One of the most thought-provoking pieces in the recent collection Thinking: The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction, edited by John Brockman, comes from Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In it, the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow examines “the marvels and flaws of intuitive thinking”: the way our minds reach judgments without conscious, step-by-step calculation. In the 1970s, Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky—self-described “prophets of irrationality”—began studying “heuristics and biases”: the mental shortcuts we take that often lead to cognitive errors. These errors, according to Kahneman, are revealing: if you want to describe how the mind does something, mistakes tell you much more than correct performance, because they reveal the process being followed.
Thoughts, he explains, come to mind in two ways: through “orderly computation,” which involves stages of recall and the application of rules, or through perception. Perception is predictive: seeing a woman's angry face, for example, we predict the tone of what she is about to say. Intuition arises from this second way. As Kahneman notes, there is no sharp dividing line between intuition and perception, but intuition has language and knowledge of words organized in ways that go beyond simple perception.
Modern cognitive science distinguishes between two types of mental operations. Type 1 is automatic, effortless, often unconscious and associatively coherent; Type 2 is controlled, effortful, usually conscious, logically coherent and governed by rules. Perception and intuition belong to Type 1. Type 2, Kahneman says, “is who we think we are”—but, as a film would show, Type 2 is the supporting character who thinks he is the hero, while Type 1 actually does most of the work behind the scenes. Our practiced skills—driving, speaking, understanding a language—also belong to Type 1, switching to autopilot once we reach a certain level of familiarity.
Underlying this way of thinking is associative memory: a vast store of ideas connected in many ways, through which activation spreads from one idea to another until a small part of the network lights up—what happens in the mind at any given moment, largely without our awareness. This leads to “associative coherence”: the tendency for everything that fits together to reinforce everything else. The system arrives at a stable representation of reality, something Kahneman calls a marvel—but coherence comes at a cost.
We adopt one interpretation and ambiguity recedes; anything that does not fit falls by the wayside. This is how “we see the world as much more coherent than it is.” Our brain, he says, is an organ that constructs meaning and tends to see things as emotionally and associatively coherent.
The biggest culprit in intuition's failures, however, is what Kahneman calls “what you see is all there is”: a mechanism that takes whatever information is available and builds the best possible story, while telling us almost nothing about what it does not know. “It is a machine for jumping to conclusions,” he says, and the problem is that it creates overconfidence: our confidence in our beliefs measures the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct, rather than the quality of the evidence. Very often, we can build excellent stories from very little evidence.
The most insidious part is that we use certainty itself—and overconfidence—as evidence. This happens through the “mechanism of substitution”: we are asked something and answer a different question, but the answer comes to us on its own, with complete certainty. Subjectively, whether right or wrong, intuition feels the same, whether it is based on a lot of information or a little, whether it comes from genuine expertise or from heuristics.
The conclusion is humbling but useful: intuition, like attention, is “a deliberate, unrepentant sorter” that asks what is relevant here and now. In the face of a culture of self-justification, this insight serves as a reminder that it is worth allowing ourselves “the uncomfortable luxury of changing our minds”—recognizing, in other words, that our certainty is not always a measure of truth.
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