①We’re fairly good at judging people based on first impressions, thin slices of experience ranging from a glimpse of a photo to five-minute interaction, and deliberation can be not only extraneous but intrusive. ②In one study of the ability she called “thin slicing,” the late psychologist Nalini Ambady asked participants to watch silent 10-second video clips of professors and to rate the instructor’s overall effectiveness. ③Their ratings correlated strongly with students’ end-of-semester ratings. ④Another set of participants had to count backward from 1,000 by nines as they watched the clips, occupying their conscious working memory. ⑤Their ratings were just as accurate, demonstrating the intuitive nature of the social processing.
①Critically, another group was asked to spend a minute writing down reasons for their judgment, before giving the rating. ②Accuracy dropped dramatically.③Ambady suspected that deliberation focused them on vivid but misleading cues, such as certain gestures or utterances, rather than letting the complex interplay of subtle signals form a holistic impression. ④She found similar interference when participants watched 15-second clips of pairs of people and judged whether they were strangers, friends, or dating partners.
①Other research shows we’re better at detecting deception from thin slices when we rely on intuition instead of reflection. ②“It’s as if you’re driving stick shift,” says Judith Hall, a psychologist at Northeastern University, “and if you start thinking about it too much, you can’t remember what you’re doing. ③But if you go on automatic pilot, you’re fine. ④Much of our social life is like that.”
①Thinking too much can also harm our ability to form preferences. ②College students’ ratings of strawberry jams and college courses aligned better with experts’ opinions when the students weren’t asked to analyze their rationale. ③And people made car-buying decisions that were both objectively better and more personally satisfying when asked to focus on their feelings rather than on details, but only if the decision was complex when they had a lot of information to process.
①Intuition’s special powers are unleashed only in certain circumstances. ②In one study, participants completed a battery of eight tasks, including four that tapped reflective thinking (discerning rules, comprehending vocabulary) and four that tapped intuition and creativity (generating new products or figures of speech).③Then they rated the degree to which they had used intuition (“gut feelings,” “hunches,” “my heart”). ④Use of their gut hurt their performance on the first four tasks, as expected, and helped them on the rest. ⑤Sometimes the heart is smarter than the head.