Should we trust our intuitions?

Whilst riding my motorbike (before it got stolen), I rode through a suburban street where cars were parked on both sides. Nice weather, good visibility, nothing to worry about. Then, for some reason, something told me to slow down to a crawling pace, which I did.

Suddenly, from underneath the parked cars, a dark shape leapt out and shot across the road. Brakes slammed on; I stopped before I hit the reckless cat who was aiming to lose one of its lives. The adrenalin rush over, it occurred to me that something slightly spooky had happened; why had I slowed down moments before the incident? A hunch, intuition, mystical powers, divine intervention?

Something we all experience at one time or another is intuition or hunch that something will happen. It happens before we think, and it has a physicality; we feel it rather than work it out.

So, where do these intuitions come from, and can we trust them?

It sounds weird when you mention that you’ve had a premonition, a gut feeling, an instinct to act in a certain way, and because we don’t fully understand why it happens, we give it a mystical quality.

We pick an explanation that best suits our interpretation of how these things happen. We’re using what seems to be a sixth sense, like ESP, or we have the power of premonition. Wherever it comes from, we’re not aware of it until we act on it. It seems to either come from deep inside us or an outside force!

Patterns repeated

Intuitions, according to Gary Klein, are set patterns and prototypes that we’ve learnt over time. We acquire habits by the regular repetition of actions that deliver benefits or rewards. When an action or thought is repeated a sufficient number of times, it passes into our subconscious mind and become an automatic response that delivers the reward or benefit. It usually happens without and before any control on our part.

Our minds are pattern-making machines; we string together events into story patterns for two significant reasons—conservation of energy and the ability to predict what may happen next. Both of which are survival advantages.

We also have a hard-wired need to attach meaning to events. Meaning means understanding. If we understand something, we can predict its behaviour and look into the future.

Intuitions are part of the same mechanisms that create patterns and allow us to predict. Things that we experience pass, after a time, into our subconscious connect with other experiences and emerge, without our conscious awareness, to inform us of an action or reaction we should have. The recognition of patterns helps us size up the situations before thinking or analysing the situation.

Regularity.

Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman says that you can only have intuitions if the world is sufficiently “regular” and if there are unconscious rules. It isn’t sufficient, though, for intuition to arrive; it must also give rapid feedback in order t be valuable and establish its position in your automatic systems.

The regularity and the rules, when recognised, are why people think they have intuitions. That’s why some people get better at trusting their “gut instincts”; they see the regular patterns and the rules and absorb them unconsciously. However, to become a skilled expert in intuition takes time and repetition.

Kahneman gives us three conditions by which intuition happens:

1. A regular world

2. The opportunity to learn it.

3. Rapid feedback.

So, in my case, the experience of that type of road, in those conditions, repeatedly informed me to have a “feeling” that something may happen. As a result, I hit the brakes and managed to avoid hitting the cat. Of course, it’s also possible that I observed the cat under the cars without being consciously aware of it, but something was alerted in my mind that encouraged me to take action and prepare for further action.

Confidence.

When we trust our intuitions or gut feelings, we gain confidence that we have special powers or insights. However, confidence is not a very good indicator of accuracy. You can, of course, be both confident and inaccurate. Our intuitions are expressed very quickly and may not be assisting us.

In interviews, for instance, opinions about the interviewee usually are formed very quickly, almost at a first impression. As a result, as an interview progresses, most people will try to confirm and reinforce their first impression rather than refine it unless they are trained otherwise.

Typically, most of us tend to forget intuitions that were wrong and promote gut feelings that turned out to be correct.

This is particularly evident where a business leader’s gut instincts can take on mystical powers. Our desires for a good story or myth helps to reinforce the idea that some people are blessed with solid intuitions about business success.

“Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.”

Steve Jobs.

People tend to advertise their successes and play down their failure. Even if intuition was nothing but good luck, we build on it and feed the myth of a superpower.

Having mystical intuitive powers makes a person unique; it tells a better story and makes them irreplaceable.

“Intuition is my best guide.”

Richard Branson.

Emotion

If there was one thing, above all others, that guides decision-making, mainly where a rapid response is required, it would be emotion. Emotions let us know what we care about, what is important to us. Emotion informs the decision.

Intuition is not intellectual; it’s emotional; it’s something we FEEL. Feelings inform our actions. That’s why intuitions often feel visceral. In our language, we use metaphors like; “gut feeling” and “acting on impulse” to express the tangible feelings that come from emotion and inform rapid decisions.

Where there is time pressure, and there isn’t enough time to consider (consciously) alternatives, we rely on what our “gut” tells us. With limited time or limited information, we rely on our emotions and behavioural habits to inform our actions.

This is demonstrated in elite athletes, where years of training and practice allow them to perform intuitively when time or information is lacking. As a result, it becomes instinctual for them to perform in specific ways when the moment arises.

Association and Inference

Michelle Right and her team experimented with detectives to understand how they interpreted a crime scene and how they relied on “instinct and intuition” to inform them.

They prepared 20 different scenes with a photo and some very basic information about a crime scene. Then, they asked experienced detectives and non-detectives to give their assessment of what happened and their thinking.

The non-detectives described the scenes as they saw them and made conclusions based on their observations. The detectives, however, observed the photos and information and began to draw inferences from the scene based on what they called their intuitions or hunches. Detectives saw a lot more in the scene because they had sufficient experience to draw inferences and associations from what was shown. They went beyond simple categorisation and gleaned much more from the little they were offered.

The analysis showed that the detectives were basing their accounts on what they called their “hunches”. The researchers realised that these hunches were based on experience, intuition, knowledge, and hypothesis, but the detectives weren’t necessarily aware that this was what they were doing.

Our brains thrive on connections and associations, most of which are made without our conscious knowledge. We are constantly making if/then rules in our minds. Our minds are constantly trying to see what things go together in the universe, automatically. To gain meaning and understanding, we associate one thing with another. We build our understanding and meaning by understanding one thing in the context of another. The heart is a PUMP; argument is WAR, love is a JOURNEY, ideas BOWL us over. We associate one thing with another to make sense (and understanding) of something.

Can we trust our intuitions?

We all rely on hunches and gut feelings, but are they always reliable and do they always lead to the desired goals?

Creative thinkers, whether in the arts or business, train themselves to trust their instincts. It becomes a life-long process of listening to an “inner voice” and associating feelings with actions and analysis. Unfortunately, however, trusting intuitions and instincts can lead us down some very dark and unproductive paths, mainly if they are based on false or unhelpful premises.

We can often become so attached to our intuitions that we don’t want to or can’t let go of them. Intuitions are inexorably linked with our habits. The behaviours we learn inform our actions. Flawed intuitions, like bad habits, can lead us to some very dark places. So, there must be some balance to be found between intuition and analysis. Rational thinking, which is slower, can, and often does, inform our intuitions.

Emotions inform our decisions because they let us know what we care about and focus our attention on. They are part of our rapid response system that remains buried below our conscious thinking until we need to react to an event in a way that should typically be advantageous to us. Intuitions in extreme situations will grab our attention, but they will merely rise to the surface to inform us how we might react in less severe conditions.

For most of us, we will be selective in our use of intuitions, based often on conflicting feelings and analysis. We will post-rationalise their benefits, reasons and sources and build stories and myths around our superpower abilities.

www.charlesleon.uk

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