Some researchers believe that intuition is not only faster than reflection but also more accurate. We are good at judging people based on first impressions, small bits of experience after a glance at a photo or five minutes of interaction. Deliberation can be unnecessary and even invasive. The psychologist Nalini Ambady did a study on this skill that we could call dissection capacity and asked a group of participants to watch ten-second videos without sound of some teachers and to evaluate them as teachers. Their evaluations were quite consistent with the academic results of the students at the end of the semester. He asked other volunteers to count back multiples of nine starting from a thousand, so that their conscious memory was occupied as they watched the videos.
Their assessments were also very accurate, suggesting that social processing is highly intuitive. Finally, he asked a third group to spend a minute writing down the reasons that led them to give the teachers one or the other rating. In this case, the level of success dropped dramatically. Ambady believes that in deliberating they focused on specific gestures or expressions, rather than forming a more complete, global, or holistic impression from the interplay of subtle cues.
Other research shows that we are better at detecting a deception or someone’s sexual orientation when we rely on intuition rather than reflection. “It’s like when you drive a car and change gears. If you think about it, you’re still wrong, but if you do it automatically, it comes out natural and precise. In social life the same thing happens,” says Judith Hall, a psychologist at the Northeast University (USA). Thinking too much can spoil the ability to form and consolidate preferences. The decision to buy a car was found to be objectively more appropriate and personally more satisfying when the buyer was asked to pay attention to their feelings rather than technical details, especially if they had gathered too much information during the process.
The superpowers of intuition only work in certain areas, as seen in a study in which participants had to complete eight tasks, four that required reflective thinking (detecting rules, using precise vocabulary) and four that required creativity (generating ideas or products). Then they had to assess the extent to which they had made use of intuition (‘the guts’, ‘the heart’). As expected, resorting to hunches had worsened her performance on the first four tasks but was very helpful on the other four. As they say, “the heart has reasons that reason does not understand.”
