when to trust your gut.
Situations for intuition.
In the context of decision-making, intuition often has a bad reputation compared to reasoning.1 This post documents situations where it's appropriate to use intuition as a decision-making tool.
What is intuition?23 Everyone knows it through experience. It’s a feeling, sense, impression, or recognition that arises spontaneously. These feelings are physical and emotional manifestations of your unconscious knowledge and personal experiences. It is an instinct to act that you can’t always rationalise.
Situations when intuition is fine:
Time Pressure: any situation where time is critical, e.g. (1) there is no time to reason through the decision, and a well-informed guess is the best option; (2) there is a time-sensitive window to act, and hesitation could mean missing the opportunity.
‘Good Enough’ Decisions: similar to time-pressured situations, sometimes intuition helps when the difference in outcomes are minimal. There’s almost always a trade-off between time and accuracy. Thinking holistically, not every decision warrants deep scrutiny, your time can often be better spent elsewhere.
Expert Environments: in any situation where you are considered an expert. Your intuition is honed by recognised patterns and your gut feeling is clearly drawing on some rational basis. Examples: Firefighters, blitz chess players, and athletes.
Familiar Situations: taking the idea that intuition is drawing from experience, it makes sense to trust it more in familiar repeated scenarios.
In my view, the most interesting criticism of relying on intuition as a decision-making tool is that it is a ‘black box’. Going with your gut lacks all the features of ‘process’ that we want to see when understanding if something has predictive power.
Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow endorses Herbert Simon’s definition: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
Gary Klein in Streetlights and Shadows: “I am defining intuition as ways we use our experience without consciously thinking things out. Intuition includes tacit knowledge that we can’t describe. It includes our ability to recognize patterns stored in memory.”