Writing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Writing - Essay Example An excellent example is this: there are many stories told about historical events that nobody has ever participated in, and many authors have written about things that happened long time ago. Most people believe that these things are true although they do not have evidence to proof that. This is the intuition. In â€Å"Predictable Irrationality† by Dan Ariely, the author gives an example of his own experience in the hands of nurses. He narrates about a period when he was in a hospital after having suffered 70 percent body burn. He tells of the manner in which nurses would bandage and un-bandage his wounds. He would try to ask them to do it slowly or to give him some time to rest but they could not. According to him, the nurses ought to have ripped the bandages slowly. He thought the nurses were wrong and so he advised them to do it his way, but since the nurses thought they were right, they believed that their way of ripping of the bandages was the best for a patient of Ariely’s kind. This caused him a lot of pain. The experience also led him into researching on how to take off bandages from burn wounds. He bought a carpenter’s vice with which he could crunch people’s fingers at the workshop for short and long periods of time and then test all the different typ es of pain they felt. Upon carrying out numerous experiments with different people and objects, Ariely realized that ripping off bandages from burn wounds at a low intensity and over a long time combined with allowing patients some time in between to rest reduced pain a lot. The facts he got after the research showed that the nurses’ way of doing it was wrong indeed. Although the nurses were wrong, they all along had been thinking that they were right, since they believed their intuition to be correct simply because they had strong but untested beliefs. In most cases, we make a decision through intuition and we believe it to be right. What can be said about the general