Not necessarily. Strong feelings sometimes emerge not as a balanced summary of all of our unconscious, but a response to some “local” (partial) knowledge.

For example, a person may happen to have seen one of the finalists of American Idol sing in a bar previously and base his or her prediction of who will win the competition on recollected feelings from that one event. Our data suggest that these “locally based” feelings tend to hurt your ability to predict because instead of summarizing everything you know about the domain, they only reflect part of what you know.

Michel Tuan Pham is the Kravis Professor of Business at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.