Musings about counter-intuition

Sitting this morning looking out across the Bay of Volos...aka the Paghasitikos Gulf. Like elsewhere in Europe it's unusually cold at present. Many shades of grey: cloud, sea, sky, smoke. The general mood in Greece is also rather gloomy at present with 'austerity measures' beginning and the price of fuel rising sharply in the past few days. I was just thinking how difficult it is to juggle actions that are counter-intuitive and how difficult it is to take a long term view. Intuition is an important part of knowing, difficult to ignore, however rational one claims to be. It's not possible for us humans (even scientists!) to just step outside our contexts, though using systems thinking can encourage us to consider our experiences in a broader context.

Three examples come to mind here today concerning: global warming, fish stocks and the economy.

1. Experiencing the coldest winter in parts of Europe for several decades, inevitably makes it harder to think about the climate warming - changing yes, but how hard it is to think of heat when feeling cold or drought when in a flood or vice versa. As humans are we actually able to tune into climate rather than weather?
2. The Bay in front of me is very nearly fished out at present. Yet off the coast nearby are protected reserves and in the years we have been coming here we've experienced times when fish numbers have risen and fallen. Although it's obvious that if left alone fish stocks will recover and quite quickly, for those in the small boats fishing the Bay, instinct seems to say 'fish today' because by tomorrow someone else will have taken the fish. How can all be encouraged to hold off and let fish stocks recover when so much else pushes in the opposite direction?
3. As far as the economy is concerned, most people here seem to think that wages cuts and tax and price rises of the kind now being imposed in Greece will not alleviate the country's economic problems but will have the opposite effect. What kind of interventions would really help improve this situation?

In their different ways each one of these examples is about a need to go against intuition. Is there therefore a link between knowledge that influences our behaviour that comes from intuition and short termism?