Leif D. Nelson

Intuitive confidence: choosing between intuitive and nonintuitive alternatives.

People often choose intuitive rather than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. The authors suggest that these intuitive biases arise because intuitions often spring to mind with subjective ease, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence. An investigation of predictions against point spreads found that people predicted intuitive options (favorites) more often than equally valid (or even more valid) nonintuitive alternatives (underdogs). Critically, though, this effect was largely determined by peoples confidence in their intuitions (intuitive confidence). Across naturalistic, expert, and laboratory samples (Studies 1-3), against personally determined point spreads (Studies 4-11), and even when intuitive confidence was manipulated by altering irrelevant aspects of the decision context (e.g., font; Studies 12 and 13), the authors found that decreasing intuitive confidence reduced or eliminated intuitive biases. These findings indicate that intuitive biases are not inevitable but rather predictably determined by contextual variables that affect intuitive confidence.

Mate Preferences in Social Cognitive Context: When Environmental and Personal Change Leads to Predictable Cross-Cultural Variation

As is common for many men, Shakespeare was idealising a woman. The search for an ideal partner was not only critical for Shakespeare — it is, by evolutionary standards, the central goal for all male and female life forms (Buss, 1985;Darwin, 1859;Vandenberg, 1972). Anthropological and psychological evidence continues to document the features women seek in a male partner (Symons, 1979), but for the purposes of this chapter we primarily focus on the features men seek in a female partner. The ideal feminine form has been characterised by painters and sculptors for as long as paintings and sculptures have existed (e.g., see Zollner & Nathan, 2003) and Shakespeare is, of course, hardly the first writer to try a verbal description.