Why We Can’t Always Trust Our Gut Instincts
It was towards the end of May 2011 and Manchester United, my beloved football team, was going to face Barcelona (with Lionel Messi) in the Champions League final at Wembley in England—a stadium that I knew well.
Surely, it was written in the stars that United would beat Barcelona in England to win the Champions league trophy and that I would be there watching them do so with my son.
I bought tickets at exorbitant prices on the black market, booked airline tickets, and convinced other members of my family and some friends to join us. We totaled eight in number and descended onto Wembley stadium on a warm Saturday evening.
The match started with United doing okay till the first half ended (drawing 1-1). In the second half, Messi came out like a man possessed, scoring one and setting up another. As the final whistle came, we lost 3-1 and were totally outclassed.
The flight back home was one full of remorse for the wasted money, energy and time. Yes, my son enjoyed the experience. Yes, I got to witness the incomparable Messi at his best. However, in the end, I felt terrible and somehow let down by making such an instinctive decision.
That day I learned a great lesson: forget the spiritual gurus and experts—we can’t always trust our intuition or gut instincts.
What is intuition?
The dictionary says, that “it is the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.” Or it is when we rely on our gut, follow a hunch or feel it in our bones to make a decision.
How is intuition developed in our minds?
Intuition is merely the process of identifying patterns from our past experiences, storing them in our long-term memory, and then retrieving the stored information when we notice similar patterns in our environment. We then use the information to make a final decision.
When toddlers touch a hot stove, they immediately feel pain, cry and store that experience in their memory. From then on, they learn to avoid most hot things that can burn them. When a friend or spouse says, “I need to talk,” then we immediately sense the seriousness of the tone and know there’s something important we need to listen to. When our children avoid the question of how well they did in their exam, then we quickly sense their insecurity and get it that they didn’t do so well.
However, intuition is not as straightforward as many people lead us to believe and could often lead us the wrong way.
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Memorial Prize-winning behavioural economist writes:
“intuition is defined as knowing without knowing how you know. But, that’s the wrong definition. Because by that definition, you cannot have the wrong intuition. It presupposes that we know, and there is really a prejudice in favour of intuition. We like intuitions to be right. A better definition would be that intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do. And so by this definition, the intuition could be right, or it could be wrong.”
To show an example of how intuition could be wrong, Kahneman asked a crowd he was addressing to guess the GPA of a college senior he called Julie. He told the crowd only one fact about Julie—that she read fluently at an early age. Most people in the crowd immediately guessed at a high 3.7 GPA.
“You might think that this is a good answer,” he said. “It’s a terrible answer. It’s an intuition, and it’s absolutely wrong. If you were to do it statistically, you would do it completely differently. Actually, the age that people read is very little information about what student they will be 20 years later,” he concluded.
However, there are times when certain conditions are met that make intuition work
We have spent enough time observing the pattern of behaviour
Our instincts will work when we spend a long time doing that thing that our intuition is needed for. In other words, we have spent enough time noticing the patterns and have become expert enough to have revised and refined our observations before storing them in our database.
For example, I can instinctively know if my daughter is worried. The sound of her voice, the curt reply by a text message or her trying to look nonchalant in front of me are all patterns I’ve recognised over the 18 years she has lived with me before moving to college.
On the other hand, at work, it’s a bit harder for me to read the feelings of some team members who don’t work with me directly and as such my intuition doesn’t always work.
We receive immediate feedback on information
In Jeff Olson’s book The Slight Edge, he explains how the Apollo rocket flying to the moon was off course 97 per cent of the time. It was only on course three per cent of the time. Continually re-adjusting itself, it reached the moon—safely—and returned to tell the tale. Similarly, we need always to readjust our stored information but can only do so with received feedback.
Though being in a particular field for a long time matters, what is also important is that we get immediate feedback and then adjust our information accordingly. This is important as what we first recognise is often off the mark, or wrong and with the renewed input, we correct what we see.
This is why chess grandmasters that have played tens of thousands of hours know the chessboard and the style of their opponents almost blindly. They can play without even looking at the board and can automatically preempt the next ten or more moves.
Predictable environment
No matter how much experience we have, and even if we have spent 10,000 hours practising that activity, it would be futile if the environment that we need to trust our instinct in is a volatile one which lacks predictability.
For example, the stock market is a notoriously difficult place to make money for anyone without much experience. There are so many variables and unpredictable factors that affect the market. People who make money on the stock exchange are those that have done their utmost to make their field less volatile while levelling the playing field.
This can be done by analysing, then backing the right blue chip companies and playing the long game like Warren Buffet. Or perhaps having some kind of an edge over others, whether that’s technological or otherwise.
Kahneman refutes that idea that instinct plays a part in the stock market, and so does Nassim Taleb, a former trader, risk analyst, professor and author of bestseller The Black Swan.
Emotions cloud reason
Surprisingly, instinct and gut feelings are based on using reason, not emotions to assess the situation at hand. It does that by referring to our memory database and concluding on the most consistent pattern. Therefore, we should look at any situation on hand coldly and compare it with previous experiences.
In my football example at the top of the page, even though I had ticked many of the conditions stated above, nevertheless I had allowed emotions to rule my reason. Every football expert had made Barcelona favourites especially as Messi was playing at his peak. True to form, it was Messi who scored the two goals that beat United.
Don’t listen to conventional wisdom. Trusting our instincts doesn’t always work.
Instinct, like risk needs to be measured.