Imagine I provided the following description of an individual named Linda:
“Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.”
Now I want to ask you which of the following descriptions are more likely based on the description?
- Linda is a bank teller
- Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Many people are quick to recognize that elements of the second statement reverberate more with the given representation and is thus deemed more likely.
But few recognize that the first statement is strictly more likely than the second. The reason is that the first statement is included in the second statement as well. This means it wouldn’t make sense for the second statement to be more likely when it is a more specific case of the first statement. It’s just that the additional detail matches with our view of Linda, so is elevated higher, even if it is statistically impossible.
Daniel Kahneman provides this example in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow to show just how much our representational experience can lead us astray, even to illogical territories. The real danger is how we place a premium on that experience.
Dissonant Rhythms
Think about a favorite song that’s extremely popular. It could be a hit, a character theme song in popular franchises, or even a nursery rhyme. Imagine you had to clap along to the beat of your song trying to get your friend to recognize the song. What are the odds they would recognize it?
Most people tend to give about 50% odds to the guessing. Essentially, they could see it equally going both ways. But Adam Grant, a well-known business researcher at Wharton, points out that in research settings, the probability someone correctly guesses the song is actually 2%. They can’t even recognize Row, Row, Row Your Boat, no matter how obvious it was to the clapper.
The problem is, we have everything telling us that the song is easy to recognize. Because we’re the one playing it. So it seems pretty likely to us that someone else can recognize it as well, because it’s obvious to us. But to others, we might as well be playing a dissonant track or clapping randomly.
What’s to say this works any different than the beliefs in our own experience? We construct a world for ourselves through our own perceptions. And it’s easy to trust that people should have a good chance to understand what we see pretty intuitively.
Moreover, we tend to extrapolate our reasonings in illogical ways. Take, for example, the halo effect. It’s a common psychological tendency to have a pleasant impression of someone in one dimension, say being charitable, and confuse that with high impressions amongst all dimensions, say kindness, responsibility, etc. In our heads, even at an unconscious level, it seems reasonable to infer. But the objective reality is that we simply do not know.
Again, this is a part of the world that we create for ourselves. And in it, we seem to think we know everything. But clearly, it can lead us astray if we aren’t aware of the process our brain undergoes when making a decision. We have to recognize when we aren’t living in the objective world, but one coloured by our own thoughts and biases.
Closing Experiences
While it is true that intuition often comes from experience, that doesn’t mean our experiences are our best insight into the objective world.
Most people, when sleep is somewhat significantly reduced for a time period, will eventually feel adjusted and describe themselves and perfectly capable in all their daily tasks. They think they can work, drive, whatever the task may be.
But as Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley, points out, the participants of such studies have a statistically significant decrease in mental cognition, energy, and performance. Many of them can barely respond to basic external stimuli. Clearly there is a huge decrease in their abilities. They should not even be driving. Yet they feel that they’ve “adapted” and believe that it’s all fine.
Many experiences can offer us a great deal of insight for the future. But sometimes they also serve to blind us from what’s actually true. When we get so used to a lower level of cognitive function, how can recognize a low level of sleep has affected us? And in what other ways can our limited experiences close us from realities?
Daniel Kahneman dubbed the intuitive process in our brain as System 1. And it tends to analyze the world in intuitive ways. System 2 is the more conscious part of our brain that uses true reasoning. However, information always enters through System 1. And unless System 2 is very active, it will lazily accept the solution System 1 comes up with.
While this is a useful mechanism to process the world, it can lead to issues because of the fallibility of System 1. And if we aren’t careful about clearly using our System 2 processes in the right contexts, illogical answers will seem like solutions we’ve carefully deducted ourselves.
Intuition is a useful thing. But sometimes we don’t know what subjective biases are lighting up what we believe to be objective reasoning. Sometimes we aren’t aware of all the information because we’ve gotten so used to our limited experience.
To blindly trust our intuition will close ourselves in one possible viewpoint where we do not even know why we believe it. If we are open enough to admit we don’t understand, then that offers infinite possibilities for ourselves, rather than closing us up So use intuition wisely and intelligently. But question it when necessary.
