Blog Post #10-Thinking & Intelligence

In Chapter 9, I learned about intuition. The book defines intuition as an effortless, immediate, automatatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. One's intuition can stop them from solving problems correctly, making wise decisions, forming valid judgments, or reasoning logically. The book explains "Intuition's Dozen Deadly Sins." The "sins" that I found most intriguing, and that I can mostly relate to are hindsight bias and overconfidence. Hindsight bias is when someone looks back on events and falsely surmises that they knew it all along. For example, let's say I get one wrong on a test. I get my test back and I think to myself, "Oh, I knew that was the answer! Why did I mark the wrong one?" This would be my intuition getting the best of me, hence the hindsight bias coming into effect. Overconfidence is one's intutitive assessments of his or her own knowledge are often more confident than correct. I remember it was stated in the book in a previous chapter that, "humans tend to be more overconfident than not." I believe this is completely true and that we as human beings do not like to think of the actuality of real life and can talk ourselves into anything.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. To perceive emotions is to recognize them in faces, music and stories. To understand emotions is to predict them and how they change and blend. To manage emotions is to know how to express them in varied situations. To use emotions is to enable adaptive or creative thinking. It is said that if one is emotionally intelligent, they are self-aware and enjoy higher quality interactions with friends. They can read others' emotions well and know what to say to a friend who is grieving, needs encouragement, or just solve a problem. I would consider myself to be emotionally intelligent. I think this is important, because I am able to build better bonds with the people around me, especially my family and close friends. I feel like I can relate to people and can help them in whatever ways that they need it. I can perceive emotions, tell it by someone's facial expressions. Some people may puzzle me, but for the most part I'm pretty good. I understand emotions, because I can tell if someone is angry, for instance, and know how I can change them to feel happy. I can manage my emotions. I know when and when it is not appropriate to express certain emotions. For example, it's ok to cry during a sad movie, but not ok to be laughing. I can use emotions in activities, such as, a school musical or during a school project.

In Chapter 10, I learned why genders differ in mental ability scores. I learned that girls spell better (I think it's because we actually care about people perceive us and what we can do), are more verbally fluent, better at locating objects (AKA not losing everything), better at detecting emotions, and more sensitive to touch, taste and color. Boys are better at mathematics and outnumber us women at the low and high extremes of mental abilities. Boys are also more likely to be found in special education classes, because they talk later than sooner.