Expert Intuition

For years Daniel Kahneman, who studied the failures of intuition, and Gary Klein, who studied its successes among firefighters, nurses and military commanders, stood on opposite sides of the question. They eventually wrote a joint paper asking when intuition can be trusted, and found they agreed on the answer. Klein's best-known case is a fire commander who ordered his crew out of a burning house without knowing why; moments later the floor collapsed. He had sensed, without putting it into words, that the fire was too quiet and too hot for what it seemed to be. Kahneman, following Herbert Simon, describes such intuition as recognition: the situation offers a cue, the cue calls up stored experience, and the answer arrives. That works when two conditions hold: an environment with stable regularities, such as chess, firefighting or nursing, and enough practice with prompt feedback to learn them. Where they are missing, as in long-range forecasting or picking stocks, confident experts do little better than chance, and Kahneman, building on Paul Meehl's work, shows that simple formulas and checklists often beat their judgment. Confidence is no guide, because it feels the same in both kinds of environment. Ask about the environment, not about the feeling.