Intuition
Its Powers and Perils
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
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 engaging and accessible book, David G. Myers shows us that while intuition can provide us with useful—and often amazing—insights, it can also dangerously mislead us.
Drawing on recent 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;
• psychics claim to be clairvoyant or to have premonitions;
• and much more.
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.
