Is it ok for your characters to do something counterintuitive?

Of course! Great characters in great books do this all the time. The key is pretty simple: just make sure they have a reason not to do the logical or simple thing.

Maybe their goals aren’t obvious and the seemingly obvious thing to do doesn’t serve their actual goals.

Maybe there’s something preventing them from doing that thing–a system is down, or they’re in the wrong place, or there are enemies in the way, etc. Maybe they are lacking information that makes clear the logical option is a possibility.

Or, contrarily–and this is where it gets a BIT stickier, but it can still work–maybe they have a personality flaw that is the issue. Maybe they’re too resentful, or prideful, or angry, or stubborn to do the simple thing and are determined to make things harder for themselves. Depending on the specific situation (if the stakes aren’t crazy high, aren’t life and death, for example), this can happen. Especially in classical tragedies.

If someone’s aiming a gun at you, and you have a loaded gun and knife both accessible, no one’s going to grab the knife.

But if the situation is much less intense and much less urgent, people do stupid things sometimes, especially when their vices come into play or their pet vice is threatened.

This is where beta readers and editors come into play. They will let you know to what extent your characters acting counterintuitively in your story is credible, and when it’s just too much to take.

Listen to their feedback, and ask yourself, if I were reading this, would this sound believable to me? That someone would do this in this situation?