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John Leach, Ph.D., is leading
a study of human intuition
on campus.
Photo credit: Anne Risser Lee
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Can you trust your gut feelings? Are snap judgments reliable? John Leach, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology, and several students are investigating the function of human intuition. “Everybody knows what it is, but they don’t know how it works,” he commented.
One school of thought postulates that people can use very small bits of information, termed “thin slices,” to make accurate decisions. In an experiment done at Harvard, students were shown 30-second videos of professors teaching and were asked to make judgments as to how effective the professors were. Their assessments were compared with the course evaluations by actual students of the professors. Surprisingly, there was a very high correlation between the two.
A new psychology lab in Myers Hall, equipped with technology and an observation room with one-way mirror, is providing a setting for faculty and student research. For example, Leach, four undergraduate students and one graduate student are pursuing a study inspired by the Harvard research. They decided to turn the study around to see if people can judge how well a student performs academically based on a 30-second snippet of silent video.
In a pilot test conducted during spring semester, nine students were videotaped through the one-way mirror while they watched a taped lecture and took notes. Then, a class of 24 students was asked to rate the students on various aspects, such as how dedicated they were, would they work well in a group project setting and last, to guess each student’s GPA. Comparing the students’ actual GPAs with the predicted results from the people watching the videos nearly matched the correlation found in the Harvard research.
Leach has plans to expand the experiment during fall semester with 45 new video clips of students taking notes shown to a greater number of people to evaluate. If the pilot test is a good predictor, the larger study should produce roughly the same correlation of accuracy. Furthermore, he wants to have professors view the 30-second video clips and make their own assessments as to each student’s GPA. “My gut feeling right now, and it’s all about intuition and gut feelings, is that the professors probably won’t do as well as the students,” he laughed.
Leach said that intuition is likely the result of a person subconsciously attending to multiple cues of information, which are simultaneously processed in the brain. “While that is going on, you’re not consciously aware of it, you just get the end result feeling,” he explained.
The mechanism of intuition is still being debated by the academic community. The standard social sciences model, called a “behavioral perspective,” purports that “we learn to respond to situations, and we learn through our exposure to the environment,” Leach stated. A new, biological, evolutionary-based way of looking at human behavior theorizes that people have an inherited, instinctual survival mechanism that allows them to make very rapid decisions based on very little information.
Leach, who for his doctoral dissertation compared analytical versus intuitive judgments, is looking forward to seeing the results of the study. If the students do well in the experiment and the professors don’t, then it would indicate intuition is most likely a biologically based mechanism, he said. If the professors do better than the students, then experience is predominantly influencing decision-making. “How intuition seems to work, is the more information that you have, the less you rely on your intuitive systems of judgment. You become more analytical,” he noted.
The availability of the psychology research lab is providing an invaluable experience for the students involved in conducting this study. “Learning how to conduct research is a highly analytical endeavor. I really believe that to understand research, you have to do it,” Leach asserted. “You learn by doing a lot better than just reading what somebody else did.”
By Charlene Hankinson
