How experience guides our intuition
There is a lot of evidence that much of our decision making is intuitive. We respond intuitively rather than think decisions through rationally. But where does our intuition come from? It seems that different intuitive mechanisms are used based on our experience of the decision at hand. And if intuition fails, then we might just have to figure things out.
Which house would you burgle?
To make a choice, the inexperienced graduates weigh up the differences between the two houses. The experienced burglars and police adopt a much simpler decision strategy using a "take the best" heuristic; one criterion guides their decision making. However, the criterion used differs, for burglars the presence of a burglar alarm was the most important cue, while police tended to focus on whether ground floor doors and windows were accessible.
Experience leads to different decisions
The chosen decision strategies highlight the role of experience in decision making.
So, experience leads to faster, more intuitive decision making but different types of experience lead to different decisions being made.
This finding might seem to confirm obvious to the layman, but from a marketing perspective it points to the importance of brand experience. Not just hands on experience, but expectations guided by indirect learning from advertising, word of mouth, and general observation.
Different understandings of intuition
A 2009 paper by Klein and Kahneman (yes, Nobel Prize winning Kahneman) compares two different schools of thought about how people make decisions. The more familiar Heuristics and Biases school holds that heuristics – general rules of thumb - inform our intuition and that, when intuition commands our decisions, those decisions are often biased. The school of Naturalistic Decision Making finds experienced-based pattern matching informs our intuition and is often accurate.
What is the difference?
The difference between heuristic-informed intuition and experience-informed intuition lies in the application of a general rule of thumb versus recognition of the specificities of the situation. Both strategies simplify decision making.
In either case, if no obvious match is identified, then people fall back on alternative decision strategies, which is what the graduate students do when trying to figure out which house to burgle. Of course, the two different approaches may well produce the same outcome, and both might be used by the same individual on different occasions.
What if these strategies are really the same?
I think the idea of pattern matching, which is referred to as a recognition primed decision strategy, is important and applicable to even simple purchase choices. The intuitive decision when shopping for groceries may be "I'll take that one" but it still requires recognition based on experience. Rightly or wrongly, I suspect there is a connection between recognition primed decision strategy and gist, the storage of ideas at their simplest meaning.
Both police and burglars are assumed to use a take the best strategy in the experiment described above, although it seems to me that to identify the best, both groups needed to draw on their experience. So, is that different from experience-informed intuition? If there is no difference, then the real takeaway is simply that experience has an predominant influence on our decision making.
Simple cues based on experience
In the paper in which they fail to disagree, Klein and Kahneman state,
"Where simple and valid cues exist, humans will find them if they are given sufficient experience and enough rapid feedback to do so…"
Which house would you burgle?
A 2009 paper by Garcia-Retamero and Dhami titled, "Take-the-best in expert-novice decision strategies for residential burglary," compares the decision strategies of experienced burglars, experienced police, and graduate students (who are presumed to have no experience of burglary). Given a list of criteria, which house would each group choose to burgle?
To make a choice, the inexperienced graduates weigh up the differences between the two houses. The experienced burglars and police adopt a much simpler decision strategy using a "take the best" heuristic; one criterion guides their decision making. However, the criterion used differs, for burglars the presence of a burglar alarm was the most important cue, while police tended to focus on whether ground floor doors and windows were accessible.
Experience leads to different decisions
The chosen decision strategies highlight the role of experience in decision making.
- We can hypothesize that lacking experience, the graduates labor through their decision, trying to consciously figure out the best choice.
- The police decide based on ease of entry, presumably basing their decision on learning gained from past investigations (presumably they too have no direct experience of burglary).
- The burglars have direct hands-on experience. They are confident that they can find a way into a property but defeating an alarm system is more challenging problem.
So, experience leads to faster, more intuitive decision making but different types of experience lead to different decisions being made.
This finding might seem to confirm obvious to the layman, but from a marketing perspective it points to the importance of brand experience. Not just hands on experience, but expectations guided by indirect learning from advertising, word of mouth, and general observation.
Different understandings of intuition
A 2009 paper by Klein and Kahneman (yes, Nobel Prize winning Kahneman) compares two different schools of thought about how people make decisions. The more familiar Heuristics and Biases school holds that heuristics – general rules of thumb - inform our intuition and that, when intuition commands our decisions, those decisions are often biased. The school of Naturalistic Decision Making finds experienced-based pattern matching informs our intuition and is often accurate.
What is the difference?
The difference between heuristic-informed intuition and experience-informed intuition lies in the application of a general rule of thumb versus recognition of the specificities of the situation. Both strategies simplify decision making.
- Heuristic-informed intuition is simple because there are a limited set of generic rules used to make the decision. However, relying on these rules of thumb can produce systematic errors in specific circumstances.
- Experience-informed intuition is simple because a pattern match produces one obvious outcome. The more experience the decision maker has of the specific domain, the more accurate their decision. Of course, pattern matching can still be prone to error. Even AI gets it wrong sometimes.
In either case, if no obvious match is identified, then people fall back on alternative decision strategies, which is what the graduate students do when trying to figure out which house to burgle. Of course, the two different approaches may well produce the same outcome, and both might be used by the same individual on different occasions.
What if these strategies are really the same?
I think the idea of pattern matching, which is referred to as a recognition primed decision strategy, is important and applicable to even simple purchase choices. The intuitive decision when shopping for groceries may be "I'll take that one" but it still requires recognition based on experience. Rightly or wrongly, I suspect there is a connection between recognition primed decision strategy and gist, the storage of ideas at their simplest meaning.
Both police and burglars are assumed to use a take the best strategy in the experiment described above, although it seems to me that to identify the best, both groups needed to draw on their experience. So, is that different from experience-informed intuition? If there is no difference, then the real takeaway is simply that experience has an predominant influence on our decision making.
Simple cues based on experience
In the paper in which they fail to disagree, Klein and Kahneman state,
"Where simple and valid cues exist, humans will find them if they are given sufficient experience and enough rapid feedback to do so…"
And when you think about it, that is all brand marketing is doing. Marketing activities provide people with experience of the brand – what it looks like, what it is good for, where they might find it – such that when a need arises, one brand is the obvious choice. We should all understand the huge influence of direct brand experience, but when it comes to brand building, we are building people's tacit knowledge through indirect learning, giving them the ability to make more intuitive purchase decisions. The influence of experience on intuition also explains why it is so difficult to change peoples' minds once a decision has been made, there is tremendous inertia to be overcome.
Not rocket science maybe, but a useful reminder. But what do you think? Please share your thoughts.
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