30 Times People's Intuition Did Not Fail To Spot That Something Wasn't Right

The thought of asking this question came to u/inferno2808 spontaneously. "I was watching a horror movie and the idea just popped into my head," the Redditor told Bored Panda.

"There were many stories in the comments but the one that stood out for me the most was about the guy who was working on a radio system in a remote town... It really made me think about whether or not our intuition is capable of guiding us through dangerous situations. It's quite an interesting topic."

Personally, u/inferno2808 believes that people should allow their gut feeling to get involved in their decision-making or judgment. The question is just how much. "As we can see, our brains can sense danger and warn us about it. But I think it's natural for different people to have different opinions about this."

In reality, it's actually quite a reasonable position. Economist Daniel Kahneman theorizes that intuitive thinking has both a positive and a negative side: it is faster than a rational approach but more prone to error.

Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize in economics for his work on human judgment and decision-making, has proposed that we have two different thought systems: system 1 is fast and intuitive while system 2 is slower and relies on reasoning. The fast system, he thinks, is more prone to error. It has its place: it may increase the chance of survival by enabling us to anticipate serious threats and recognize promising opportunities. But the slower thought system, by engaging critical thinking and analysis, is less susceptible to producing bad decisions.

Other cognitive scientists argue that intuition can lead to effective decision-making even more frequently than Kahneman suggests. Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin is one of them. He agrees that people rarely make decisions on the basis of reason alone, especially when the problems faced are complex. But he argues that intuition's merit has been vastly underappreciated — he views intuition as a form of unconscious intelligence.

In one study, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues, then at the University of Amsterdam, came to a similarly favorable view of intuition's value. The researchers tested what they called the "deliberation without attention" hypothesis: although conscious thought makes the most sense for simple decisions (for example, what size skillet to use), it can actually be detrimental when considering more complex matters, like buying a house.

Kamila Malewska of the Poznán University of Economics and Business in Poland has also studied intuition in real-world settings and also finds that people often apply it in a variety of scenarios. Malewska asked managers at a food company how they use intuition in their everyday work. Almost all of them stated that, in addition to rational analyses, they tapped gut feelings when making decisions.

So maybe there's more to these stories than the alignment of the stars after all?