When Intuition Is Our First Resort

I remembered something that I had penned a while ago, as I was reading Louis' post on disregarding intuition.

I wrote about why we rely on it so much in the first place and how understanding a little nuance to our intuition might help us.

It goes something like this.

Intuition helps us understand things instinctively without expending time.

It is an evolutionary trait – we relied more on our gut to remove ourselves from situations of threat or danger, without having to reason our way out of it.

We have neutralised most, if not all the fight-or-flight type of threats humans faced.

But this leaves us with a predisposition to deploy intuition in an unfamiliarly ‘safe’ environment.

Goes without saying, that the decisions we make today are drastically different from our ancestors.

But our decisions are ridden with biases, to the point that we are often victims of intuition. Poor intuition comes from systematic errors in judgement.

This is best explained by drawing a distinction between strong intuition and clear intuition.

For example, if I ask you to guess the high school GPA of a student who read fluently at the age of 4, most of us would place the student in the higher percentiles of the class.

But, we are basing this on something that is statistically insignificant. Literacy levels at the age of 4 has no bearing on performance in high school.

The intuition is strong on this one.

Clear intuition, however, would place the student in the percentile category of an average high schooler with the information presented.

Deliberate intent and attention is important to avoid systematic errors in decisions.

Do it often enough and we (hopefully) improve our decision-making system sufficiently to not make systematic errors.