ABSTRACT

I n many everyday decisions, people do not go consciously through steps of searching, weighing evidence, and inferring a conclusion before they act. Instead, people rely on instant responses including affective valences or “gut feelings,” which are reached with little apparent effort. These spontaneous judgment processes are what can be dened as intuition (e.g., T. Betsch, chap. 1, this volume; Epstein, chap. 2, this volume; Haidt, 2001; Hogarth, 2001). Now assume that you have to make an important decision, and for some reason, the analytic thinking process that you have applied points in a different direction than your immediate gut feeling. Should you, nevertheless, rely on your intuition? Does intuition bear some benet beyond its apparent effortlessness? How do you know when you can trust your intuition, and under what circumstances would it be better to obey your reective thoughts? Given the vast amount of literature, with a focus on biases, errors, and shortcomings in intuitive (or heuristic) judgments and decisions (e.g., Barron, 1998; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982), the answer seems to be clear. A statement such as “being more analytic and less intuitive should help you to develop more effective and rewarding solutions to the difcult managerial judgment and decision-making challenges that lie ahead” (Kardes, 2002, p. 402) appears to be self-evident. Accordingly, the assumption of a general superiority of reective processes in comparison to more intuitive ones has been prevalent in classical models of rational choice (for an overview, see, e.g., Hastie & Dawes, 2001). However, one reason for the increasing (or renewed) interest in the concept of intuition in the domain of judgment and decision making stems from the observation that at least sometimes spontaneous responses can outperform more deliberate ways of thinking. This nds its expression, for example, in the reference to hidden

sources of knowledge and the “power of thinking without thinking” (Gladwell, 2005).