Intuition in Judgment and Decision Making

Psychology and decision sciences have for too long been out of the mainstream of the other natural sciences, mainly evolutionary biology and neuroscience, by putting the conscious cart before the unconscious horse. Finally, a collection of essays by leading experts in human reasoning and decision making that takes the unconscious seriously as a force in producing important decisions. This book provides a much needed counterweight to the dominant 'conscious and rational' model of human decision making. Hats off to the editors for gathering just those authors who are doing the cutting edge research in this area, as well as for the original idea to produce this much needed collection.
John A. Bargh
Yale University

This volume examines in depth intuition, one of the most often mentioned and yet least systematically investigated concepts of lay psychology. It provides a well rounded discussion that covers the manifold aspects of this fascinating phenomenon. The book is successful in bringing together ample cutting edge insights into what intuitive judgment might entail. It is timely, thought provoking and comprehensive. A must read for anyone interested in the intricacies of human judgment and impression formation.
Arie W. Kruglanski
University of Maryland

Book Description

The central goal of this volume is to bring the learning perspective into the discussion of intuition in judgment and decision making. The book gathers recent work on intuitive decision making that goes beyond the current dominant heuristic processing perspective. However, that does not mean that the book will strictly oppose this perspective. The unique perspective of this book will help to tie together these different conceptualizations of intuition and develop an integrative approach to the psychological understanding of intuition in judgment and decision making. Accordingly, some of the chapters reflect prior research from the heuristic processing perspective in the new light of the learning perspective.

This book provides a representative overview of what we currently know about intuition in judgment and decision making. The authors provide latest theoretical developments, integrative frameworks and state-of-the-art reviews of research in the laboratory and in the field. Moreover, some chapters deal with applied topics. Intuition in Judgment and Decision Making aims not only at the interest of students and researchers of psychology, but also at scholars from neighboring social and behavioral sciences such as economy, sociology, political sciences, and neurosciences.

p.43 Generally, cues [relevant pieces of evidence available or accessible in the environment] vary in at least two ways. First, they vary in their objective validity. Second, they vary in the ease with which they can be processed: Some are simply available; others are accessible at varying costs. By available we mean that they are directly observable such as the skin color, sex, or behavior of a person; the brand or price of a product in the supermarket; or the length of a persuasive message. By accessible, we mean that the judge must engage in some activity to sample the information such as to observe a person's behavior in many situations, try out a product, read a consumer report about it, or read the arguments contained in a persuasive message....

External Cues

In most situations that call for a judgment or a decision, multiple relevant pieces of evidence are available or accessible in the environment. Generally, the type and number of relevant external cues for a judgmental task at hand is determined by the ecology surrounding an individual and cannot be predicted by our model.

p.71 According to the Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.oed.com), intuition is "the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process." In general parlance, knowing something without knowing how you know it.

p.76 The term implicit learning was coined by Reber (1989) to refer to the process by which people acquire knowledge about rule-governed complexities of a stimulus environment independently of conscious attempts to do so. Reber (1993) and Berry and Dienes (1993) have showed that people exposed to various artificial structured situations, without being informed that there was any structure, were subsequently able to identify instances of the phenomenon or to predict the future occurrences.

p.94-95 The fact that many activities are exercised in an intuitive manner does not, of course, mean that they were originally acquired in this way. This applies to many physical skills such as driving an automobile. Here the skills (e.g., changing gears) are so practiced and overlearned that the person can no longer explain how they are achieved. What started explicitly becomes automated - and thus intuitive - over time. This also applies to mental skills and bears on the issue of how people acquire expertise in specific domains.

p.120-121 What exactly does making a decision entail? There are many phase models of decision making in the literature... but we borrow the decision protocol of Orasanu and Connolly (1993) because it includes the execution of decisions that is especially relevant when considering sports decisions... The first step is the presentation of the problem... The next step is the identification of the constraints, resources, and goals facing the decision maker... Third, the generation of possible solutions to the problem, or courses of action, occurs... The fourth step of the decision-making protocol, consideration of possible solutions, is the one typically regarded as representing the whole of the decision-making process... the next two stages are rarely dissociated from the output of the consideration phase. Selection of a course of action... and initiation of the selected action... Finally, the last stage of a decision protocol is the evaluation of the decision made including the appraisal of feedback information if any exists.

p.135 According to this program [the heuristics and biases program of Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982], when dealing with the twilight of uncertainty, people rely on a limited number of simplifying heuristics rather than more formal and computationally and informationally more extensive algorithmic processing. The heuristics are regarded as typically yielding accurate judgments but also give rise to systematic errors.

p.191 In this chapter, we propose that expert intuition refers to processes to which the decision maker does not have conscious access either because previously conscious, analytic processes have become automated to a point in which conscious attention is no longer necessary (Goldberg, 2005) or as the result of cumulative, associative learning that has never been conscious (e.g., Plessner, Betsch, Schallies, & Schwieren, chap. 7, this volume).

p.195 The constrained optimization view of decision making depicts decision makers as seeking the alternative that optimizes their objective function under a given set of constraints.

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