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May

2010

Kahneman Explains How Intuition Leads Us Astray

Nos intuitions nous trompent, mais nous dépendond d'elles...

www.psychologicalscience.org/...getarticle.cfm

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"Intuitive impressions come to mind without explicit intention, and without any confrontation, and this is one of their distinctive aspects,"
Expert intuitions are able to deal swiftly and decisively with a difficult matter - such as making a quick chess move or fighting a fire - that would seem to require extensive deliberation. Most of the time, a person with expert intuition is not really conscious of making a decision, but rather acts as though their instinctive choice is the only natural outcome of a circumstance.
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- "People jump to statistical conclusions on the basis of very weak evidence. We form powerful intuitions about trends and about the replicability of results on the basis of information that is truly inadequate," Kahneman said. For this reason, a person who is not an expert, even if thoroughly versed in a field of study, might make an intuitive mistake.
- In a study that still holds up over 50 years later, Meehl found that when the clinician competed with the statistical formula, the formula won almost every time. This finding has served as the basis for Kahneman's theory about overconfident experts.
- "When something happens that a person has not anticipated, ... they remain convinced that what they had predicted, although it didn't happen, almost happened," he said. The overconfidence is then propagated while the accuracy remains the same, and the cycle begins again.
- Kahneman divided all thought into a two-system model, intuition and deliberate computation, whose particular attributes are almost completely opposite. Intuition is fast, uncontrolled, and, most importantly, effortless. Computation, on the other hand, is slow, governed by strict rules, and effortful.
- "Our ability to avoid errors depends on what comes to mind, and whether the corrected thought comes to mind adequately."
- "A fully rational agent would find it possible to answer both questions equally easily, regardless of the display," he said. "That's not what happens. We don't compute everything we could compute. We do not use all the information that is actually available."
- Kahneman argued that intuitive activities are very similar to perceptual activities, such as seeing and hearing. "These processes of perception are going to guide us in understanding intuition,"
- "The alternative to thinking intuitively is mental paralysis," he said. "Most of the time, we just have to go with our intuition, [but] we can recognize situations in which our intuition is likely to lead us astray. It's an unfinished story."