Thinking Fast: When Intuition Isn’t All Bad, According to its Biggest Critic
We rely on our gut for everything from choosing options at a restaurant to making high-stakes career choices. Behavioral science, however, has given intuition a bad rap. Over the years, the literature on cognitive biases and heuristics has categorized the numerous ways in which our impulses lead us to commit frequent, predictable mistakes.
Behavioral science is all about unpacking human decisions and understanding what is driving our choices beneath the surface. Since Daniel Kahneman’s early work on cognitive errors, we have celebrated deliberate choices as a panacea for the problems that stem from our imperfect decision-making faculties. The classic directives are to stifle our intuition and assess a choice in the context of objective outside information: bring in base rates, check your priors, consider underlying motivations, and then make a decision.
However, we can’t always stop and think about our choices before they happen. Many of our biases save us time and energy, so that we can handle a world that is constantly in flux.
The wordchoiceevokes scenarios where one has time to consider several options, perform some sort of calculus, and then emerge with a preference. But what about the decisions we make that don’t really feel like choices at all? When we follow our instincts, it can feel like we’re being pulled towards a certain option, and the process of decision-making becomes one of traffic control. Should we follow this urge or rein it in?
References
- Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree. American psychologist, 64(6), 515.
About the Author
Nathan Collett
Nathan Collett studies decision-making and philosophy at McGill University. Experiences that inform his interdisciplinary mindset include a fellowship in the Research Group on Constitutional Studies, research at the Montreal Neurological Institute, a Harvard University architecture program, a fascination with modern physics, and several years as a technical director, program coordinator, and counselor at a youth-run summer camp on Gabriola Island. An upcoming academic project will focus on the political and philosophical consequences of emerging findings in behavioral science. He grew up in British Columbia, spending roughly equal time reading and exploring the outdoors, which ensured a lasting appreciation for nature. He prioritizes creativity, inclusion, sustainability, and integrity in all of his work.
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