My partner and I have a long-running disagreement about thinking.
She believes strongly in intuition. She’ll meet someone, encounter a problem or contemplate a decision and say, essentially, I just know. If I suggest we slow down and think it through, she can become mildly irritated. Occasionally not so mildly.
I take the opposite approach. I want the evidence. What are the alternatives? What are the risks? Could there be another explanation?
She thinks I suffer from analysis paralysis.
I think she should analyse things more.
This arrangement has proved remarkably resistant to resolution, perhaps because we’re both partly right.
Where does a gut feeling come from?
Intuition sounds slightly mystical. We talk about gut feelings, instincts, hunches and vibes. Something arrives in consciousness already assembled: Don’t trust him. Take the job. Something’s wrong.
We know the conclusion but not how we got there.
A useful way to think about intuition is as rapid judgement occurring largely outside conscious awareness. Your brain has processed information and produced an answer without showing you the working.
Sometimes the process is astonishingly good.
An experienced mechanic hears an engine and knows something is wrong. A doctor walks into a room and thinks: This patient is sicker than they look.
They may struggle to explain why. That doesn’t necessarily make the judgement irrational. They may have noticed a dozen tiny things without consciously listing them.
What trained your gut?
Psychologist Gary Klein spent years studying experts making rapid decisions under pressure. Daniel Kahneman became famous for demonstrating how spectacularly rapid judgement can go wrong.
When they compared notes, they reached a useful truce: Intuition becomes more reliable when three things are true: the situation is one you can actually learn, you have enough experience of it, and you’ve had clear feedback about whether your judgements were right.
That third part matters. You can have twenty years of experience without having twenty years of useful learning.
Imagine someone who has been picking shares for decades. Every success confirms their brilliance. Every dud gets blamed on interest rates, China or government incompetence. Feedback is noisy and wonderfully easy to misinterpret.
Contrast that with a tennis player. Hit the ball badly and the feedback arrives half a second later.
So perhaps the important question isn’t: How experienced am I? It’s: What has been training me?
Confidence feels remarkably like expertise
This is where my partner and I both run into trouble.
Some people pride themselves on intuition. Others pride themselves on rational thought. Neither guarantees good judgement. You can be a “gut person” whose gut is frequently wrong. You can also reason your way elegantly to complete nonsense.
Worse, we often turn our preferred style into part of our identity.
I’m a gut person. I’m a logical person.
Once you’ve done that, being asked to think differently becomes slightly insulting.
Sometimes your first impression knows something
People are particularly fascinated by the intuition we have about other people. Research suggests that brief observations can sometimes produce surprisingly accurate judgements, although this depends very much on what we’re judging.
This fits my experience in psychiatry. After years of interviewing people, you sometimes sense that something doesn’t quite fit. A patient says they’re fine, yet something about the timing, expression, voice or story makes you uneasy.
That feeling matters, but it doesn’t prove you’re right. It means you should dig deeper.
Treat intuition as information, not necessarily as a verdict. Your gut doesn’t contain only expertise - it also contains your childhood, prejudices, fears, attractions, resentments and hopes.
“This person can’t be trusted” may be subtle pattern recognition. Or he may remind you of your horrible Year 8 maths teacher.
“This relationship feels wrong” may reflect dozens of tiny warning signs. Or intimacy may frighten you.
The mistake is assuming that because a feeling is powerful, its explanation must be correct.
Can you think too much?
Unfortunately for me, yes. Deliberate thought is useful when there is evidence to weigh, risks to compare, or competing explanations to test. But more thinking isn’t endlessly useful.
Some decisions simply don’t improve after their ninth spreadsheet. At some point, thought stops adding information and starts manufacturing doubt.
Perhaps analysis paralysis isn’t too much thinking. It’s thinking after the useful thinking is done.
The gut check
I’ve reached a compromise. Before trusting an important decision to intuition, ask:
1. Have I seen this situation many times before?
If not, your intuition hasn’t had much opportunity to learn.2. Have I received decent feedback about whether I was right?
Experience without feedback can manufacture confidence rather than expertise.3. Is this world predictable enough to learn?
Chess, yes. Next year’s geopolitical crisis, rather less so.4. Could something be distorting me?
Fear. Lust. Money. Anger. Ego. Tribal loyalty. Or the suspicious convenience of the answer being exactly what you hoped it would be.
Finally, consider the consequences.
If you’re choosing dessert, trust yourself. If you’re investing your retirement savings, marrying someone, undergoing surgery, or deciding whether someone is dangerous, perhaps give your intuition some supervision.
My partner will probably keep telling me I think too much. She’s often right.
I’ll keep suggesting that her gut could sometimes benefit from cross-examination. I’m often right, too.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to become either an intuitive thinker or a considered thinker. It’s knowing which part of yourself deserves the microphone this time.