Gut decisions don’t work well in many situations

There has been a recent spate of best-selling books that support the notion that you should go with your gut when making a decision (e.g. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer and Gary Klein's The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work).

The authors of these books state that for many decisions there is no need to formally identify the issue, develop multiple alternatives, and itemize criteria — just go with your intuition. Of course, they are right — for some decisions. We make decisions in two very different ways. Sometimes we reach conclusions unconsciously — our minds quickly and silently sorting through the available information and drawing an immediate judgment. This may be in a blink — so quickly and so far below our level of awareness that we may have no consciousness of where our conclusions came from. If we are trying to decide what to do in an emergency, how to walk through a doorway, or many other simple or no-time-to-think situations then this is the right approach.

One study of decision-making methods (see Payne, Bettman, and Johnson, The Adaptive Decision Maker) found that

1. People use a variety of cognitive strategies, dependent on task and context factors.
2. Given that people have limited cognitive abilities, strategy selection is a compromise between accuracy and the desire to minimize cognitive effort.
3. People are opportunistic; they change their strategies on the fly.

The study indicated that intuition follows a strategy in which we compare the first alternative solution for the situation to the most important criterion. If our evaluation shows that the alternative satisfies that criterion, we accept it and move on. If it doesn’t, we generate another alternative and try again. If there is more than one alternative that satisfies the most important criteria, we move to the next most important criterion to try to zero in on the one to choose. Of course, this strategy may be modified if we are out time, there are too many alternatives, or there are others involved.

Research I did in the early 1990s showed that designers who pursued their first idea generally ended up with concepts that needed much patching to make them work, if they could be fixed at all. Another study of design engineers showed that the quality of design results linearly improved with the time and effort spent on developing alternatives and criteria (this work is in an obscure German dissertation but the results can be read in a paper I wrote "The Ideal Engineering Decision Support System."