Many people feel guided by their intuition—by what they feel in their gut. “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 Britain’s Prince Charles (2000).

Prince Charles has much company, judging from the long list of pop-culture discussions of “intuitive managing,” “intuitive trading,” and “intuitive healing.” Intuition is indeed important. Research shows that our thinking, memory, and attitudes operate on two levels—conscious and unconscious. More than we realize, much of our mental life happens automatically, off screen. Like jumbo jets, we fly mostly on autopilot.

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But intuition can lead us astray. Our gut feelings may tell us that lie detectors work and that eyewitnesses recall events accurately. But as you will see in chapters to come, hundreds of findings challenge these beliefs.

Hunches are a good starting point, even for smart thinkers. But thinking critically means checking assumptions, weighing evidence, inviting criticism, and testing conclusions. Does the death penalty prevent murders? Whether your gut tells you Yes or No, you need more evidence. You might ask, Do states with a death penalty have lower homicide rates? After states pass death-penalty laws, do their homicide rates drop? Do homicide rates rise in states that abandon the death penalty? If we ignore the answers to such questions (which the evidence suggests are No, No, and No), our intuition may steer us down the wrong path.

With its standards for gathering and sifting evidence, psychological science helps us avoid errors and think smarter. Before moving on to our study of how psychologists use psychology’s methods in their research, let’s look more closely at three common flaws in intuitive thinking—hindsight bias, overconfidence, and perceiving patterns in random events.

Did We Know It All Along? Hindsight Bias

Some people think psychology merely proves what we already know and then dresses it in jargon: “You get paid for using fancy methods to tell me what my grandmother knew?” But consider how easy it is to draw the bull’s-eye after the arrow strikes. After the football game, we credit the coach if a “gutsy play” wins the game and fault the coach for the same “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 predictable events, the actual future is seldom foreseen. No one’s diary recorded, “Today the Hundred Years War began.”

This hindsight bias (also called the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon) is easy to demonstrate by giving half the members of a group a true psychological finding, and giving the other half the opposite result. Tell the first group, for example: “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—just common sense. 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 false statement can also easily imagine it, and most will also see it as unsurprising. When opposite findings both seem like common sense, we have a problem!

More than 800 scholarly papers have shown hindsight bias in people young and old from across the world (Roese & Vohs, 2012). Hindsight errors in what we recall and how we explain it show why we need psychological research. Just asking people how and why they felt or acted as they did can be misleading. Why? Not because common sense is usually wrong, but because common sense describes, after the fact, what has happened better than it predicts what will happen.

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Nevertheless, although sometimes mistaken, Grandma’s intuition is often right. As the late baseball great Yogi Berra (1925–2015) 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.”) We’re all behavior watchers, and sometimes we get it right. Many people believe that love breeds happiness, and it does. (We have what Chapter 9 calls a deep “need to belong.”)

Overconfidence

We humans also tend to be overconfident—we think we know more than we do. Consider these three word puzzles (called anagrams), which people like you were asked to unscramble in one study (Goranson, 1978).

WREAT→WATER

ETRYN→ENTRY

GRABE→BARGE

About how many seconds do you think it would have taken you to unscramble each anagram? Knowing the answer makes 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 puzzle without the solution: OCHSA. (When you’re ready, check your answer against the footnote.⁵)

Are we any better at predicting our social behavior? At the beginning of the school year, one study had students predict their own behavior (Vallone et al., 1990). Would they drop a course, vote in an upcoming election, call their parents regularly (and so forth)? On average, the students felt 84 percent sure of their self-predictions. But later quizzes about their actual behavior showed their predictions were correct only 71 percent of the time. Even when they were 100 percent sure of themselves, their self-predictions were wrong 15 percent of the time.

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, unrelated data we often find patterns, because 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 or tails. In actual random sequences, patterns and streaks (such as repeating numbers) occur more often than people expect (Oskarsson et al., 2009). That also makes it hard for people to generate random-like sequences. When embezzlers try to simulate random digits, their nonrandom patterns can alert fraud experts (Poundstone, 2014).

Some happenings, such as winning the lottery twice, seem so amazing that we struggle to believe they are due to chance. But as statisticians have noted, “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen” (Diaconis & 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: We trust our intuition more than we should. Our intuitive thinking is flawed by three powerful tendencies—hindsight bias, overconfidence, and perceiving patterns in random events. But scientific thinking can help us sift reality from illusion.