Six years ago, Malcolm Gladwell released a book entitled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In his usual style, Gladwell weaves stories in-between descriptions of scientific research the support his hypothesis that our intuition can be surprisingly accurate and right.
One year ago, authors Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education not only had some choice words for Gladwell’s cherry-picking of the research, but also showed how intuition probably only works best in certain situations, where there is no clear science or logical decision-making process to arrive at the “right” answer. For instance, when choosing which ice cream is “best.”
Reasoned analysis, however, works best in virtually every other situation. Which, as it turns out, is most situations where big life decisions come into play.