Psychology takes a look at intuition

The American Psychological Association’s publication, Monitor on Psychology, focused on intuition for the first time. In an article entitled, “What we know without knowing how” psychologist explore split-second, unconscious judgments and deductions. This area of research on intuition includes work on subliminal priming, implicit memory, implicit priming non-verbal communication, emotional processing, and thin slice video.

The Monitor article ‘Thin Slices of Life’ describes research on the accuracy of our first impressions. The main focus is on Nalini Ambady’s work with thin-sliced video of professors and the student’s ability to predict who would or would not be a successful teacher from a random 30 second video tape of them teaching. Even when she reduced the time to 15 seconds, Amabady found that students could accurately predict who would or would not be successful.

A third article, “When Intuition Misfires” explores how our desire to make connections can lead us into making up connections that do not exist. The final two articles delve into implicit bias and visual sensing without seeing. Both of these articles suggest that we know far more than we realize.

www.apa.org/monitor/mar05