How to Know If Your Gut Instinct Is Reliable
Sometimes there is an overwhelming feeling that you just know something about a person or situation; this is called intuition and is often not true.
There is much debate about whether we can trust our instinct about other people; some people think we know everything we need to know about a person in an instant. The Nobel Memorial Prize-winning behavioral economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman struggles with this perception in his work, however, insisting that many things that we immediately believe to be true actually have much more to do with stereotypes and our own biases.
ThinkAdvisor reported on Kahneman’s speech at the World Business Forum in New York, where he explained that there are times when the feeling we call “intuition” is correct , but there are criteria. You need to be able to answer these questions in order to know if you are correct in what you think your intuition is telling you.
You could learn it – and have you practiced it?
Our brains love to look for patterns everywhere, so there is a tendency to make connections where there are none. We try to guess how common something is by recalling past events, so things that rarely happen can seem common if they are significant or extremely negative. Ask yourself, is there a regularity in this situation? And have you observed this enough times to draw conclusions?
Kahneman gives two examples of worlds in which one can learn regularly – playing chess and marriage:
“The intuition of experienced chess players when they look at the board [and make a move] is accurate,” he said. “Everyone who was married could guess the mood of his wife or husband from one word on the phone. It’s intuition, and overall it’s very good and very accurate. “
The rules of chess are always the same, and we hope that anyone in a marriage knows their spouse. In a sense, our intuition is a more learned strategy than guesswork. Your choices are backed up by all sorts of data that your brain has accumulated over time. This is not really a guess, even if it seems.
Marriage is a very concrete example; you learn a lot about someone just by constantly observing and relating to them. You are wasting hours. Practice is a deep part of the instinct of knowledge, and therefore a person who has a lot of experience in something can be trusted when his intuition tells him something. If you haven’t really practiced something, you don’t really know.
However, when it comes to safety, it’s best to listen to yourself. For example, every time I’m on a date with someone who makes me feel bad , I immediately leave and will continue to do so. But I’ve also been on many first dates, and while everyone is different, there is a pattern of socially acceptable behavior when you first meet someone. What I interpret as the intuitive feeling that someone is a monster may just be knowledge gained from a lot of interactions with creeps. Think about times when you trusted your intuition and why you might be right – or wrong – based on what you actually knew.
Has your intuition been confirmed?
Kahneman says that the only way to really know if you have expert intuition about anything is to validate your “guess” by saying that you should “know almost immediately if you got it right or wrong.”
What he claims is essentially scientific evidence. Everything else is just a guess. Kahneman mostly outlines his criteria because he believes that too many people base their decisions on a sense of confidence that is unwarranted. This means confirming their bias, discriminatory practices and assumptions about how the world works that are completely wrong. He is wise in asking people to reconsider their tendency to classify the world based on their feelings. On the other hand, in situations where your intuition tells you that you are unsafe or that something is seriously wrong, now is not the time for the scientific method. In such cases, trust your instincts and walk away.
Daniel Kahneman: Your intuition is wrong if these 3 conditions are not met | ThinkAdvisor