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“The heart has its reasons which reason does not know."
~Pascal, Pensees, 1670
“He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool.”
~Proverbs 28:26
“Buried deep within each and every one of us, there is an instinctive, heart-felt awareness” that can guide our behavior. So proclaimed Prince Charles in a 2000 lecture. Trust your gut instincts.
Prince Charles has much company. “I’m a gut player. I rely on my instincts,” explained President George W. Bush in justifying his decision to launch the Iraq war, after earlier talking with Vladimir Putin and declaring himself “able to get a sense of his soul.”
“Within the first minute [of meeting Kim Jong-un] I’ll know, declared President Trump. “My touch, my feel—that’s what I do.” Afterwards he added, “We had a great chemistry—you understand how I feel about chemistry.” The heart has its reasons.
But is there also wisdom to physicist Richard Feynman’s channeling the skepticism of King Solomon’s Proverb: “The first principle,” said Feynman, “is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
In sifting intuition’s powers and perils, psychological science has some wisdom.
First, our out-of-sight, automatic, intuitive information processing is HUGE. In Psychology, 12th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I offer some examples:
Second, our intuition is perilous. Psychology is flush with examples of smart people’s predictable and sometimes tragic intuitive errors:
The bottom line: Intuition—automatic, implicit, unreasoned thoughts and feelings—grows from our experience, feeds our creativity, and guides our lives. Intuition is powerful. But it also is perilous, especially when we overfeel and underthink. Unchecked, uncritical intuition sometimes leads us into ill-fated relationships, feeds overconfident predictions, and even leads us into war.
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