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People's intuitions about intuitive insight and intuitive choice
Yoel Inbar1, Jeremy Cone, Thomas Gilovich
1Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA , USA. yoel_inbar@harvard.edu
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|July 28, 2010
Summary
People
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Decision-Making Science
- Behavioral Economics
Background:
- Decision-making involves balancing intuitive and rational processes.
- Understanding how individuals choose between intuition and reason is crucial for behavioral science.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how features of a decision problem cue individuals to rely on intuition or reason.
- To propose and test a "task cuing" framework for decision-making.
Main Methods:
- Conducted six studies examining decision-making in various scenarios.
- Manipulated features of decision problems to observe shifts between intuitive and rational choices.
- Analyzed choices in ratio-bias and ambiguity-aversion paradigms.
Main Results:
- Decision problem features significantly influence the choice between intuition and reason.
- Objectively evaluable, sequential, complex, or precise choices elicit rational decision-making.
- Intuitive decision-making is favored when choice features align with intuitive processing.
Conclusions:
- The "task cuing" framework effectively predicts how people balance intuition and reason.
- Decision problem characteristics play a critical role in guiding cognitive processes during choice.
- Findings contribute to dual-process theories of cognition and decision-making models.
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