If you want to learn more about how rational people and their decisions really are I recommend watching this clip with
Dan Ariely a researcher on behavioral economics at Duke University:
I can also recommend his book
Predictably Irrational if you want to learn more about behavioral economics and decision making.
Isn't intuition partly based on past experience? Although it is a sub-optimal simplification of past experiences, still your intuition didn't come out of the blue, it consists of inputs from different experiences and events from the past that have merged into the opinion you hold today. In some way our intuition therefore is based on past experiments, carried out on purpose or by accident by yourself.
SvaraRaderaAlso, the way we make decisions now lead us to end up in possible local maxima if we are to believe Ariely's theory. Ariely's method might eventually lead to reaching the global maximum (amount of happiness) for a certain action, but it also brings along the negative experiences you encounter while learning along the way. In some cases it is simply not desirable to really find the global maximum.
Take dating for instance, if you find a local maximum (you meet someone you really like), why would you throw this away for a long journey full of 'learning experiences' only to find out that the global maximum is a partner that just makes you a little bit happier than the first one did. The point is, as long as you don't know about the global maximum, your local maximum is the best you know. Ignorance is bliss.
Therefore I think that Ariely's theory doesn't apply to all decisions you have to make in life, contrary to what he claims. Maybe emotional personal decisions are not that suitable for experiments...