Intuition

How to Learn to Trust Your Gut

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You learn to trust your gut by earning it, one area at a time. Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein concluded that skilled intuition develops only under two conditions: an environment regular enough to have learnable patterns, and enough practice with feedback to learn them. They also found that how sure a feeling makes you is not a reliable sign that it is right.

What did Kahneman and Klein find?

The two came from opposite camps. Klein had spent much of his career promoting reliance on expert intuition in decision making; Kahneman had spent much of his running experiments in which intuitive judgment was found to be flawed. In a 2009 paper in American Psychologist, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree,” they set out to map where intuition can be trusted and found they agreed on the answer:

  • A high-validity environment: the situation has stable, learnable patterns. Games such as bridge and poker qualify.
  • An adequate opportunity to learn those patterns, through practice and feedback.

They add a warning that matters for everyday life: subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgment accuracy. A gut feeling can feel calm and certain and still be wrong.

Where does intuition fail?

Where one of the conditions is missing. The paper gives examples:

  • Low-validity environments: Kahneman and Klein describe predictions of individual stock prices and long-term political forecasts as close to zero-validity. They cite research finding that experienced experts were no better than untrained newspaper readers at long-term political forecasting.
  • No chance to learn: experienced fireground commanders draw on the many fires they have seen and imagined; without such opportunities to learn, the authors write, a valid intuition can only be due to a lucky accident or to magic.
  • Mixed skill within a field: weather forecasters predict temperature and rain better than hail. The authors call this “fractionated expertise,” expertise that holds for some tasks in a field and not others.

How do you build intuition you can trust?

By creating the two conditions on purpose:

  1. Choose the domain. Intuition is specific. Being reliable about your children’s moods says nothing about your instincts on investments.
  2. Get rapid, clear feedback. Make a judgment, then find out promptly whether it was right. The paper notes that people find valid cues when they have enough experience and rapid feedback, except in environments where the feedback itself is misleading.
  3. Accumulate experience. The amount of experience is one of the factors the authors name, alongside predictable outcomes and good feedback.
  4. Notice when you are outside your zone. In a new situation, or one with no stable patterns, slow down and reason it through.

Balancing gut and reasoning

Use both, in order. Let your first impression come, then check it against what you know, especially when the stakes are high or the situation is new. In a domain where your feelings have proved reliable over time, you can give them more weight. Where they have not been tested, treat them as a starting guess.

Map where your gut has earned trust

List three areas where you make frequent judgment calls, such as work, money and people. For each, ask two questions from the paper: does this area have stable patterns, and do I get quick, clear feedback on my calls? Where the answer is yes to both, your gut has had a chance to learn. Where either answer is no, give your reasoning the final say.

This article is general information, not medical or psychological advice; talk with a licensed clinician about your own situation.

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