intuitive tricks of the trade[book blog]

Summary

Intuition, by David G. Myers, is a very engaging book. As a paraphrase of Myers’ definition, intuition is an inherent ability for direct perception and immediate knowledge without conscious observation or reason. In other words, intuition is that gut feeling you get before making a decision that you [think you] don’t know much about. The concept itself fascinates me, and this book presents it in a very organized and entertaining way. The concept of intuition is broken down to its costs and benefits (which Myers calls the “powers” and “perils” of intuition), and then applied to specific intuitive areas of life. For instance, Myers discusses sports, investments, the medical field, and much more. Myers weaves social psychology terms and concepts through these broad explanations of intuition, forming well-rounded and scientific arguments. This book isn’t in a format that is easy to summarize, simply because the “meat” of it mostly consists of terms and examples that would be difficult to discuss unless I had a lot of time and space to mention them all. But for the sake of this summary, Intuition argues that intuitive processing is a vital part of the way humans perceive the world. When it comes to the way we interpret information, the unconscious is constantly at work. In order to demonstrate the importance of automatic (unconscious) processing, Myers discusses the strengths of intuition discovered by studies on implicit memory, heuristics, right-brain processing, and non-verbal communication. However, although psychologists have found support for such processes, they have also discovered the limitations of intuition. Myers mentions theories that have been discounted due to modern research, such as subliminal self-help tapes and therapeutic touch. Also, the costs of intuition include memory construction, mispredicting our own feelings, and belief perseverance. The message of this book, in its simplest form, is that intuition is a powerful and useful tool of perception, but left unchecked it can lead us to make rash or unfounded decisions. Unconscious thought is important because it gives us cues about significant details that might otherwise go unnoticed. But we need conscious thought because it helps us focus our attention, and it functions much more rationally. Moral of the story? Pick and choose which intuition you pay attention to. How to do that? Read this book—it’ll help you out.

In my humble opinion…

I chose the book because I am a very emotion-driven person, and I often make decisions based on my “gut feeling”. I guess I just wondered if this was actually a reliable way to make decisions. Now that I’ve read the book, I’m really glad that I chose this one. It actually served as a great refresher of concepts and terms that we learned before the first test. For instance, Ambady and Rosenthal’s (1992) research on thin slices and Wason’s (1960) work with confirmation biases were both mentioned in the book with great, simple summaries of the studies involved and implications for the results. The application of these concepts to intuition was not only interesting, but it also helped me put the big picture of social psychology into perspective. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about sexy studies but doesn’t want to take the time to read the entire journal article. The summaries that Myers offers are both concise and informative, with a sense of reverence toward the innovative minds of social psychologists. The book is a bit dense at times though, and although a strong background in research methods is not necessary, it certainly is helpful if you want to get the most out of the material. I’d definitely recommend this book to someone who maybe wanted to major in psychology but decided to do something else, or someone who didn’t have time to take the Social Psych course at SU. I think social psych students would enjoy this as an overview or refresher of terms—there is overlap with our class material, but the book is engaging enough that I didn’t mind the redundancy.

A day in the life…

This book was very applicable to everyday life, which I think was Myers’ intention. Although I’m not a huge sports fan, I really enjoyed the sports intuition chapter because I see examples of the “hot hand” phenomenon so often. Myers discussed our inherent tendency to connect “temporally contiguous” events, which in the case of sports performance is not logically grounded (pp. 145). The “hot hand” phenomenon is the inaccurate belief that a basketball player, for example, has a better chance of making a shot right after s/he makes a shot than right after s/he misses a shot. The idea is that they’re “on a role”. But, after tons of research by Gilovich (1985) and others, it was found that players were just as likely to score after a miss as after a basket. As odd as a comparison as this is, this made me think about watching people play “beer pong”. When people are “on a role”/ have a “hot hand”, it seems like they just keep getting their little ping pong ball into the solo cup over and over again. They are UNSTOPPABLE! But the truth is, the audience (and the player) pays selective attention to these streaks and doesn’t realize how many times the player gets the ball into the cup after s/he just missed it. Intuitively, we think there’s such thing as a “hot hand”. Logically, there is not.

Also, as a business minor, I thought the investment chapter was pretty interesting. For instance, I particularly enjoyed reading about the endowment effect, which an economist by the name of Thaler (1980) defined as the phenomenon that people demand more to give up something than they are willing to pay to get it in the first place. This made me think of the guitar that I have tucked away in a case in my dorm room. I bought the guitar for $500 about 7 years ago, and it has aged quite a bit. The “pick-up” (the part that I plug in to an amp) doesn’t always work, the wood is most likely a bit warped, and the strings are pretty old. But in my mind, that guitar is very valuable. If I were to buy a guitar in the same condition from a shop, I would pay maybe $200 at the most. But if I were to try to sell mine, I would want at least $400. Why? Because that’s what it’s worth to me, and as a consumer I have loss aversion. This is the same reason, Myers points out, that we have trouble giving up on a project that is a lost cause. We invest so much in a project that we don’t want to lose all that hard work, even though a lot of times the most economically rational move is to give up and start over with a new idea. I love this example because, yet again, it shows the versatility of social psychology, and how this stuff really does influence us in every aspect of our lives! (disclaimer: this picture is not my actual guitar...)

These are just two examples of ideas in the book, but there were a MILLION that are worth mentioning. As I read this book, I constantly could apply concepts to my daily life. For instance, illusory correlations made me think of silly superstitions like walking across “the seal” in front of the chapel meaning that you wouldn’t graduate on time from SU (Ward & Jenkins, 1965). I also realized that I often have what Dawson (1988) and his colleagues call hindsight bias—when a relationship ends (looking back, I always knew my high school sweetheart would drop out of college and move back in with his mother…), or when I am travelling (I knew I should have packed an umbrella!). Many areas of my life are strongly influenced by intuition, which I never would have realized without the help of this book. However, as great as intuition is and as much as it helps us perceive the world, it is important to be able to discern when it leads us to biased or inaccurate perceptions. It is for this reason that Myers’ book is an applicable read, and I suggest that you check it out. 

About the Author

David G. Myers is a professor at Hope College in Michigan. He received his psychology Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Apparently he has a pretty great reputation with students, because they have invited him to speak for graduation ceremonies and voted him "outstanding professor." Myers' articles have been in periodicals such as American Scientist, Psychological Science, and the American Psychologist. He also has contributed to introductory and social psychology textbooks. As is evidenced by his accessible writing style and simple explanations of experimental research, Myers sees the importance of making research available to the layperson. He writes for many non-scientific magazines, such as Today’s Education, and has authored five books that are designed for the everyday person (one of which is the topic of this blog). What do I get out of this? Well, I gather that Myers is a pretty legitimate guy, with a lot of important things to say. I trust his book, and I know that he did very thorough research to bring it all together. He is definitely a credible source, and I look forward to reading more from him.

~Sarah Elizabeth

Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis, Psychological Bulletin III, 256-274.

Dawson, N. V., Arkes, H. R., Aiciliano, R., Blinkhorn, R., Lakshmanan, M., & Petrelli, M. (1988). Hindsight bias: An impediment to accurate probability estimation in clinicopathologic conferences. Medical Decision Making, 8, 259-264.

Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295-314.


Myers, D. G. (2002). Intuition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Thaler, R. H. (1980). Toward a positive theory of consumer choice. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 1, 39-60.

Ward, W. C., & Jenkins, H. M. (1965). The display of information and the judgment of contingency. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 19, 61-75.

Wason, P. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 129-140.