Intuition: Dumb But Lucky. Fortuitous Affective Cues and Their Disruption by Analytic Thought

Abstract

‘Intuition’ can sometimes produce attitudes and judgments that are superior to those generated from conscious, analytic thinking. I consider two unsatisfying explanations for the differences: (i) that reasoning is ‘dumb’, in that it simply limits and biases otherwise adequate decisions; or (ii) that intuition is ‘smart’, in that it improves those processes by invoking qualitatively distinct and sophisticated cognitive mechanisms. I propose, instead, that intuition is ‘dumb but lucky’, that its positive benefits are achieved via fortuitious covariation, often inherent in the structure of the social world, between decision outcomes and subjective feeling states – particularly positive affect, familiarity, and cognitive fluency. I also advance the ‘affect disruption hypothesis’, which proposes that analytic thinking interferes with the use of these affective cues by underweighting affective responses, conflating feeling states that are subjectively similar, and/or generating competing emotions. I review data in support of this hypothesis in domains such as art preferences, music popularity, and sports prediction, and provide a new characterization of what constitutes ‘good intuition’.