Psychology, too, is replete with compelling examples of how people fool themselves. Even the most intelligent people make predictable and costly intuitive errors; coaches, athletes, investors, interviewers, gamblers and psychics fall prey to well-documented illusory intuitions. It's shocking how vulnerable we are to forming false memories, misjudging reality and mispredicting our own behavior. Our intuition errs.
Studies suggest, for instance, that people mispredict the durability and intensity of their emotions after a romantic breakup, losing an election, winning a game and being insulted. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, Ph.D., and his colleagues have studied at length our ability to affectively forecast. They've found that while most people facing a personal catastrophe expect emotional wounds to be enduring, such expectations are often wrong.
Take hungry shoppers, for instance, who buy more impulsively than those who shop after dinner. When hungry, we mispredict how gross fried doughnuts will seem when we're full. When sated, however, we mispredict how yummy that late-night doughnut might be. Various other studies have found that people tend to overestimate how much their well-being would be affected by warmer winters, relocations, football victories, losing weight, and having more free time. Even extreme events—winning the lottery or suffering a paralyzing accident—affect long-term happiness to a lesser degree than most people suppose.
Our intuitive theory seems to be: We want; we get; we are happy. If true, this article would be shorter. In reality, note Gilbert and his colleague Timothy Wilson, Ph.D., of the University of Virginia, we often "miswant." People who dream of a holiday on a deserted tropical island may in fact be disappointed when they see "how much they require daily structure, intellectual stimulation or regular infusions of Pop Tarts." Our intuition tells us that if our desired candidate or team wins we will be delighted for a long while, but studies repeatedly reveal that emotional traces of good tidings evaporate more rapidly than we expect.
It's after negative events that we're particularly prone to misintuiting the durability of our emotions. People being tested for HIV expect to feel misery over bad news and elation over good news for weeks after hearing the results. And yet, just five weeks later, the recipients of bad news are less distraught and the recipients of good news are less elated than they first anticipated.
This occurs because people neglect the speed and power of their "psychological immune system," say Gilbert and Wilson, which includes strategies for rationalizing, discounting, forgiving and limiting trauma. Being largely ignorant of this emotional recovery system, we accommodate illnesses, disabilities, romantic breakups and defeats more readily than we intuitively expect. "Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning," reflected the Psalmist.
Intuition is bigger than we realize. It feeds our expertise, creativity, love and spirituality. It is a wonder. But it's also perilous. Today's cognitive science aims not to destroy intuition but to fortify it, to sharpen our thinking and deepen our wisdom. Scientists who expose intuition's flaws note that it works well in some areas, but needs restraints and checks in others. In realms from sports to business to spirituality, we now understand how perilous intuitions often go before a fall, and how we can therefore think smarter, even while listening to the creative whispers of our unseen mind.
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