Intuition Dozen Deadly Sins

•Hindsight bias—looking back on events, we falsely surmise that we

knew it all along.

•Illusory correlation—intuitively perceiving a relationship where none

exists.

•Memory construction—influenced by our present moods and by

misinformation, we may form false memories.

•Representativeness and availability heuristics—fast and frugal

heuristics become quick and dirty when leading us into illogical and

incorrect judgments.

•Overconfidence—our intuitive assessments of our own knowledge are

often more confident than correct.

•Belief perseverance and confirmation bias—thanks partly to our

preference for confirming information, beliefs are often resilient, even

after their foundation is discredited.

•Framing—judgments flip -flop, depending on how the same issue or

information is posed.

•Interviewer illusion—inflated confidence in one’s discernment based

on interview alone.

•Mispredicting our own feelings—we often mispredict the intensity and

duration of our emotions.

•Self-serving bias—in various ways, we exhibit inflated

self-assessments.

•Fundamental attribution error—overly attributing others’ behavior to

their dispositions by discounting unnoticed situational forces.

•Mispredicting our own behavior—our intuitive self -predictions often go

astray.

Evidence of Intuition Powers

•Blindsight—brain-damaged persons’ “sight unseen” as their bodies

react to things and faces not consciously recognized.

•Right-brain thinking—split-brain persons displaying knowledge they

cannot verbalize.

•Infants’ intuitive learning—of language and physics.

•Moral intuition—quick gut feelings that precede moral reasoning.

•Divided attention and priming—unattended information processed by

the mind’s downstairs radar watchers.

•Everyday perception—the instant parallel processing and integration of

complex information streams.

•Automatic processing—the cognitive autopilot that guides us through

most of life.

•Implicit memory—remembering how to do something without knowing

that one knows.

•Heuristics—those fast and frugal mental shortcuts that normally serve

us well enough.

•Intuitive expertise—phenomena of unconscious learning, expert learn-

ing, and physical genius.

•Creativity—the sometimes-spontaneous appearance of novel and valu-

able ideas.

•Social and emotional intelligence—the intuitive know -how to compre-

hend and manage ourselves in social situations and to perceive and

express emotions.

•The wisdom of the body—when instant responses are needed, the

brain’s emotional pathways bypass the cortex; hunches sometimes

precede rational understanding.

•Thin slices—detecting traits from mere seconds of behavior.

•Dual attitude system—as we have two ways of knowing (unconscious

and conscious) and two ways of remembering (implicit and explicit),

we also have gut -level and rational attitude responses.