Clipped from: 'The trouble with intuition'

Intuition means different things to different people. To some it refers to a sudden flash of insight, or even the spiritual experience of discovering a previously hidden truth. In its more mundane form, intuition refers to a way of knowing and deciding that is distinct from and complements logical analysis. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman nicely contrasts the two: "Intuitive thinking is perception-like, rapid, effortless. ... Deliberate thinking is reasoning-like, critical, and analytic; it is also slow, effortful, controlled, and rule-governed." Intuition can help us make good decisions without expending the time and effort needed to calculate the optimal decision, but shortcuts sometimes lead to dead ends. Kahneman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2002 for his work with the late Amos Tversky that showed how people often rely on intuitive heuristics (rules of thumb) rather than rational analysis, and how those mental shortcuts often lead us to make decisions that are systematically biased and suboptimal.

Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and author of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (Viking, 2007), takes a more benign view of intuition: Intuitive heuristics are often well adapted to the environments in which the human mind evolved, and they yield surprisingly good results even in the modern world. For example, he argues, choosing to invest in companies based on whether you recognize their names can produce reasonably good returns. The same holds for picking which tennis player is likely to win a match. Recognition is a prime example of intuitive, rapid, effortless cognition.

Gigerenzer's book jacket describes his research as a "major source for Malcolm Gladwell's Blink," but the popular veneration of intuitive decision-making that sprang from Blink and similar works lacks the nuance of Gigerenzer's claims or those of other experimental psychologists who have studied the strengths and limits of intuition.
The idea that hunches can outperform reason is neither unique nor original to Malcolm Gladwell, of course. Most students and professors have long believed that, when in doubt, test-takers should stick with their first answers and "go with their gut." But data show that test-takers are more than twice as likely to change an incorrect answer to a correct one than vice versa.

Intuition does have its uses, but it should not be exalted above analysis. Intuition can't be beat when we are deciding which ice cream we like more, which songs are catchier, which politician is most charismatic. The essence of those examples is the absence of any objective standard of quality—there's no method of analysis that will decisively determine which supermodel is more attractive or which orchestra audition was superior. The key to successful decision making is knowing when to trust your intuition and when to be wary of it. And that's a message that has been drowned out in the recent celebration of intuition, gut feelings, and rapid cognition.

There is, moreover, one class of intuitions that consistently leads us astray—dangerously astray. These intuitions are stubbornly resistant to analysis, and it is exactly these intuitions that we shouldn't trust. Unfortunately, they are also the intuitions that we find the most compelling: mistaken intuitions about how our own minds work.

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