People find it difficult to judge how good their intuitions are

Whether people believe they are ‘intuitive’ or not may have no bearing on how they perform in tasks that require intuition, according to new research by psychologists at the University.

Dr Mario Weick and Stefan Leach, of the School of Psychology, found that the extent to which people feel confident about, and endorse, their intuitions may often not provide an indication of how good their intuitions actually are.

The researchers asked 400 people from the UK and US to complete a questionnaire to find out how much of an ‘intuitive’ person they were. They then required the study participants to perform a series of tasks that involved learning new and complex associations between letters and images.

The associations followed certain patterns and the task was designed in a way that encouraged learning of the underlying rules without people realising this was happening.

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