Intuition is something everybody experiences and while we may be quick to cast it aside, Gerd Gigerenzer feels otherwise. The Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development argues that intuition is not really about suddenly knowing the right information or the right answer, but it’s a process that helps us instinctively understand the type of information that is not important to us and how to discard it. Gigerenzer, however, notes that intuition and rationality go hand in hand. Gigerenzer who has also written the book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious says that in his scientific work, there are times he gets a feeling or a hunch about something.
Although it’s not something he can explain, there is always that feeling from within that a certain path or course of action is the right one. In response to this feeling, Gigerenzer has to check the path or course of action and see what he finds. To him, this is the scientific part – that is, to follow up on the intuition and see whether it’s valid or not. But sometimes instinct will be purely sufficient to make a decision. In such cases, it’s not entirely possible to do a scientific process to verify the intuition. Gigerenzer gives a simple example.
When he met his wife, it wasn’t about calculation and statistical models. His decision to marry her or make the first move was entirely intuitive. For quite some time now, many people haven’t really categorized intuition as a source of intelligence yet it appears as if people who are more intuitive are perhaps more intelligent and more prudent in making their decisions. But for intuition to be a strong source of intelligence, it has to be viewed in the context of people who are already intellectually curious, people who are rigorous in their search for knowledge, and most importantly, people who dare to challenge their own perceptions and assumptions.
In other words, it’s not really about sitting somewhere and intuitively thinking about things or perceptions you have. It’s about diving into an area or a subject of study and in an effort to process the knowledge, you can use intuition to decide what in that subject area is important and what is not. In that sense, you can clearly see that being intuitive can help develop and discard knowledge based on importance. There are those who have also argued that intuitive design can be defined as something that is understandable even without any kind of instructions.
In other words, this is a situation where an object makes sense to a lot of people only because they share a common understanding of how that particular object works or what it is. But intuition has to be backed by concrete grounds. You can’t just come out of the blue and hope that people will trust your intuition. Gigerenzer argues that you have to do your homework and provide concrete reasons as to why you feel a certain course of action is the most ideal. Nonetheless, the rational mind will not always be capable of clearly showing you the path to go and in such cases, your gut feeling could be all that stands between a good decision and a bad one.
