“Trust your intuition” is something we’ve all heard repeatedly. It’s scarce for us to hear someone say – “Don’t trust your intuition.” How justified is this? When should you trust your intuition? When shouldn’t you trust your intuition? What should you do when your intuition and conscious thought are conflicting? Why is “Trust your intuition” such common advice? I’ll use two simple yet insightful illustrations to help make my case and set the stage for analyzing when (and why) intuition is overrated.
Putting your intuition to the test
Illustration – 1:
In a moment, I’ll ask you to look at a picture containing a person whose face you cannot see. Try to imagine what the person’s face might look like (only for a few seconds.) Ready? Now look at the picture below and imagine the person’s face for a few seconds.
What did you think were the race and gender of the person in this picture?
Note: I came across this picture while randomly scrolling through a page of “nature images” on Google and caught myself visualizing the gender and race of the person, even though that is ambiguous from the image. Therefore, using the same picture and question, I conducted a small poll at my University to test a hypothesis. (Discussed further below.)
Illustration 2:
Look at the following picture (Fig 2.) You can see two horizontal lines with arrows appended, pointing in different directions. Which horizontal line is slightly longer? The one on top? Or the one below it?
(Answer: The lines are of equal length. )
Some of you might recognize this as the famous Müller-Lyer illusion. However, there is more to this illusion than most people care to infer. In fact, the inference (discussed below) is so remarkable and terrifying that it inspired me to write this article.
However, as illustrations 1 and 2 demonstrate, “cheaper” can sometimes result in an unintended distortion in the output.
Why intuition is overrated
Let us analyze your responses to both illustrations so that you can appreciate the understated limitations of intuition.
Illustration – 1) What made most respondents (likely including you) think the person in the picture was a white male?
Well, this response can be explained by the availability heuristic/bias. In simple terms, the availability bias is a kind of “mental shortcut” that involves making judgments based on information and examples that quickly come to mind.
The picture in the illustration would’ve subconsciously reminded you of other photos of nature you’ve seen online. And as it turns out, a majority of stock images of nature happen to contain white people. However, suppose you’ve recently seen similar images containing non-white people. In that case, you are more likely to steer away from the above response. This is because the “examples” that come to mind more easily are trusted by your intuition to be far more accurate reflections of the real world. This means that your “mental memory” determines how your intuition will guide you; because you are unaware of the actual statistics involving people in scenic locations (nature).
i.e., Your intuition isn’t a reflection of objective reality.
Illustration – 2) Whether you’ve known this illusion before or whether you’ve measured the lengths explicitly, you now know that the lines are of equal length.
But here’s the kicker: Although you know that the lines are of equal length, you cannot suddenly decide to see them as equal. Sure, you know for a fact that they are equal. But you cannot prevent intuition from doing its thing. i.e., If you look at the lines again, your first impression will still be that the bottom line is longer. Go ahead, try it! And this, in my opinion, is extremely scary because it demonstrates the involuntary nature of intuition despite the knowledge of facts.
i.e., Even when you know it to be wrong, your intuition cannot be readily modified, since it is largely involuntary.
Conclusion
The availability bias is one amongst several tendencies our intuition is subject to. And when you include phenomena such as priming, framing etc. that we are subconsciously exposed to daily, it becomes visible that our intuition is a million light-years away from being fool-proof. Secondly, your intuition is involuntary and cannot be stopped from “doing its thing,” even in cases where you consciously know it to be wrong!! This combination can lead to several errors in judgement.
As a final example, a recent paper titled Intuition, reason, and conspiracy beliefs (published Oct. 2022 in the Current Opinion in Psychology journal) found significant evidence suggesting that conspiracy beliefs are often linked to an overreliance on intuition and a lack of reflection. In their words, “people may believe conspiracies partly because they fail to engage in analytic thinking and rely too much on their intuitions.”
Does this mean you shouldn’t rely on your intuition? That would be a terrible waste of a powerful tool. So what can you do?
To paraphrase Psychologist and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s answer –
Errors of intuitive thought are often difficult to prevent. Biases cannot always be avoided. Even when hints to likely errors are available, mistakes can be prevented only by the enhanced monitoring and effortful activity of conscious thinking. As a way to live your life, however, continuous vigilance (conscious thought) is not necessarily good, and it is certainly impractical.
Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and conscious thought is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for intuition in making routine decisions. The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are high.
“Just go with your intuition” is excellent advice for when you have no additional data/information to engage in conscious thought or when it’s a routine decision with low stakes.
When the stakes are high, give your conscious and rational thought genuine and fitting importance. After all, it’s voluntary, deliberate and based on logic and known data. Your intuition is neither authoritative nor necessarily a reflection of objective reality. Therefore, when your intuition and conscious thought are in conflict, it would generally be wiser to follow your conscious thinking, even if your intuition doesn’t agree (And realizing nothing can be done about this since it’s involuntary. And that’s OK.) At the same time, with experience, we can learn to utilize the power of intuition while not getting carried away by it.
That brings us to the end of this article. There is a brief section below on the source of intuition for those interested in further reading. What do you think of this article? What’s your intuition telling you? 😉
If you have ANY comments, criticism or recommendations, hit me up at reachthetaciturn@gmail.com or leave your comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
Until next time, The Taciturn.
You can also follow me on twitter @philosophy_mail.
The source of intuition
Intuition is a somewhat mysterious and obscure phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for ages. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact source of intuition, scientists and scholars believe it to be a combination of unconscious processing of past experiences, knowledge, and information.
Biologically speaking, this processing is thought to be done by the brain and the gut. In the words of Dr. Judith Orloff, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA – “scientists believe intuition operates through the entire right side of our brain, the brain’s hippocampus and through our gut.” (Source: Forbes.) Similarly, in an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Dr. Emeran Mayer, professor of medicine at UCLA, stated that the source of intuition actually might be gut microflora, interacting collaboratively with the vagus nerve and the brain. (Source: BigThink)
It costs a lot of resources to be so clever. As a result, natural selection found a cheaper way (intuition) to make decisions.
Prof. John McNamara, University of Exeter, UK.
Your logic and reasoning really makes sense.Reading this makes me think of ‘impulsive thoughts’ what’s your opinion on them?
Ps-I love your writing style,you’d make a great author!!!!