Customer Reviews

Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Yale Nota Bene)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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. ...

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.

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.

As a tool for prediction, scientific discovery, business management, and many other areas, intuition has been claimed by many to be essential, even superior to other more quantitative approaches to cognition. In fact, there is at the present time a fairly intense debate going on between two camps: one camp consisting of those who believe intuition to be the superior mode of cognition, and the other camp consisting of those who favor cognitive efforts that are governed by mathematical/computational algorithms. The tension between these groups probably would not have arisen if it were not for the intense interest in building thinking machines. Indeed, developments in artificial intelligence over the past few decades have shown beyond doubt that many tasks that were once thought to need "intuition" for their completion, origination, or evaluation, can now be accomplished by machines using artificial reasoning patterns.

But far from being a well-defined mode of cognition, intuition has been a kind of catchphrase that is used to explain the ability to solve problems and reach goals without really knowing how. The apologists of intuition emphasize its ability to deal with issues and problems of a qualitative nature (the famous Einstein dictum that "not everything that counts can be counted"). In some extreme instances, enthusiasts of intuition think of it as a "power", the possession of which will give one distinct advantages, especially in the areas of business and finance. Indeed, there are the "intuitive" financial traders who boast of their abilities to foresee market trends that the "quants" cannot, and they do so without really quantifying just how much advantage their intuition has over more mathematical/algorithmic approaches to financial trading. Human intelligence in their view goes beyond mere logic, and can capture or "intuit" things that computational algorithms cannot. Business managers who make decisions based on their "gut feelings" are another example of the belief in the power of intuition. This reviewer knows of many instances where millions of dollars in revenue or capital expenditures have rested on the "gut feelings" of a senior manager, with disastrous consequences.

In this highly interesting work, the author discusses the pros and cons of intuition, and in doing so has given the reader an account of the subject that demystifies it and makes its contemplation and possible justification more palatable from a scientific point of view. That is not to say that the book is a scientific study for it is not, but it could be viewed as a precursor to such a study, which if done carefully would be extremely important and interesting. If there are elements of human (or for that matter nonhuman) intelligence that do not rely on logical or mathematical computations or processes, then the identification of these elements would assist those who are attempting to build non-biological thinking machines. A rigorous scientific study would isolate those patterns of thought and human actions that cannot be represented as a mathematical or algorithmic process and through laboratory investigations would justify how advantageous "intuition" is over more quantitative modes of thought. The field of cognitive neuroscience will no doubt shed even more light on the role of intuition as it advances in the decades ahead. If a book like this is written twenty years from now it might be considerably smaller in size, with only a few pages needed to discuss the role of intuition in problem solving since many more tasks will have been shown to be doable by machines. The trend seems to be in this direction.

Intuition has many forms with many results, both good and bad for decision makers who rely on their intuitions. This book, as promised in the title -- Intuition: its power and peril -- lays out a very readable survey of the scientific psychological research on intuition. This is more like an undergraduate survey course than an in-depth discussion of what intuition is and how it can be improved and used more profitably to produce better results in our decision making. On the whole, however, an interesting book worth reading.

David Myers has written very clear introductory books in psychology and social psychology. This more-specialized book is as clear and easy to read as his work that's intended for college freshman.

Intuition, in the sense meant by psychologists, concerns thinking about things without conscious awareness of the thinking occuring and "feeling" that a decision or answer is right without being aware of how the decision or answer was arrived at. There are many situations in which people do this, and Myers discusses many of them. For example, Gamblers' intuition, "clinical" intuition among psychologists and others, and "everyday" intuition about probablities, physics, and finacial decisions. The first half of the final chapter also explains many of the aspects of human thinking that make "psychics" appear to have supernatural powers, when there's no evidence that they, in fact, do.

Myers does an excellent job of presenting (or citing) research to back up the many facts included in the book. He also clearly explains the theories or general concepts that explain some of the strengths and weaknesses of intuitive judgment.

After such a positive review, you may wonder why I only gave this book 4 stars. The reason is that after providing a rational and evidence-based review of research and theories Myers's final chapter digresses strangly into an absurd attempt to justify his religious beliefs. Myers's religosity is completely inconsistent with the rationality and skeptical outlook of the rest of the book, and he ends up looking ridiculous for trying to "sell" it to readers.

This is a book that will make you think and will challenge many of your perceptions. It's written in a clear, concise and entertaining style; Myers makes certain difficult concepts very understandable by using examples, logic and humor. Highly recommended!

Myers has done a good job in this book but has overlooked the contributions of past intellectual giants like Frank Knight ,Joseph Schumpeter, and John Maynard Keynes,as well as the superb work of Gary Klein,on the role of intuition in business and general,practical,everyday decision making.Myers definition of intuition as " our capacity for direct knowledge,for immediate insight without observation or reason " is only half right and only half baked.What should be added to his definition is the following :" based on the sum total of all of our past experiences and past knowledge ".Myers correctly points out that intuition can lead us astray.Unfortunately,he fails to point out that such errors are corrected and incorporated into the corpus of our overall knowledge under the title of "learning from experience".Intuition thus brings into play the concepts of induction,similarity,and creativity.Perhaps a better way of summing up Myers main point is that intuition is knowing without knowing that you know.The interested reader is advised to also take a look at the work on intuition done by Gary Klein.He incorporates a substantial amount of scientific study that is not mentioned by Myers.

A lot of pop-psy books fall into the habit of reviewing basic information on the topic before getting to the meat of the book, which ends up being one or two chapters. Intuition is not like that at all. I felt there to be astounding information throughout the entire book. Some of the results of studies recounted in Intuition will make you give your "hunches" and degree of certainty a second thought next time. Some of what we believe just doesn't make sense - like fears of getting bitten by a shark or being in a plane crash; we should apparently worry more about slipping in the bathroom.

The reference list is huge and has given me a great jumping off point to find out more information on specific topics covered.

This is an excellent book and if it was possible to give more then 5 stars I would. With the methods of scientific psychology and with many many superb examples it shows in a very subtle way the positives and negatives of intuition. If it showed only the positives or only the negatives I think it would be less good and this is what this makes this book so special. The examples are so vivid that somethings you would need thousands of words to understand, you LIVE with one example.It stands out with its fascinating sanity and soberness on such a slippery ground.

But in a way that cannot change my rating, Prof. Myers makes ,though only a few times among thosands of examples, shallow interpretations I think, . This made me think that although I totally agree that we despirately despirately need scientific psychology we also need psychoanalytical in-depth analysis / interpretation.But totally agreeing with Prof Myers that we need sound statistical data , emprical facts before we start interpretation. A wonderful joining of scientific psychology and psychoanalytical depth !!

Plus I think there is something slightly wrong with statistics which is the factor of hope. If I were cancer I think the minute percent that recovered would be far more important for me then the big percentage of deaths.In fact it is the things that are not statistically "high percentage " that seperates us from eachother; I believe most of us have some properties that we are significantly away from the "statistically significant" (an otherwise very average person maybe a brilliant poet, artist, spotrtsman, engineer etc)and this is the MOST important thing that gives information about him / her.

And also I believe we need to differentiate "intuition" as mentioned in the book to many different things like instinct, inspiration, common sense, accumulated and therefore automated experience etc. (maybe awareness too) and must treat them as totally different things and must not even try to put them under the same name.