Scientific American Mind-June/July 2007

( Intuition is powerful, often wise, but sometimes perilous, )
and especially so when we overfeel and underthink.
ing powers of unconscious thought in recent experiments
that showed people complex information
about potential apartments, roommates or
art posters. The researchers invited some participants
to state their immediate preference after
reading, say, a dozen pieces of information about
each of four apartments. A second group, given
several minutes to analyze the information consciously,
tended to make slightly smarter decisions.
But wisest of all, in study after study, was
a third group, whose attention was distracted for
a time—enabling the subjects’ minds to process
the complex information unconsciously and to
achieve more organized and crystallized judgments,
with more satisfying results. Faced with
complex decisions involving many factors, the
best advice may indeed be to take our time—to
“sleep on it”—and to await the intuitive result of
our unconscious processing.
Intuition’s Perils
So, just by living, we acquire intuitive expertise
that enables quick and effortless judgments
and actions. Yet psychological science is replete
with examples of smart people making predictable
and sometimes costly intuitive errors. They
occur when our experience has exposed us to an
atypical sample or when a quick and dirty heuristic
leads us astray. After watching a basketball
team overwhelm weak opponents, we may—
thinking the team invincible—be stunned when
it is overwhelmed by a strong opponent. Or,
make your own snap judgment with this quick
quiz: In English words, does the letter k appear
more often as the fi rst or third letter? For most
people, words beginning with k are more immediately
available in memory. Thus, using the
“availability heuristic,” they assume that k occurs
more frequently in the fi rst position. Actually,
k appears two to three times more often in
the third position.
Intuitive prejudice. After actor Mel Gibson’s
drunken anti-Semitic tirade during a traffi c arrest,
after comedian Michael Richards’s vile racial
response to a black heckler, and after New
York City police offi cers in two incidents killed
unarmed black residents with hailstorms of bullets,
each perpetrator reassured us that he was
not racist. At the conscious, explicit attitude level,
they may well be right. But their (and our)
unconscious, implicit attitudes—which typically
manifest wariness toward those unfamiliar to us
or those who resemble people with whom we
have negative past associations—may not agree.
And so it is that people may exhibit a primitive,
automatic dislike or fear of people for whom they
express sincere respect and appreciation. And
whereas our explicit attitudes may predict our
deliberate, intentional actions, our slower-tochange
implicit attitudes may erupt in our spontaneous
feelings and outbursts.
Various experiments have briefly flashed
words or faces that “prime” (automatically activate)
stereotypes for some racial, gender or age
group. Project Implicit, a collaboration among
researchers at Harvard, the University of Virginia
and the University of Washington, probes the
results. Without the participants’ awareness,
their activated stereotypes often bias their behavior.
When primed with a black rather than white
face, people may react with more hostility to an
experimenter’s annoying request. And they more
often think of guns: they more quickly recognize
a gun or mistake tools, such as a wrench, for a
gun. Even the most seemingly tolerant, egalitarian
white people will take longer to identify
pleasant words (such as “peace” and “paradise”)
as “good” when associated with black rather
than white faces. Moreover, the more strongly
people exhibit such implicit prejudice, the readier
they are to perceive anger in black faces.
If aware of a gap between how we should feel
and how we intuitively do feel, self-conscious
people may try to inhibit their automatic responses.
Overcoming what prejudice researcher Patricia
G. Devine of the University of Wisconsin–
Madison calls “the prejudice habit” is not easy. If
we fi nd ourselves reacting with knee-jerk presumptions
or feelings, we should not despair, she
advises; that is not unusual. It is what we do with
(The Author)
DAVID G. MYERS is Hope College’s John Dirk Werkman Professor of Psychology.
His social psychological research, supported by National Science
Foundation grants and recognized by the Gordon Allport Prize, has appeared
in two dozen scientifi c periodicals, and his writings about psychological
science have appeared in three dozen magazines. His 15 books
include psychology texts and general audience books on happiness, hearing
loss, sexual orientation, psychology and religion, and intuition.
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