the larger part operating automatically, offscreen. 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] 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.

Studies show that people greatly overestimate their lie detection accuracy, their eyewitness recollections, their interviewee assessments, their risk predictions, and their stock-picking talents. 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).

Indeed, observed novelist Madeleine L’Engle, “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.