Management Tools: Intuition

Decision-Making
and the
Role of Intuition

Deciding on different alternatives is an every-day practice of personal and professional life. Therefore, it is well worth taking a closer look at the decision-making process and its final implications. In principle, two different approaches can be distinguished: deciding spontaneously out of a gut feeling; or after careful and long deliberation. But when it comes to evaluating the quality of the decision, which one of those tools is the most effective?

Psychological research has undertaken a number of projects to determine the value of decisions made with either approach. Ap Dijksterhuis of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, has recently published the findings of his work. And he has indeed come up with seemingly surprising results.

The human mind has only a limited capacity for processing information. The longer and more careful a deliberation process takes, the less accurate the predictions become. This is due to the fact that people tend to err on the relative importance of their pros and cons. With an extended thinking process, more irrelevant information is included and successively outweighs the important information. And the more information enters the deliberation process, the less precise the decision becomes. The conclusion is that conscious thinking can only lead to a sound decision when a limited amount of information is involved.

The opposite process is one that relies on unconscious thoughts as a basis for decision-making. The unconscious mind has a far greater capacity of processing information, which can lead to producing more accurate decisions. Also referred to as intuition, the gut feeling is far more than just a tool of those people who cannot rationalize their thoughts. It conveys a conviction for one alternative instead of another, although it might not enable the transmitter to expressively articulate why: it is ‘just a feeling’.

In order to prove his theory, Dijksterhuis carried out a number of experiments. He gave the same information to selected groups of people but guided them through the decision-making process in three different ways. Two of them were the previously explained methods of deciding spontaneously or deliberating carefully over time. The third method was to first give out the main information, then distract the conscious mind with non-relevant issues and finally asking them for a decision.

After testing the results, Dijksterhuis could prove that the group members who processed information unconsciously reached better decisions than those reacting spontaneously or even those taking time for conscious deliberation. According to the study, there were almost no exceptions to the decisions being better from a normative (rationally justifiable), a subjective (post-choice satisfaction) and an objective perspective (exact results).

How can this outcome influence our own decision-making process in personal and professional life? Ideally, the conscious mind should be used to gather all the necessary information, but without evaluating or analyzing it. Instead, our thoughts should be occupied with other things for a day or two, leaving the digestion to the unconscious mind. Thus, the decision will develop from within and emerge naturally.

So when we follow what our intuition advises us to do, we can quite trustfully assume that this is the best decision.


Andreas Hauser