It all started in the early 1970s, when the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky conducted an influential series of experiments showing that all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality. Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason.
But really it's both a fallacy and over-simplification that a "high intelligence" leads to a high rationality. There's reason to believe hat there may be several types of intelligence (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences) and being intelligent in one of these is no guarantee of being intelligent in another. Reason is a tool, and not the same as being rational. My mother, who has dementia is quite rational, but only within the parameters of her dementia. She will crate theories about her environment, based on her perceptions, but those perceptions are affected by her condition, and are not always reliable.
Also, I don't think that intuition is the opposite of rationality or reason. Reason relies on the pars of our brain that relate to language, but not everything we know or feel connects to that, and intuition, which comes from those bits, relates to us via an emotional chord. The trouble with rely on only on intuition is that it's easy to confuse one's hopes and fears (especially paranoia) with it. To use intuition properly, you have to be both open to your emotions, but at the same time not be totally driven by them.
Originally shared by Theodore A Hoppe
Good news!
"It is, of course, unrealistic to think that we will ever live in a world where everyone is completely rational. But by developing tests to identify the most rational among us, and by offering training programs to decrease irrationality in the rest of us, scientific researchers can nudge society in that direction."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-difference-between-rationality-and-intelligence.html?_r=0
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