Beware The Seductive Attraction Of Intuition
Prior experience wires the brain to enable amazing intuition, but it should not be trusted completely
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How many times has your intuition told you something was happening before you realized it? It might have been the urge to pause for a moment on a street corner only to have a city bus flash by inches from your face. (This happened to me in Paris, BTW.) Or it might have been that strong feeling you got that eating in this new restaurant would stay with you for days afterwards, and not in a positive way. Maybe it was the notion that something unseen was going on behind the scenes of the meeting you just attended, and you didn’t know what it was? This is your intuition talking to you, courtesy of System 1 (the automatic part of your thinking).1
Today we take a closer look at how intuition works, why you should listen, and why you should not blindly trust it.
Recall from a few weeks back that neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to make new connections between neurons based on new experiences. We saw how a thought activated a neuron grouping which automatically activated associated neurons and thoughts as well.
I mentally picture earlier experience connections as a type of database that System 1 automatically references when it receives a new set of inputs. As the new inputs activate different neurons , prior thought patterns appear that System 1 automatically combines to perform an immediate situation analysis from which it will often act on its own. This is a good thing for many situations. I am personally gratified that System 1 is always watching for danger and will immediately act if it senses that something is not right. You cannot help yourself from reacting to a loud noise or immediately stepping on the brake should a child run out from behind a parked car, and this is all thanks to System 1. System 1 is powerful and amazing.
Awareness of the importance of experience is not new. When doing my Dissertation research in the mid-2000s, I came across research indicating that experienced pilots have more of their conscious thinking ability available to them while flying than novice pilots. The article’s authors’ conclusion was that prior experience prepared the brain to deal automatically with more aspects of flying than for a novice. To the novice, many aspects of flying were new and required conscious thought. Doesn’t this sound a lot like the difference we have been discussing in prior posts between a novice automobile driver and an experienced driver?2
Think back to when driving was completely new and you needed to consciously think about each step, and that as you gained more experience driving became second nature. This is analogous to the novice pilot’s need to consciously evaluate things that the experienced pilot simply knows intuitively. The novice pilot must rely on the conscious thinking of System 23 to “figure things out” where the experienced pilot’s System 1 has already sized up the situation and, based on existing neural connections created from earlier experiences, decided what to do next. This allowed experienced pilots to focus their conscious, deliberative abilities on critically evaluating the more complicated matters such as an engine outage or unexpected instrument failure.
The movie “Sully” reflects this dance perfectly. As the pilot, Captain Sully made the call to land in the river instead of trying for an airport as he was advised to do by his ground controllers. His intuition told him that they wouldn’t make it to the airport, and he trusted it enough to take the actions he did, saving the lives of the passengers and crew, not to mention the lives of those who lived where they might have crashed. As presented in the movie, his System 1 said “You won’t make it to the airport” and his System 2 thought about it, agreed, and chose to land in the river. As presented in the movie, an idealized re-enactment showed that he could have made it to the airport but a more realistic, and nuanced, re-enactment showed that he made the right decision. (Great movie! Has @TomHanks ever made a bad movie?)
To summarize: Prior experience forms the neural connections that form the basis of the intuitive feelings that more experienced workers have when facing complicated problems. The experienced worker’s neural connections inform System 1’s intuition and it is System 2’s job is to determine whether the intuition is simply a ghost relic from the past that sort of looks like an earlier situation, or if it is indeed fully applicable to the current situation. The dance is always happening.
Without experience, a novice worker does not have the neural connections that enable System 1 to develop an intuitive feel. The novice must “figure it out.” The novice worker must engage System 2 to evaluate things for the first time which requires deliberate effort on the worker’s part, just like driving a car for the first time.
Experience really does change the way we think because it forms neural pathways that inform System 1 in the background while System 2 is consciously figuring out what is happening.
Experience is so important a factor, that it is included as a core component of the Paulson Media Matching Method detailed in my “Getting Through” book. Experienced workers have the ability to understand more from fewer words than the novice, which means that communicating with a novice in relation to a situation of moderate complexity should be done using a richer form of media. (See the end of this post for details about “Getting Through” and how you can get the book. It is a powerful, short read that will change how you communicate long into the future.)
This is the basis of intuition but beware – System 1 may see things in ways that do not accurately reflect current reality. This is where System 2 is very important for decision making that is informed by intuition.4
If this is still not clear, try thinking of the intuition process in this way. Your past experiences involved various working situations, personalities, client cultures, and technology characteristics, to name a few. These are now part of your experience database which, when referenced, will trigger that familiar intuitive feeling you get with a new situation. This is your System 1 automatically sensing external inputs that match earlier experiences. Your brain activates the associated neurons and eventually develops an intuitive expectation based on what happened before, but not necessarily what is happening today. Here is where caution is needed.
The System 1 perceptions will be pass to System 2 which, if not careful, will accept it and determine the next steps based on the System 1 input. But what if System 1’s perception is only half right and not fully applicable to the current situation? If the two situations are identical, then the unchecked intuition could be perfect, but what are the odds of that?
For these reasons, I strongly recommend to my clients that, time allowing, they listen to their intuition and also use System 2 to verify its applicability to today through some type of critical analysis. If System 2 finds mismatches, it tells System 1 which updates its perceptions to reflect the new perceived reality and then offers an updated intuition. In this way, you can use the speed of System 1 intuition with the powerful critical thinking of System 2 to make better choices.
This marvelous dance that continues to amaze me. Hopefully at this point you are starting to get an appreciation for the elegance of the interaction between the two systems while also developing an appreciation for the possible problems that can come from allowing them to run unchecked. The more aware you become of when your own two systems are on automatic, the more aware you will become of when it is happening in others without their knowledge.
QUESTION:
For next time, I am planning to look at some of the pitfalls related to intuition and the need for System 1 to find answers. What do you think about this as the next topic? Would you prefer another? Let me know by leaving a comment, taking the poll, or (even better) both!
#System1, #System2, #DanielKahneman, #DecisionMaking, #intuition, #neuroplasticity
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System 1 is the part of our thinking processes that works automatically and invisibly to us.
We will see in a future post that System 2 has limited ability to manage multiple thoughts, so relying on it for real time action is unrealistic.
System 2 is the deliberative part of our thinking which analyzes, evaluates and makes conscious decisions.
Kahneman differentiates between “emotional” learning and “expertise” and we will take this up as a topic in a future post.