Today is May 27 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How much of your thinking is intuitive compared to rational?”
Thinking about thinking is hard work. Getting through the day can be challenging enough for most people. Yet successful people who navigate the chaos spend time thinking about their thinking. In addition to assessing what they think, they also evaluate how they think.
In a Psychology Today article Dr. David Ludden explained that economists have traditionally assumed that humans are rational decision makers. In recent decades, however, psychologists working in the field of behavioral economics have come to recognize that people are limited in their ability to make rational decisions.
“In some cases, such as when we have the time and the cognitive resources to think things through, we can be quite rational in our decision making. But when we’re constrained by time we tend to make quick, gut-feeling decisions.”
In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explains the so-called dual-process theory of decision making for lay audiences.
According to dual-process theory, intuitive thinking is fast, while rational thinking is slow. And so, psychologists often use reaction time to determine whether a participant in their experiment is using an intuitive or rational approach to solving the problem at hand. Going with your gut isn’t necessarily bad. We humans have evolved some pretty effective intuitions that usually lead us to very quick—and reasonably accurate—judgments, at least in the social realm.
Likewise, taking the time to make a rational decision can lead us to what psychologists call “paralysis by analysis.” That is, we’re unable to make a decision in real time because we’re bogged down by slow reasoning processes. For example, there’s no rational process for deciding what to order for lunch, and so we just have to go with whatever feels right.
Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper noted “Serious rational criticism is so rare that it should be encouraged. Being too ready to defend oneself is more dangerous that being too ready to admit a mistake.”
How much of your thinking is intuitive compared to rational? How often are you too ready to defend yourself?