After a career spent pondering the connections between subjective and objective truth, feeling and fact, and intuition and reality, I'm predisposed to welcoming unbidden hunches. I once took an instant liking to a fellow teenager, to whom I've now been married nearly 40 years. Upon meeting job applicants, before I can explain my feelings, my gut sometimes reacts within seconds. As a sign in Albert Einstein's office is rumored to have read, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
But from science and everyday life, I know that my intuition—an effortless, immediate, unreasoned sense of truth—sometimes errs. My gut tells me that Reno is east of Los Angeles and that Atlanta is east of Detroit, but I am wrong. "The first principle," said Einstein's fellow physicist, Richard Feynman, "is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."
There is also the quandary of mining untapped intuitive powers. When hiring, firing and investing, should we plug into our "right brain" premonitions? Or, with bright people so often believing demonstrably dumb things, do we instead need more "left brain" rationality?
Here, I present psychology's assessment of intuition's powers and perils. Consider the importance of intuition to a judge or juror determining the fates of individuals, an investor affecting fortunes or a clinician determining a client's suicidality. Intuitions shape our anxieties, impressions and relationships. They influence the president's judgments, a gambler's bets and a personnel director's hiring decisions. Our gut level intuitions have helped us all avert—and sometimes enabled—misfortunes. "Nobody can dictate my behavior," said Diana, Princess of Wales, in her last interview before her fatal accident. "I work through instinct, and instinct is my best counselor."
The Powers
Prince Charles once said, "Buried deep within each and every one of us, there is an instinctive, heartfelt awareness that provides—if we allow it to—the most reliable guide as to whether or not our actions are really in the long-term interests of our planet and all the life it supports." We need, he continued, to listen "more to the common sense emanating from our hearts." In this postmodernist New Age, Prince Charles has plenty of company. Writers, counselors and speakers galore offer to develop our sixth sense, harness our inner wisdom and unlock our subconscious mind. Books guide us toward intuitive healing, learning, spirituality, investing and managing.
Deciding what to make of this new cottage industry is tricky. "Intuitives"—intuition authors and trainers—seem largely oblivious to new scientific explorations of how the human mind processes information. Are their intuitions about intuition valid? Consciousness is sometimes invaded by uninvited truth, there to behold if we desist from rational thinking and instead listen to the small voices within. Or are intuitives' writings to cognitive science what professional wrestling is to athletics?
Today, cognitive science is revealing a fascinating unconscious mind that Freud never told us about: Thinking occurs not onstage but offstage, out of sight. Studies of automatic processing, subliminal priming, implicit memory, heuristics, right-brain processing, instant emotions, nonverbal communication and creativity unveil our intuitive capacities. Thinking, memory and attitude operate on two levels: the conscious/deliberate and the unconscious/automatic. "Dual processing," researchers call it. We know more than we know we know.
This idea—that much of our everyday thinking, feeling and acting operates outside conscious awareness—is a difficult one to accept, report psychologists John Bargh, Ph.D., of New York University (NYU), and Tanya Chartrand, Ph.D., of Ohio State University. Our consciousness is biased to think that its own intentions and deliberate choices rule our lives. But consciousness overrates its own control.
Take something as simple as speaking. Strings of words effortlessly spill out of your mouth with near-perfect syntax. It's as if there were servants upstairs, busily hammering together sentences that get piped down and fluidly shoved out of your mouth.
Even as I type this paragraph, my fingers gallop across the keyboard under instructions from…somewhere. And if a person enters my office while I'm typing, the cognitive servants running my fingers will finish the sentence while I start up a conversation. We have, it seems, two minds: one for momentary awareness, the other for everything else.
Reading "Thin Slices"
Do you ever find yourself sizing someone up in an instant, noting their animation, gestures and manners of speaking? These "thin slices" of someone's behavior can reveal much and form lasting impressions. Harvard psychology professors Nalini Ambady, Ph.D., and Robert Rosenthal, Ph.D., discovered as much after videotaping fellow instructors. Observers viewed three thin slices of each professor's behavior—10-second clips from the beginning, middle and end of a class—and then rated the professors' confidence, energy and warmth. They found that these ratings predicted with amazing accuracy the average student rating taken at semester's end. Thinner slices—three two-second clips—also yielded ratings similarly congruent with student evaluations.
Even microthin slices tell us something. When Bargh flashes an image for just two-tenths of a second, his NYU students respond to it instantly. "We're finding that everything is evaluated as good or bad within a quarter of a second," he says. So before engaging in rational thought, we may find ourselves either loathing or loving a piece of art or our new neighbor.
