Intuition: Its Powers and Perils [Hardcover]

David G. Myers (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300095317 | ISBN-13: 978-0300095319 | Publication Date: September 1, 2002

How reliable is our intuition? How much should we depend on gut-level instinct rather than rational analysis when we play the stock market, choose a mate, hire an employee, or assess our own abilities? In this discussion, David Myers shows us that while intuition can provide us with useful, and often amazing, insights, it can also dangerously mislead us. Drawing on psychological research, Myers discusses the powers and perils of intuition when: judges and jurors determine who is telling the truth; mental health workers predict whether someone is at risk for suicide or crime; coaches, players and fans decide who has the hot hand or the hot bat; personnel directors hire new employees; and psychics claim to be clairvoyant or to have premonitions.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With humor and warm disinterestedness, Myers, professor of psychology at Michigan's Hope College, marshals cognitive research on intuition, or "our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason" or what is sometimes called ESP. He finds that the mind operates on two levels, "deliberate" and "automatic." The nondeliberate mode (aka the intuitive) can be an effective way of knowing and doing, helping us empathize with others, intuit social cues or perform rote tasks like driving cars. It can also lead us astray: illusory correlations, self-fulfilling prophecies, dramatic anomalies and other misleading heuristics may feel like direct perception, but are not. Statistically random events may appear to have patterns, but "random sequences are streaky." The book treats scientific method as an attractive intellectual tool and shuns "truth is personally constructed" evasions; it is thus delightfully readable and deliberately provocative.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Myers (psychology, Hope Coll.) presents here accessible research findings on intuition that are a welcome change from obscure self-help guides on the subject. He holds that people often rely on hunches without factoring in personal backgrounds, scientific fact, and unperceived influences, such as random streaks of occurrence, making those hunches less effective than we might think. Covered here are intuition's general strengths and weaknesses and its relationship to investment, psychotherapy, and employment settings. While some would argue that trying to gauge intuition is futile, Myers argues convincingly that we can measure how we arrive at a conclusion. By and large Myers is not making a case for intuition so much as for logic: he invites us to sharpen our insights and self-knowledge so that when impulse strikes, we can make sounder and less costly decisions. For the psychology sections of larger public libraries and academic libraries. Lisa Liquori, M.L.S., Syracuse, NY
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300095317
• ISBN-13: 978-0300095319
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #577,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David G. Myers, Psychology of Psychology at Michigan's Hope College, is the author of seventeen books, and of articles in three dozen academic periodicals, from Science to the American Psychologist, and in four dozen magazines, from Scientific American to The Christian Century. For more information and free resources visit davidmyers.org.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What we know but dont know we know affects more than we know, October 30, 2002

By 

Coert Visser "solutionfocusedchange.com" (Driebergen Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Hardcover)

Intuition is a hot topic. Today there are lots of trainers, coaches, consultants, and authors advocating the powers of intuition. 'Don't be too rational, trust you intuition!', they say. But how well-informed are these people about what intuition really is? To what extent can you rely on your intuition and to what extent should you be skeptical? In this book, David Myers, a well-known writer on psychology, explains what is known about intuition.

WE KNOW MORE THAN WE KNOW WE KNOW
What is it anyway? David Myers explains that intuition is our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason. In contrast, deliberte thinking is reasoning-like, critical, and anlytic. So there are two levels of thinking:
1. DELIBERATE THINKING: this level of thinking is conscious and analytical. It is very valuable because it helps us to focus on what is really important and protects us from having to think about everything at once. It is as it where the mind's executive desk.
2. INTUITION: this unconscious level is automatic. It seems, inside our minds there are processing systems that work without us knowing it. To use a metafor by David Myers: we effortlessly delegate most of our thinking and decisions making to the masses of cognitive workers busily at work in our minds's basement. These processes enables us, for instance, to recognize instantly, among thousands of humans, someone we have not seen in five years. We do know, but we don't know how we know.

WHAT WE KNOW, BUT DON'T KNOW WE KNOW, AFFECTS MORE THAN WE KNOW
Both ways of knowing are present within each person. Often they support eachother, sometimes they lead to conflicting conclusions. One thing is important: we tend to underrate how much of our actions are guided by unconsicous thinking. A vast proportion of our behavior is under control of unconscious perception and information processing. This 'automaticity of being' helps us through most of the situations we encounter (you type without consciously knowing where exactly the letters on your keyboard are; you'd have to 'ask your fingers` to know where they are). What's more, it is even so that we can process and be influenced by unattended information (for instance you had not noticed someone talking at a party until s/he mentioned your name, then you suddenly noticed this). Furthermore, we sometimes unconsciously continue processing information regarding problems (after having stopped trying to remember a name, we sometimes 'suddenly` remember it).

WE DON'T SEE THINGS AS THEY ARE, WE SEE THINGS AS WE ARE
Intuition is powerful and important and often it will pay to 'listen to your heart`. But intuition also often errs. An important example is that our theories and assumptions distort our perceptions and interpretations. For instance if we hold a stereotype about a certain category of people, we unknowingly tend to selectively perceive what they do. We tend to notice information that confirms the stereotype more readily than other information. This way, we tend to see our beliefs confirmed. Other examples of unrealistic intuition are: 1) hindsight bias ('I knew it all along'), 2) self-serving bias (accepting more responsibility for succeses that for failures), 3) overconfidence bias (we tend to intuitively assume that the way we perceive the world, so it is).

CONCLUSION
This is a great book for anyone interested in psychology and intuition. The material is presented very pleasantly and clearly. David Myers describes many interesting experiments that certainly will challenge your intuition (for instance some eye-opening experiments by the recent Nobel price winner psychologist Daniel Kahneman). Often these experiments will surprise you. Special attention is payed to the role of intuition in specific contexts like sports, investment, therapy, interviewing and risk taking. Psychology is still an interesting subject. This book is a clear reminder of that. ...

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Long on data, short on theory, November 25, 2002

By 

James Daniels (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Hardcover)

In Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, author David Myers provides an overview of the unconscious operations of the human mind.

He begins by arguing that we have two parallel systems operating in our day to day lives, the conscious/rational system and the unconscious/intuitive system. The former is slow and deliberate, the latter is fast and sometimes inaccurate. He then details may of the ways in which our intuition proves incorrect in areas like geography, personal memories, individual competence, and foly physics. Myers ends the book with a long chapter about our intuition in medicine, job interviews, risk, and gambling.

Throughout the book, Myers repeats a theme popular since Tversky and Khanneman's papers in the 1970s: the human mind has predictable biases and innaccuracies on a host of logical puzzles and laboratory tests. As such, the book is basically a 249 page review article of the evidence against human rationality. While many of his examples are fascinating, there is no overall theory or mechanism given to account for this irrationality.

To take one example he uses, imagine a ball dropped from a plane. Most people intuitively feel that the ball should fall straight down, rather than along the correct parabolic path to the earth. Myers takes this as evidence of a faulted folk-physics. Unfortunately, despite this fault, people have no problem catching balls falling from great heights. Is it possible that our intuition is in fact robust and accurate within the domains where it is used, and only incorrect in the unusual situations of the laboratory? Myers only casually addresses this, but his evidence on competence developing at certain tasks and jobs indicates that this might be the case.

I would recommend this book to anyone trying to access the primary literature on human rationality and its shortcomings. It is a nice overview. Those attempting to understand how intuition is used by humans in everyday situations, that is, a theory of intuition, will have to keep looking. I recommend Gerd Gigerenzer's book, Adaptive Thinking, as an excellent starting point.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent overview of intuition, decision making and risk, December 8, 2002

By 

Kevin Hogan "Author - Psychology of Persuasion" (Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Hardcover)

Myers brings together a lot of research into a very readable book about "knowing."

Myers explains to some degree how we know...and why we are likely to be correct. This is well documented although perhaps not as thorough as Sources of Power or Strangers Unto Ourselves by Wilson. Nevertheless there is plenty of meat here.

Then he talks in much greater detail about how and when our intuition is likely to fail us. This is much more enjoyable reading and thorough in scope.

Myers gives a significant amount of attention to ESP, psychic intuition and gambling, all of which are evenly presented and well thought out.

If you have an interest in decision making, intuition, risk, and how we "think" this is a brilliant introduction.