Here’s a link to a recording of me giving a talk about this topic in 2019.
The idea that you should “just trust your gut” – that is, make many life decisions solely based on intuition (as opposed to based on reflection) – is obviously very popular. But I think that there are pretty much only four types of situations where we’re best off relying on intuition alone: when a decision is Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, or Evolutionary (FIRE for short).
Case 1: Fast decisions
There is no choice but to make the decision quickly, so thinking it through is infeasible. In this case, intuition is your only option because it’s the only method of deciding that’s fast enough.
Examples:
– the car barreling towards you in the other lane has just swerved into your lane
– you’re in a job interview and are asked whether you’d still be interested in this job if it pays less than your prior job
– the train you’re thinking of taking is about to depart, and there is no other train for five hours
Case 2: Irrelevant decisions
The decision is of low importance, so minimizing time, effort, and indecisiveness is more important than optimizing for the best outcome. In this case, intuition is your best option because it’s the least costly.
Examples:
– you are trying to decide whether to put carrots on your salad
– you are trying to decide what TV show to watch tonight
– you are trying to decide which $5 product to buy among several similar options
Case 3: Repetitious decisions
You have lots of experience making decisions in that realm AND received reliable information on how the decisions turned out. In this case, intuition is trustworthy because it’s been honed through practice with feedback.
Examples:
– a heart surgeon who is conducting her 500th heart surgery (but not a heart surgeon who is conducting her 2nd heart surgery)
– a digital marketer writing email newsletter headlines who has been tracking the performance of each such email for five years (but not one who doesn’t track the performance of the emails)
– a chess player making a decision about which move to make after playing chess daily for years (but not a chess player playing backgammon)
Case 4: Evolutionary decisions
It’s the sort of survival-relevant decision that our ancestors had to make regularly 20 thousand to 200 thousand years ago, and hence we should expect that evolution built us to have reasonable instincts in this domain. In this case, our intuitions are quite reliable: our genes endow us with these intuitions precisely because they helped earlier copies of our genes survive.
Example:
– should you eat that foul-smelling old food?
– is that person who has been staring at you likely to have malicious intent?
– should you walk on that injured knee that’s causing searing pain?
So, to recap, I think pure intuition is the right solution pretty much only for FIRE decisions, that is, those that are:
(1) Fast (because you don’t have time for anything else)
(2) Irrelevant (because the costs of other approaches are too high)
(3) Repetitious (because with lots of practice, when we’re receiving reliable feedback, our intuition becomes well-honed)
(4) Evolutionary (because certain types of decision-related instincts are built into our biology)
In other words, if you weren’t born with the ability to make the decision intuitively (non-evolutionary decisions), you didn’t learn to make that kind of decision intuitively (non-repetitious decisions), the stakes are high enough that it’s worth using the best approach (non-irrelevant decisions) and you have time to use another approach (non-fast decisions) then you should indeed use another approach.
So if a decision is not FIRE, you’re probably best off thinking the decision through carefully, discussing the decision with others, writing out pros and cons, etc. Intuition still plays a very important role in those cases, but it plays a supporting role (e.g., to help you figure out things like what you value, to help you estimate likelihoods, to help you synthesize lots of information into an overall judgment, etc.) rather than playing the only role.
I’ll emphasize since it is so important: intuition almost always plays a critical role in decision-making. The question here is just whether you’re merely (1) “going with your gut” (for the whole decision), or whether you are (2) feeding your intuitions (which might include intuitions about what you value, what you predict is true, what you feel, etc.) into a broader decision-making process.
I think that using just your intuition on important non-FIRE decisions tends to produce bad life outcomes.
So don’t just go with your gut. Go with your gut when your decision is FIRE, and otherwise, let your gut be a really useful tool, rather than letting it be in charge of the whole process.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Sam Rosen for his help improving this framework.
This essay was first written on April 7, 2019, and was first released on this site on August 30, 2021.
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