I agree that it's intuitive. That doesn't make it right. Beware intuitive explanations, because our cognitive process is so riddled with bias that being obvious cannot be taken as a proxy for being right.
Just because you read it in your psych 1 textbook doesn't mean it always applies. Plenty of intuitive beliefs happen to have merit.
For more on this read Gladwell's
Blink. Gut reactions aren't invalid because they're based on simple intuition.
I've been waiting to reply to this until I had more time, but I wanted to put a placeholder to make sure I don't forget. I'm familiar with Blink- I think I argued in this thread that maybe we should sometimes be more accepting of answers like "I don't know" or "just because" when someone is saying why they prefer one player over another, a concept inspired by Blink and which would probably be worth reviving and rehashing. With that said, Blink doesn't really grant human intuition carte blanche to decide whatever it decides without evaluation. Gladwell makes a point of discussing when intuition fails. There are all sorts of easy ways to demonstrate how easily intuition can lead us astray (I'll post more later, but here's a quick one- together, a bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? See what your intuition has to say about that one). Gladwell argued that, for highly trained individuals who had logged countless hours gaining expertise, their intuition proved especially insightful in the narrow range of their expertise- the example of the tennis coach knowing about tennis serves, or the chicken sexers being able to quickly determine gender. The problem is that, as far as I know, "structural integrity of human joints across a relatively narrow range of body types" doesn't fall under anyone here's field of expertise. Of course, the other problem with Gladwell is that pop psychology is not psychology. Gladwell is rewarded for being counterintuitive, shocking, fresh, and interesting. He's rewarded to a far lesser extent for accuracy. The unsurprising result is that in his rush to pull together large numbers of disparate studies to support a single unified theory is that he often latches on to studies that fit his narrative, but which prove difficult to replicate or easily debunked. The 10,000 hour theory of expertise has been shot full of holes. His choice paradox and subconscious priming studies have proven difficult to replicate. Gladwell is a smart guy who is genuinely inquisitive about the way the world works, and he's a very interesting read, but I wouldn't take him as an authority on anything. Daniel Kahneman has a whole lot of research on intuition and the way our mind works (it's very, very lazy), and his paints a much less rosy picture of the reliability of our subconcious.
Kahneman and Gary Klein (who is one of the main pro-intuition researchers cited in
Blink) have a paper on when intuitions are likely to reflect skilled expertise titled "Conditions for Intuitive Expertise A Failure to Disagree". (Kahneman also has a chapter in his book
Thinking, Fast and Slow which is based on that paper.)Kahneman & Klein's take is that a person can develop intuitive skill in a domain, which allows them to make accurate predictions (often without being able to justify them). They basically just become really good at pattern recognition, where the pattern is that such-and-such an outcome tends to end up happening in such-and-such a situation. In order to develop this expertise, they need to have lots of experience in the domain (making observations and then getting feedback about how things turned out), and the domain needs to be regular enough to actually have strong patterns which a person could learn.
The problem is that this kind of skilled intuition feels pretty much the same as any other intuition (and that many environments are not regular enough to have strong patterns). People also develop intuitions for lots of bad reasons, which Kahneman has covered in detail in his research on heuristics & biases (e.g., seeing patterns that aren't there because they have a plausible story in mind for why that pattern should be there, or because they happened to be exposed first to a subset of the data which sorta resembled that pattern just because of random variation). So if a person feels a strong intuition, and is really confident in that intuition, that doesn't tell us whether the intuition is based on expert pattern-recognition or is just uninformed gut-thinking.
Here is how Kahneman & Klein put it in their paper (which you can find on Google Scholar):
[*]Our starting point is that intuitive judgments can arise from genuine skill—the focus of the NDM approach—but that they can also arise from inappropriate application of the heuristic processes on which students of the HB tradition have focused.
[*]Skilled judges are often unaware of the cues that guide them, and individuals whose intuitions are not skilled are even less likely to know where their judgments come from.
[*]True experts, it is said, know when they don’t know. However, nonexperts (whether or not they think they are) certainly do not know when they don’t know. Subjective confidence is therefore an unreliable indication of the validity of intuitive judgments and decisions.
[*]The determination of whether intuitive judgments can be trusted requires an examination of the environment in which the judgment is made and of the opportunity that the judge has had to learn the regularities of that environment.
[*]We describe task environments as “high-validity” if there are stable relationships between objectively identifiable cues and subsequent events or between cues and the outcomes of possible actions. Medicine and firefighting are practiced in environments of fairly high validity. In contrast, outcomes are effectively unpredictable in zero-validity environments. To a good approximation, predictions of the future value of individual stocks and long-term forecasts of political events are made in a zero-validity environment.
[*]Validity and uncertainty are not incompatible. Some environments are both highly valid and substantially uncertain. Poker and warfare are examples. The best moves in such situations reliably increase the potential for success.
[*]An environment of high validity is a necessary condition for the development of skilled intuitions. Other necessary conditions include adequate opportunities for learning the environment (prolonged practice and feedback that is both rapid and unequivocal). If an environment provides valid cues and good feedback, skill and expert intuition will eventually develop in individuals of sufficient talent.
[*]Although true skill cannot develop in irregular or unpredictable environments, individuals will sometimes make judgments and decisions that are successful by chance. These “lucky” individuals will be susceptible to an illusion of skill and to overconfidence (Arkes, 2001). The financial industry is a rich source of examples.
[*]The situation that we have labeled fractionation of skill is another source of overconfidence. Professionals who have expertise in some tasks are sometimes called upon to make judgments in areas in which they have no real skill. (For example, financial analysts may be skilled at evaluating the likely commercial success of a firm, but this skill does not extend to the judgment of whether the stock of that firm is underpriced.) It is difficult both for the professionals and for those who observe them to determine the boundaries of their true expertise.
[*]We agree that the weak regularities available in low-validity situations can sometimes support the development of algorithms that do better than chance. These algorithms only achieve limited accuracy, but they outperform humans because of their advantage of consistency. However, the introduction of algorithms to replace human judgment is likely to evoke substantial resistance and sometimes has undesirable side effects.