Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It?

SPEAKING OF JUDGES VS. FORMULAS

"Whenever we can replace human judgment by a formula, we should at least consider it."

"He thinks his judgments are complex and subtle, but a simple combination of scores could probably do better."

"Let’s decide in advance what weight to give to the data we have on the candidates’ past performance. Otherwise we will give too much weight to our impression from the interviews."

Expert intuition: chapter 22

Professional controversies bring out the worst in academics. Scientific journals occasionally publish exchanges, often beginning with someone’s critique of another’s research, followed by a reply and a rejoinder. I have always thought that these exchanges are a waste of time. Especially when the original critique is sharply worded, the reply and the rejoinder are often exercises in what I have called sarcasm for beginners and advanced sarcasm. The replies rarely concede anything to a biting critique, and it is almost unheard of for a rejoinder to admit that the original critique was misguided or erroneous in any way. On a few occasions I have responded to criticisms that I thought were grossly misleading, because a failure to respond can be interpreted as conceding error, but I have never found the hostile exchanges instructive. In search of another way to deal with disagreements, I have engaged in a few “adversarial collaborations,” in which scholars who disagree on the science agree to write a jointly authored paper on their differences, and sometimes conduct research together. In especially tense situations, the research is moderated by an arbiter.

My most satisfying and productive adversarial collaboration was with Gary Klein, the intellectual leader of an association of scholars and practitioners who do not like the kind of work I do. They call themselves students of Naturalistic Decision Making, or NDM, and mostly work in organizations where they often study how experts work. The NDMers adamantly reject the focus on biases in the heuristics and biases approach. They criticize this model as overly concerned with failures and driven by artificial experiments rather than by the study of real people doing things that matter. They are deeply skeptical about the value of using rigid algorithms to replace human judgment, and Paul Meehl is not among their heroes. Gary Klein has eloquently articulated this position over many years.

This is hardly the basis for a beautiful friendship, but there is more to the story. I had never believed that intuition is always misguided. I had also been a fan of Klein’s studies of expertise in firefighters since I first saw a draft of a paper he wrote in the 1970s, and was impressed by his book Sources of Power, much of which analyzes how experienced professionals develop intuitive skills. I invited him to join in an effort to map the boundary that separates the marvels of intuition from its flaws. He was intrigued by the idea and we went ahead with the project—with no certainty that it would succeed. We set out to answer a specific question: When can you trust an experienced professional who claims to have an intuition? It was obvious that Klein would be more disposed to be trusting, and I would be more skeptical. But could we agree on principles for answering the general question?

Over seven or eight years we had many discussions, resolved many disagreements, almost blew up more than once, wrote many drafts, became friends, and eventually published a joint article with a title that tells the story: “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree.” Indeed, we did not encounter real issues on which we disagreed—but we did not really agree.