When the phone rings, you often know who it is. You can predict the weather without once flicking on The Weather Channel. You rarely bother to tune in to the election results because you knew who was going to win all along.
You probably suspect you have psychic powers. You might even tack on the words “The Amazing” in front of your last name and buy a deck of Tarot cards.
Hold on. Don’t invest in that crystal ball just yet. A new study suggests that what you have aren’t psychic abilities, but a perceptive gut … er, brain.
Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh conducted eight studies in which participants were asked to predict various outcomes, from the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee to the weather. What they found was that people who regularly trusted in their feelings -- or who were encouraged to go with their instincts -- were more accurate in their predictions than people who rely more on logic. (Read the study here.)
In fact, the “feelies” were as accurate as the scientific method called “crowdsourcing,” which uses the power of the many to do everything from predicting election outcomes to solving problems. The researchers hadn’t predicted that one.
“We were surprised by it,” admitted Andrew Stephen, assistant professor of business administration at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. “Crowdsourcing is very scientific. People take it very seriously and put up money for it. We were impressed to see something so relatively straightforward achieve the same outcome.”
And at first, the researchers thought that individuals who rely on their own feelings were, in a sense, crowdsourcing. That is, intuiting how others would act in certain situations. “Putting yourself in another’s shoes -- instead of relying on logic and reason -- works where crowd behavior matters, like who’s going to win an election or ‘American Idol,’” says Stephen. But that kind of thing doesn’t work with something like the weather.” But they decided to try it anyway. “We did it as a little bit of a joke -- kind of tongue in cheek -- saying to ourselves, ‘Now wouldn’t it be funny if it worked?’”
It did.
Yes, people who went with their guts could predict the weather not only at home, but in other places too. They were best at predicting weather in climates they were familiar with and those that were similar. So someone in Fargo, N.D., could “feel” the weather in, say Minnesota, and someone in Miami could have a good sense of what the weather might be like in New Orleans.
ESP? Nah. Instead, says Stephen, the subjects in his study were actually just tapping into the vast -- and often hidden -- stores of knowledge in their own brains. The researchers believe that tuning into your gut instincts help you more broadly access what you already know, whereas basing your predictions based on logic and reason reduces your potential choices to a few pieces of knowledge.
“If you just think about your past experience and exposure, you’re going to be narrowly focused,” says Stephen. “There may be 10 pieces of information that are important, and if you narrowly focus you may hone in on two of them. That’s OK if they’re the most important factors, but chances are they’re not.” On the other hand, your feelings are often the sum total of all those experiences and knowledge you have, parsed unconsciously to predict the future.
This ability makes evolutionary sense, acknowledges Stephen, who says if we were “rational, logical decision-making machines in daily life, we wouldn’t get anything done.” It would take too much time to make even simple decisions.
So, does this mean we should just abandon rational thinking and go with our gut alone? Don’t be too hasty. “The point is not to abandon reason, but to not discount your feelings either,” says Stephen. The truth is that both are great sources of information.
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