Kahneman and Klein: when expert intuition works
Researchers have tested this many times, in different places, over many years, and they keep finding the same result. This one is safe to trust.
Two researchers had spent their careers on opposite sides of a fight. One had spent years showing that expert intuition is powerful and real, the snap judgement of a firefighter or a nurse who just knows. The other had spent years showing that expert intuition is often an illusion, that supposed experts frequently do no better than chance. Instead of continuing to argue, they did something rare: they wrote a paper together to work out who was right. The answer was that they both were, under different conditions. Intuition becomes trustworthy only when two things are true. The environment is regular enough to be predictable, and the person has had long practice in it with quick, clear feedback. Firefighters and nurses have both. Stock pickers and long-range forecasters have neither, and their confident intuitions are mostly noise.
Expert gut feeling is real in some fields and worthless in others, and you can tell which by asking two questions about the expert's world. Is it regular enough to be predictable, and have they had long practice in it with fast, clear feedback? If yes, trust the intuition. If no, the confidence is real but the skill is not, no matter how senior the person. This is the sharp test for your own hunches too, especially in hiring, where feedback is slow and every candidate is different, which is the environment where intuition fails and structure wins.
Kahneman and Klein say expert intuition can be trusted under two conditions: a regular environment and fast, clear feedback. Pattern noise says the felt consistency of a judge's reaction is not evidence that either condition holds, because a signature feels like discernment whether or not it predicts anything. They agree more than they collide. The firefighter and the chess player get thousands of cases with immediate feedback; the interviewer gets a few dozen a year and learns how a hire turned out months later, if at all. Hiring is the environment where intuition's conditions are least likely to be met, which is why the same man who wrote the conditions calls the interview often useless.
Tetlock's pundits barely beat chance, and the most confident among them did worst. Kahneman and Klein's firefighters and nurses have intuitions that are real and reliable. The disagreement is only apparent, because the two studies describe two different worlds. The pundits made calls that resolved years later and could always be explained away afterwards, which lets confidence grow with no skill underneath it. The firefighter meets the same kind of situation again and again and learns quickly whether the read was right, which is the condition under which a hunch can become skill. Side by side, they give you one test for anyone's judgement, your own included: how quickly and how clearly does their world tell them when they are wrong?
Source: Kahneman and Klein, Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree, American Psychologist, 2009. Kahneman covers the same ground in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011.
Daniel Kahneman, 2011
Where the fast, intuitive mind can be trusted, and where it leads you wrong while feeling right.
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