Counterintuition

Johnnie Moore recently blogged on The Danger of Safety and pointed to some evidence that although you would expect that better brakes made for safe driving that is exactly the opposite of what happened in an experiment with a fleet of taxis.

So better brakes - can lead to more accidents!

This reminded me of some other articles I had read.

• Do Road Signs and Billboards Contribute to Vehicle Accidents? and Brainstorming wont bring you good ideas.
  
  
• Calorie Postings Don’t Change Habits - Study Finds

So improved road signs may lead to more accidents and posting calories counts on food may lead to people eating more food rather than less.

The lesson? Many things we do, we do for what seem like good intuitive reasons. We don't question things enough. Where we can, we need to back decisions up with evidence not intuition.

See what Wikipedia says on Counterintuition.