One of my students has this patch on her backpack:
It's a familiar thought: deep-down, you have a sense for what's true and what's false. Your instinct can tell you what's right. Some things just seem reasonable whereas others don't. Trusting that feeling is a good idea, the epistemic equivalent to listening to Jiminy Cricket. If you want to navigate the chaos of the world, trusting your gut is the way to go.
I see this kind of advice all over in popular culture. For example, I can't watch football without seeing a commercial for gambling software encouraging people to put money on their instincts. The sports betting app FanDuel puts it plainly: "never let a powerful hunch go to waste." And a friend of mine who is considering a job change told me that she will wait to get an offer and then go with her gut on where she's likely to have the best career.
Blindly trusting your instincts on what's true is a really bad idea. Everything we know about the science of hunches, gut feelings, and intuitions tell us that they are not designed to track the truth. While some of them are pretty reliable under limited circumstances, others are designed to bring us things like social acceptance or emotional comfort rather than truth.
To see this, back up a minute and think about what the human brain is designed to do. In a nutshell, your brain is designed to help you to survive. That's the central lesson of natural selection: our ancestors who used their brains in ways that helped them to survive reproduced at higher rates than those who used their brains in other ways. You inherited those genes. That means your brain is a survival tool.
In fact, your brain is actually running two survival programs simultaneously. The first is called Type 1 thinking, and it's usually characterized as a fast, intuitive, emotional, and sub-conscious system. Type 1 thinking happens without effort, whether you like it or not. Type 1 thinking is what makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you go through a dark doorway and gives you a negative impression of a shorter-than-average political candidate. In cases like these, you know (or at least think you know) stuff but aren't exactly sure how. Hunches, intuitions, and gut feelings are all the result of Type 1 processing.
In contrast, Type 2 thinking is slow, deliberative, logical, and conscious. Type 2 thinking requires effort on your part--it's not simply a reaction or matter of instinct. Type 2 thinking happens when you calculate the annual return on investment for your portfolio or when you want the dessert but talk yourself out of it because you know it's bad for you. A settled view or a conclusion from an extended line of reasoning are examples of Type 2 processing.
Each program is aimed at survival, but that doesn't mean each is equally designed to discover the truth. Sometimes getting to the truth of things helps us to survive. For example, it's useful for you to accurately identify foods, dangers, mates, and enemies. But not all true beliefs are survival-enhancing, and at least some false beliefs give you a better shot.
For example, if you're like most people, you wildly exaggerate how harshly those around you judge your failures. You make a social blunder or are the butt of a mean joke, and you assume that others are sure to form negative impressions of you. But most of the time, they don't. Your intuition is unreliable because you've been wired to be hyper-sensitive to matters of social standing. That matters because your survival relies on the approval of people around you. Humans are deeply social creatures.
As a general rule of thumb, Type 1 thinking is reliable in narrow domains. For example, if you have an intuition that you will enjoy eating one entrée option over an alternative, you are probably right. But for many topics, Type 1 thinking will lead you astray. The fact that you have a positive feeling about a job applicant is not a good indicator of future job performance. Your powerful hunch that the Eagles look strong is not a reliable predictor of how the next play will go.
However, it turns out that intuitions that start out as unreliable can be trained over years and years of practice. A novice doctor's intuition about a diagnosis might be little better than a roll of the dice whereas a senior practitioner might develop a kind of sixth sense about certain medical conditions. The same goes for senior executives picking a market strategy, spy masters determining whether someone is lying, and chicken sexers sorting hens from roosters.
The upshot is that our instincts and intuitions are reliable for some things and unreliable for others. That means simply trusting all of them is a recipe for epistemic disaster. One of the most important epistemic challenges for each of us is to determine when it's reasonable to trust a hunch and when it is not.
Next time you are tempted to go with a hunch about something, ask yourself the following questions:
How likely is it that my cavemen ancestors would have developed reliable hunches about this topic?
Would trusting this hunch be good for me (in the survival sense) even if it turned out to be false?
Are there any scientific surveys tracking the reliability of hunches about this topic? (a quick search in Google Scholar will answer the question)
If this sort of hunch is important in my life, how can I build a track record and improve my intuitive accuracy over time?
In other words, it's not wise to simply trust your instincts. Instead, engage in some Type 2 thinking about when your Type 1 system should be trusted and when it should not. That's both the blessing and the curse of being a primate with a dual-processing brain!
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