Does Intuition Affect Decisions?
Daniel Goleman
Director of Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Online Courses and Senior Consultant at Goleman Consulting Group
As a follow-up to my earlier post about the brain and gut decisions, I want to share my conversation with Erica Ariel Fox for my Leadership: A Master Class about how intuition can factor into good decision-making. Erica Ariel Fox is a lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, and part of the internationally acclaimed Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
“Let’s look at Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of thin-slicing. My interpretation: you are in fact cognitively perceiving data, it’s just that you’re doing it so quickly. With pattern recognition from past experience, what you experience as intuitive is actually just unbelievably quick cognitive processing.
There are also arguments that when the emotional part of the brain is damaged, people can’t make decisions: you need the right and left hand side of the brain, the cognitive and the emotional. I think that is right for certain kinds of decisions, such as when you’re gathering information and trying to make meaning or make sense out of information.
But these approaches to decision-making don’t address what might be called direct knowing: I know this, but I don’t know how I know it. I didn’t read it in a book. Nobody told it to me. I didn’t have an Excel spreadsheet that laid it out for me. Nonetheless, I know it.
I think we have a set of skills that coaches and leaders who work with teams might call “reading the room.” Others call it attunement or discernment. It’s not data processing and thin-slicing, and it’s also not having an emotional evaluation of decisions. It’s a sensing. When I work with a team in crisis, tuning in to the group’s feelings and emotions really helps me ask the right questions about what’s happening.
People will be shocked when they think back over the course of their lives, ‘when I made that decision, I actually knew it was wrong, but I didn’t trust the part of me that was telling me not to do it.’ Or they say, ‘It was the craziest thing. I made this decision. Everyone in my life thought I was insane, but I just knew it was right, and it turned out it was the best decision I ever made.’”
How does this concept resonate with you? How would you explain intuition in relation to decision-making?
Learn more about negotiation with Erica Ariel Fox in my video series Leadership: A Master Class.
Other resources:
High Performance Leadership with George Kohlrieser
The Leader’s Mind with Dr. Dan Siegel
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters
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Scientist, migraine & nutrition.
10 年I have a hormonal (neurotransmitter) explanation to this phenomenon. What you call the left and right and the emotional parts of the brain are not "parts" but communicating networks. The prefrontal cortex (what you call left and right) uses dopamine as reward for guessing the right choices on impulse and the limbic system (the emotional part you refer to) actually makes the choice for you--unless a person falls into the 1-2% of people whose emotional system is not connected properly or is not functioning and they can only make logical rational decisions, based on the model that standard economic theories posited and used to explain the markets, the firm, etc. This explanation failed because automatons use emotion-free logical "rational" decision, which in the case of humans represents only 1-2% but the rest makes decision using the combination of emotions and logic. Thus (in economic sense) their decisions and choices and knowledge appear to be gut feeling actions when in fact they are not.
Psychotherapist
10 年Absolutely if calm mind enough to hear!
fine artist/ Illustrator/Cartographer/design draftsman
10 年When a gut feeling hits me strongly, I immediately scan my brain for experiences that probably led me to that inside. The decision is then made. If is usually correct. Helen Bruce, coach
Customer Support Coordinator
10 年Intuition is an important process when delivering careers advice it is an inner sensing, sometimes inexplicable, but equally as important as logic, marrying the two skills together is an added bonus, trusting this skill in one self is also about confidence too.
Did 2 Two day MDP Programs for WE school Bangalore recently.
10 年I remember reading --" when information is overwhelmingly large, we may not be able to manage it cognitively. So use gut feeling." Do not remember where.