Do people have insight into when implicit processes are beneficial?

An interesting implication of the task and state cuing hypotheses (discussed in Chapter II) is that there is a great deal of variation in the extent to which people come to trust their intuitive judgments or not. People appear to have lay theories about the relative quality of intuitive decision-making under different circumstances, trusting it in some circumstances and not in others. An important theoretical question thus concerns whether people’s lay theories about when intuition is helpful align with the situations that have been identified by researchers as ones in which intuitive judgment is relatively more reliable.

Are people’s intuitions about their intuitions correct? Do they have any accurate

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insight into when their intuitions are surer guides to sound decisions versus when they are more often a source of error?

As the failures to replicate in Chapter III highlight, we still know very little about when intuitive processes are beneficial or not. Thus, the answers to such questions are still perhaps currently out of reach. However, there are a few broad conclusions that warrant further exploration. One important observation, for example, is that some of the factors that served to pull participants in the direction of their rational analyses are precisely the situations in which researchers have proposed that rational analyses are likely to be most

unreliable—that is, in situations in which participants encounter difficulties in their decision-making, either because the problem is complex or the stimuli are difficult to process (Betsch et al., 2001; Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). If these researchers are correct in their assertion that intuitions have an edge on rational analyses in such situations, it suggests that people lack any meaningful insight into this phenomenon. Indeed, Dijksterhuis (2004), in his discussion of his Unconscious Thought Theory, notably described the assertion that people are better-served by intuitions as problems complexity increases as a

“somewhat counterintuitive idea” (p. 597), suggesting that it may defy many people’s intuitions about their intuitions.

It is also worth noting that the manipulations of participants’ mental states at the time of their decisions that I reported in Chapter II were entirely incidental to the actual decision, and normatively should perhaps not have had

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any strong influence on the choices that people made. This suggests that participants’ lay theories of the power of intuition can indeed break down, at least under some well-controlled, experimentally-induced circumstances.

Moreover, because of the nature of the paradigm used in those studies, any mindset that served to influence people to trust their intuitions simultaneously served to reduce their likelihood of receiving additional compensation, making it a normatively inferior choice strategy. The fact that even in such situations people can still often be relatively more persuaded by their intuitive judgments than by a reasoned analysis is thus perhaps rather telling.

More generally, there is a strong theoretical precedent to suggest that individuals are largely ignorant of the experiences or processes that serve as the antecedents of their gut feelings. Many researchers have proposed that a defining feature of intuitions is that their source (and, by extension, any biases that may exist in that source) is wholly unavailable to conscious introspection.

Hogarth (2010) has proposed, for example, that individuals lack meta-cognitive insight into whether their intuitions have been honed in a kind or a wicked environment, thus leading them to place their trust in their intuitive judgments even when they are unreliable.

Nonetheless, there is still work to be done in determining whether people have any accurate insight into the quality of their intuitive decision-making—that is, work that examines whether the variance that is observed in people’s

likelihood of trusting intuitions bears some resemblance to the likelihood of

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intuition leading to good decisions. Perhaps there are indeed reliable cues that exist in the environment that serve as an indicator to individuals that their intuition may be faulty. If such cues exist, are people able to pick up on them, either consciously or non-consciously?

To take an example, consider Hogarth’s central claim that the quality of intuitive decision-making is a product of the extent to which the environment in which one makes a decision is representative of the environment in which learning takes place. One cue that may exist that could serve as an indicator of the quality of one’s intuitive insights, then, is if there have been any changes in the structure of the environment from the time of learning to the time of making a later decision based on an intuitive judgment. Are people sensitive to such changes in the environment? And could such changes serve as a cue to individuals that their intuitions may be relatively less useful and reliable?

Suppose, for example, that participants are given relevant experience in one environment identifiable by a particular cue—say, a particular background colour. Are participants more likely to side with their intuitions when making a later judgment if the same cues are present than they are if these cues differ?

This is a question that awaits future research.