Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions

by Gerd Gigerenzer

Common Misconceptions About Intuition 1. Intuition is the opposite of rationality. It’s not. Intuition is unconscious intelligence based on personal experience and smart rules of thumb. You need both intuition and reasoning to be rational. 2. Intuition is female. That has been the doctrine since the Enlightenment. Today, men are also allowed to have intuitions. The key difference is that men are still more hesitant to admit intuition or even listen to their gut. 3. Intuition is inferior to deliberate thinking. Deliberate thinking and logic is not generally better than intuition, or vice versa. Logic (or statistics) is best for dealing with known risks, while good intuitions and rules of thumb are indispensable in an uncertain world (Figure 2-3). 4. Intuition is based on complex unconscious weighing of all evidence. This thesis has been put forward to explain why intuitive decisions are often excellent. The idea is that if an intelligent process is good, it must function according to the bookkeeping method of weighting everything. But bookkeeping is only best in a world of known risk, not under uncertainty. There is strong evidence that intuitions are based on simple, smart rules that take into account only some of the available information. 7