Our Sixth Sense is Making Us Racist and Sexist
Our intuitions have just as much impact as our conscious biases.
Midwives have a special intuition. They know when a baby will start crowning, but can’t explain exactly how they knew it. My sister explained this to me. She finished her training and became a midwife last year, and is still in awe of her peers who have been there for years. “It’s like they have a sixth sense,” she says. The same thing happens when art experts can instantly recognise a fake or fire-fighters suddenly sense they need to get out of a burning building. This instant judgement is the very foundation of speed-dating, and of love at first sight.
Humans have this intuition which feels like a mystical extra-sensory perception, but in reality, is the result of observations and decisions we make on an unconscious level. Our brain works like a computer, taking into account many factors that we’re not even aware of perceiving, and drawing a conclusion. It’s like how when your phone rings, sometimes, you just know who it will be before picking up. It’s funny because nowadays, some cellphones put on the homepage the most likely actions you’ll do at a certain time — text your lover, phone your Mom, calculated according to your habits, the time of day and day of the week. We do exactly the same thing, without knowing it, when we sense who is calling us.
Psychologists call this the “adaptive unconscious,” and it is a very powerful thing. It would be impossible to make all our decisions in a rational, calculated way. We simply wouldn’t survive. We need a quicker way to make choices, like, for instance, jumping out of the way of oncoming traffic. As Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the book Blink, on this very topic, argues:
“The only way human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we’ve developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgements based on very little information.”
He compares it to functioning on autopilot, or being a giant computer, quickly and quietly processing all the data we need. Which may sound…
