The Nature and Function of Intuitive Thought, Lauri Järvilehto

SPRINGER BRIEFS IN WELLBEING AND
QUALIT Y OF LIFE RESEARCH
LauriJrvilehto
The Nature and

Function of
Intuitive Thought
and Decision
Making
123
SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality
of Life Research
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10150
Lauri Jrvilehto
The Nature and Function

of Intuitive Thought
and Decision Making
123
Lauri Jrvilehto
Aalto University
Espoo
Finland
ISSN 2211-7644 ISSN 2211-7652 (electronic)

SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research
ISBN 978-3-319-18175-2 ISBN 978-3-319-18176-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-18176-9
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Remember that what pulls the strings is the
force hidden within; there lies the power to
persuade, there the lifethere, if one must
speak out, the real man.
Marcus Aurelius
Preface
This book is about intuition: thinking and decision-making driven by the non-
conscious mind.
The question of intuitive thinking is ever the more pressing today, in a world that
is changing faster all the time. The ability to commit decision-making to the rapid
non-conscious mind and to differentiate between viable and non-viable intuition is
critical to functioning in todays fast-paced world.
But what is intuition? And how can we work with it? What, in other words, are
the nature and function of intuitive thought?
Research in the last few decades by, in particular, the proponents of the dual
process theories of cognition offers us a powerful, scientically credible basis to
study intuition. In the framework of the dual process theories, backed up by nd-
ings in positive psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and the
philosophy of the mind, intuition can be dened as the capacity to carry out viable
non-conscious cognitive operations within a valid domain of operations familiar to
the cognitive agent.
By understanding how this cognitive facility works, we can perform signicantly
better in situations demanding excellent decision-making and thinking skills.
Understanding intuition helps us make better decisions, solve problems, to be more
creative and even achieve the optimal state of flow more often in our everyday lives.
The purpose of this book is to construct a structured model of intuitive thought,
based both on the mainstream theorizing on intuition and dual processing, as well as
on empirical research concerning intuition and the non-conscious.
This book is positioned at the crossroads of philosophy of the mind, cognitive
psychology and positive psychology, with an emphasis on the philosophically
pressing questions of the nature of the mind and intuitive thinking. The method
employed is a combination of qualitative meta-analysis and philosophical con-
ceptual analysis.
The nature of intuition is studied rst in a historical context. Then, a model of
intuitive thought is constructed, drawing from the most prominent dual processing
theories, as well as from studying recent empirical evidence. Finally, the relevance
vii
viii Preface
of intuition for well-being and decision-making is studied in the context of positive

psychology, cognitive psychology and decision-making theories.
The purpose of this book is to provide a scientically sound view of how
intuitive thought takes place, and how intuition can be used to better our lives.
Acknowledgments
This book is based on research on intuition carried out from 2011 to 2014 at the
Systems Analysis Laboratory at the Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. It has been
kindly supported nancially by the Academy of Philosophy (Filosoan Akatemia)
in Helsinki, Finland and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland as a grant towards the
writing of this book.
This work could not have come to be without the various bright minds I have
had the chance to work with through these years. I would, in particular, like to
thank Professors Esa Saarinen and Raimo P. Hmlinen from Aalto University for
their support as well as several inspiring discussions. I would like to thank
everybody at the Academy of Philosophy, in particular Frank Martela, Karoliina
Jarenko, Tapani Riekki, Timo Tiuraniemi and Markus Neuvonen.
I am deeply indebted to those brilliant thinkers who have had the chance to
review and comment on my work in various stages as a manuscript. Thank you,
Professor Esa Saarinen, Emilia Lahti, Corinna Peifer, Tapani Riekki, Henrik
Rydenfelt, Sami Paavola, Timo Tiuraniemi, Peter Kentt, Asta Raami and Frank
Martela. Thanks to your comments, this book is far better than it could ever have
been by my working on it alone. As always, any mistakes committed in the text are
solely my own responsibility.
Lastly, I would like to thank my parents Timo and Rauni, my sisters and
brothers, Kirsi, Paula, Liisa, Paavo, Eemu, Aki and Petri and my family: my wife
Laura and my wonderful children Silja, Luukas, Joonatan and Tuomas. Thank you
for reminding me everyday about what makes researching and understanding the
world worthwhile at the end of the day!
ix
Contents
1 Background for Intuition Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 A Brief History of Intuition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.1 Rationality and the Non-conscious Mind. . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.2 Platos Horses: Dividing the Human Mind . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.3 The Surfacing of the Non-conscious Mind . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.2 The Two Intuitions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.2.1 Intuition as Immediate Apprehension: Apprehensive
Intuition and a Priori Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .... 7
1.2.2 Intuition as Immediate Insight: Generative Intuition
and Habits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.3 C.I. Lewis and the Roots of Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.2.4 Bridging the Two Intuitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.3 Intuition and the Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
1.3.1 Neural Correlates of Conscious and Non-conscious
Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3.2 Limitations of Conscious Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.3.3 The Learning Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2 The Nature of Intuitive Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.1 Dual Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.1.1 The Two Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.1.2 Type 1 and Type 2 Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.1.3 Algorithmic, Reflective and Autonomous Minds . . . . . . . 30
2.2 The Structure of Intuitive Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2.1 The Nested Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.2.2 Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Type 1 Processes . . . . . . . 34
2.2.3 On the Possibility of the Smart Unconscious . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.2.4 Intuition as Skilled Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
xi
xii Contents
2.3 Intuition and the Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

2.3.1 The Extended Mind Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.3.2 Systems Intelligence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.3.3 Intuition, Organism, and Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3 Using Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.1 Intuition and Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.1.1 The Definition of Flow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.1.2 Intuition and Flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.2 Intuition and Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.2.1 Defining Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.2.2 The Dynamics of Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
3.2.3 The Role of Intuition in Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.3 Intuitive Decision Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.3.1 The Phenomenology of Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
3.3.2 Heuristics and Biases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
3.3.3 Heuristic Intuitions and Expert Intuitions . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
3.3.4 Valid Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
3.3.5 Using Intuition in Decision-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Chapter 1
Background for Intuition Research
Abstract Throughout the history of thinking intuition, and more generally, the
non-conscious mind, has piqued the interests of philosophers and scientists alike. In
the 20th century research of the non-conscious gradually picked up speed, to
culminate in the present day theories of dual processing. Historically, two different
views towards intuition gathered support. Intuition as immediate apprehension or
knowledge was a notion supported by many philosophers. The more modern type
of intuition as immediate insight was present already in the works of the American
pragmatists. Non-conscious cognition has been particularly difcult to study, and
here recent advances in neuroimaging have produced promising avenues of inquiry
to study the differences between conscious and non-conscious cognition. While
establishing connections between brain activity and cognitive processing is any-
thing but easy, neuroscience can inform us a great deal about the nature of non-
conscious thought and intuition.
Keywords History of intuition

German idealism American pragmatism

Sigmund Freud Immanuel Kant William James Charles S. Peirce C.I.

Lewis Neuroscience Matthew Lieberman
Scientic study of intuition is relatively new.

Throughout the history of thinking, though, intuition, and more generally, the
non-conscious mind, has piqued the interests of philosophers and scientists alike.
But it took until the early 20th century for the rst mainstream theories of the non-
conscious to surface, most specically in the works of Sigmund Freud.
In the 20th century research of the non-conscious gradually picked up speed, to
culminate in the present day theories of dual processing that have influenced much
of cognitive psychology. Only in the recent few decades, systematic research of
intuition has entered mainstream psychology.
Historically, two different views towards intuition gathered support. Intuition as
immediate apprehension or knowledge was a notion supported by many philoso-
phers from Spinoza to Kant. The more modern type of intuition as immediate
insight was arguably present already in the works of the American pragmatists
The Author(s) 2015 1

L. Jrvilehto, The Nature and Function of Intuitive Thought and Decision Making,
SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-18176-9_1
2 1 Background for Intuition Research
Peirce and James. While the two ways to approach intuition seem at the rst glance
incompatible, they may be reconciled as different aspects of non-conscious thought.
Work involving the study of the nature of the mind would not be very credible
without taking into account up to date neuroscientic research. Non-conscious
cognition has been particularly difcult to study, and here recent advances in
neuroimaging have produced promising avenues of inquiry to study the differences
between conscious and non-conscious cognition. While establishing connections
between brain activity and cognitive processing is anything but easy, neuroscience
can inform us a great deal about the nature of non-conscious thought and intuition.
1.1 A Brief History of Intuition
Ancient Greeks were keen on denitions. One of the more important concepts to
dene was human. What are we exactly? What are the necessary and sufcient
conditions for something to be human?
Plato proposed that while humans were one of the rare bipedal animals, there
were, also, various bipedal birds. But all of them had feathers. Therefore, a suf-
ciently precise denition of human would be featherless biped.
That is, until Diogenes the Cynic turned up at Platos Academy, plucked a
chicken clean and exclaimed: Here is Platos Man! (Laertius 1925, p. 43).
This sent the Greek philosophers scrambling for a new answer. The suggested
revision, featherless biped with broad nails, did not really take off. The denition
that eventually ended up directing centuries of philosophical discourse was the one
often attributed to Platos student Aristotle: a human being is a rational animal.
1.1.1 Rationality and the Non-conscious Mind
It is a deeply ingrained belief in our culture that rationality is the dening feature of
being human. This is reflected in the latin genus of humanity: homo sapiens. We are
not the upright, bipedal, featherless, or tool using human. We are the wise human.
Our cognitive capacity is what sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
This assumption permeates our entire culture, from judicial practices to politics,
from everyday arguments to economics. Mainstream economics caricatures human
beings as what the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls Econs. Kahneman
characterizes the assumed rational human as follows: First, people are generally
rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear,
affection and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from
rationality (Kahneman 2011, p. 8).
Keith Stanovich elaborates the great rationality debate by three positions: the
Panglossians, the Meliorists and the Apologists. The Panglossians, like their
namesake from Voltaires classic, stick to their guns with the rationality
1.1 A Brief History of Intuition 3
assumption. They argue that when people perform irrationally, the cause is not
irrational thought, but rather a performance error or something else independent of
cognition. The Meliorists, gearing towards growth and improvement, assume that
human cognition is, at least in part, irrational, but that it can also be improved. The
Apologists assume that human cognition is irrational, period. The debate rages on.
(Stanovich 2004, p. 154 ff.)
In the light of recent research, it is more and more clear that the assumption of
inherent human rationality is untenable. While rationality is, indeed, typical only to
humans and perhaps a few higher primates, it appears that the structure of human
cognition is in fact quite diverse.
In addition to rationality, at least in its traditional sense of analytic and logical
thought, we appear to possess a cognitive capacity that is quite opposite to it. One
that we surprisingly seem to share with many of the other animals. A capacity
whose foundation lies not in the conscious and clear rational mind, but the murky
depths of non-consciousness. Insofar as much of human cognition is dictated by
non-conscious processes, this gives rise to the hypothesis that we may in fact not
have just one mind, but two: the conscious and the non-conscious mind.
This poses problems to many of the ideas that are taken as given in our society.
Owing to the prominence of the rationality hypothesis, the role of the non-conscious
in thinking, decision-making and drawing inference has often been ignored in
Western philosophy and science. In the recent decades this has, however, changed.
Non-conscious thinking and intuition have risen as viable contenders in research
involving areas such as cognition, creativity and decision-making.
While non-conscious and intuitive thought have not been a prominent part of our
culture, many thinkers have time and again pondered about the nature of the ideas
that pop into our heads in the middle of the night; about the sometimes even strange
things we think without thinking.
1.1.2 Platos Horses: Dividing the Human Mind
In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato wrote as follows:

Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their
charioteer. The gods have horses and charioteers that are themselves all good and come
from good stock besides, while everyone else has a mixture. To begin with, our driver is in
charge of a pair of horses; second, one of his horses is beautiful and good and from stock of
the same sort, while the other is the opposite and has the opposite sort of bloodline. This
means that chariot-driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difcult business. (Plato
1997a)
The chariot is pulled by two horses. One is well-behaved. The other in turn has a
nasty temperament and seems to often ignore the charioteer. The charioteer has an
idea of where he would like to go. The good horse does what is asked of it. The bad
one does what it wants.
Isnt this a familiar situation to everyone? We know what we should do: sleep
and exercise more, eat less chocolate and more vegetables, be nice to people and so
forth. But more often than not we stay up too late watching the game, skip on the
lunch only to splurge on fries later, and snap at our spouse when we are tired and
stressed. We all know what we should do, but something keeps pulling us towards
another direction. Our thinking encounters constantly such conflicting states.
Plato divided the human mind into three parts: reason, spirit and appetite (Plato
1997b, p. 1067 ff). Platos model explains how our reason and desires often con-
flict. In particular, the opposition between reason and appetitethe good and the
bad horseexplains how we may feel one thing the right thing to do, and yet want
to do another. Appetite trumps reason. There is more to the mind than just
reasoning.
After Plato, there have been references to what can be interpreted as non-
conscious thought or mind in the works of e.g., Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas,
Pascal, Spinoza and Leibniz. But it took until the 19th century for non-conscious
thought and non-conscious mind to surface more substantially (See e.g. Frankish and
Evans 2009, p. 3; Nicholls and Liebscher 2010, p. 4; Hintikka 1999, pp. 130131).
In the 19th century, several writers started addressing the non-conscious and
intuitive mind, especially in the German Idealist tradition. The non-conscious was
referenced, among others, by Herder, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, as well
as by non-scientic writers such as Goethe, Richter and Wordsworth (Frankish and
Evans 2009, p. 4). The rst chief theorist of the non-conscious was Eduard
Hartmann, whose Philosophy of the Unconscious (1884) became a major influence
on the German speaking public (Nicholls and Liebscher 2010, p. 1). In the book
Hartmann presented a synthesis of ideas presented by the German Idealists, arguing
that the paradox in the notion of unconscious ideas (thoughts that are not thought)
is, in fact, only apparent (Hartmann 1884, p. 2).
Before the advent of modern psychology, the non-conscious and intuition were
considered in metaphysical terms. Evans and Frankish write: The German idealists
thought of the unconscious as part of the underlying structure of reality, rather than
as a postulate of empirical psychology (Evans and Frankish 2009, p. 4). Intuition
was thought of as an immediate way of knowing, not unlike Socrates notion of
anamnesis, or learning by remembering (Dane and Pratt 2007, p. 32; Hintikka
1999, p. 131).
Even these days, a more mysterious nature of non-conscious thinking and
intuition is supported by many thinkers; the justication has only shifted from
divine influence to quantum mechanics or even extra-sensory perception (See e.g.
Bradley 2011; Radin 2011). Recent research on the non-conscious mind has,
however, shown that we do not need to posit quantum entanglement or ESP to
explain intuition. Understanding the basic building blocks of our cognition is
enough.
1.1 A Brief History of Intuition 5
1.1.3 The Surfacing of the Non-conscious Mind
While the idea of the non-conscious mind surfaced with the German Idealists, its
breakthrough moment took place in the early 20th century. The non-conscious mind
entered the mainstream of scientic discourse in the works of Sigmund Freud.
Freud rst proposed an explicit division into the conscious and the unconscious
minds. The unconscious consists of repressed impulses or memories that have been
prevented from becoming conscious. The unconscious works according to the
pleasure principle, and seeks to maximize pleasure and minimize pain (Freud
2005).
Freud later developed this account further, ending up in a tripartite division quite
similar to that of Platos. He divided the cognitive system to three faculties: the
conscious mind or ego, the supervising mind, or superego and the non-conscious
mind, or id (Freud 2014). Freud proposed that the ego is squeezed between the
directives dictated by the moral compass of the superego (compare with Platos
good horse) and the wants of the beastly id (the bad horse). The ego (the poor
charioteer) can only exert limited power over the mind.
Freud ascribed mostly negative traits to the non-conscious mind. He was brought
up in the post-enlightenment era that preferred clear rationality over the murky
faculties of intuition and emotion: the age of sense over sensibility. In Freuds
mind, discovering the secrets of the id were mainly directed towards resolving
adverse mental conditions and resolving traumas.
But the non-conscious mind is not just the seat of traumas or suppressed
memories. It is, in fact, the foundation of almost everything that makes us who we
are, and of almost everything that makes us human.
The psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz had an important role in the further
development of the understanding of the non-conscious mind. He was among the
rst to posit non-conscious inferences: mental processes underlying thought and
action (Frankish and Evans 2009, p. 5).
In philosophy, various positions started also to reflect on the consciousnon-
conscious division, such as the epistemological division between knowing that and
knowing how, or Michael Polanyis division between explicit and tacit knowledge
(Polanyi 1966).
While in a great part of the 20th century, behavioristic schools of thought in
psychology ignored non-conscious thought as unresearchable, trends had started to
pick up speed that would eventually bring the non-conscious into play as a valid
object of scientic research.
These trends would culminate by the end of the century in the new paradigm of
cognitive psychology, the dual process theories of thinking and reasoning. These
theories originated with the empirical research ndings especially by Amos Tversky
and Daniel Kahneman, as well as by Peter Wason and Jonathan Evans, among
others (Tversky and Kahneman 1974; Wason and Evans 1975; see also Frankish
and Evans 2009).
The dual process theories have been recently advocated most prominently by
Evans (2003, 2009, 2010), Tversky and Kahneman (1974, Kahneman and Tversky
1982, Kahneman 2011) and Stanovich (2004, 2009). Tversky and Kahneman dis-
covered that human cognition was riddled with consistent thinking errors (Tversky
and Kahneman 1974). Evans and Wason, in turn, found out that people have
surprising troubles with drawing rational inference in certain types of tasks (Wason
and Evans 1975). At the heart of these theories is the hypothesis of the existence of
two separate minds: the conscious and the non-conscious (Evans 2003).
The dual process theories form a solid basis for understanding how intuition
works. In the context of dual processing, intuition concerns processes in the non-
conscious mind that only post their end result into consciousness. This theoretical
framework will be used in the second part of the book to build a structured model of
the intuitive mind.
1.2 The Two Intuitions
Intuition is a difcult concept to dene.

Intuition has been thought of as unconscious perception (Jung 1953, p. 461.),
the act of grasping the meaning or signicance or structure of a problem without
explicit reliance on the analytic apparatus of ones craft (Bruner 1962, p. 102), an
act of recognition (Simon 1992, p. 155), or for it to seem to you that A (Bealer
1996, p. 123).
It has also been described as the subjective experience of a non-conscious
process (Lieberman 2000, p. 111), a gut feeling based on unconscious past
experience (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006 p. 105), affectively charged judge-
ments that arise through rapid, non-conscious and holistic associations (Dane and
Pratt 2007, p. 40) or gut feelings based on unconscious rules of thumb
(Gigerenzer 2007, p. 47).
The term intuition has hardly been adequately dened in the relevant literature.
Therefore it is subject to a great degree of ambiguity. In fact, looking at the
literature dealing with intuition, it appears there are at least two completely different
kinds of conceptions of intuition at large. Roughly, this distinction is between
intuition as an outcome and intuition as a process.
The rst, metaphysical notion maintains that intuition concerns immediate
apprehension, either of empirical sensations, or of pure reason. The second, more
modern cognitive notion maintains that intuition concerns processes that generate
insight without awareness of the process itself.
The rst type of intuition was most prominently developed by Kant in his notion
of Anschauung, and stands for immediate apprehension. The second use of intuition
is that attributed to it in much of the philosophy of the mind and psychology,
meaning here immediate insight.
Let us call these apprehensive intuition and generative intuition, respectively.
1.2 The Two Intuitions 7
1.2.1 Intuition as Immediate Apprehension: Apprehensive

Intuition and a Priori Knowledge
The Kantian notion of intuition concerns how we come to entertain certain types of
knowledge. According to Kant, we can arrive at correctly believing the truth of
some statements, while not all, simply by contemplation (Kant 1998, p. 106 ff).
Knowledge thus generated is called a priori knowledge: knowledge that comes prior
to experience (Kant 1998, p. 107). In these cases, it is the intuitive capacity of the
mind that justies such beliefs. The other type of knowledge is a posteriori,
posterior to experience. It requires also sensory perception.
Intuition is crucial to both kinds of knowledge. Kant denes intuition as follows:
In whatever way and through whatever means a cognition may relate to objects, that
through which it relates immediately to them, and at which all thought as a means is
directed as an end, is intuition. (Kant 1998, p. 155)
Kant presents an architectonic model of cognition, where perceptions are rst

broken down into sensations and cognitions. Cognitions, in turn, are broken down
into intuitions and concepts, out of which intuitions are singular and immediately
related to the object, whereas concepts are mediated by means of a mark (Kant
1998, pp. 398399).
In generating cognitions, the object is related to us through sensations
(Empndung): Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it
alone affords us intuitions; but they are thought through the understanding, and
from it arise concepts (Kant 1998, p. 155). Where intuitions are singular and
immediate, concepts are general and mediate perception.
In the Kantian architectonic system, understanding arises when sensations are
interpreted via concepts. Thus we never perceive the object as it is (noumenally),
but rather as a conceptual interpretation, a phenomenon. Kant also differentiates two
kinds of intuitions: empirical intuitions that are generated through sensation, and
pure intuitions that contain nothing that belongs to sensation. Kant writes that
sensations are the effects that objects have on a perceiving subject. An intuition that
is related to the object through sensation is empirical, and concerns appearances
(Kant 1998, p. 155).
Empirical intuitions are singular components of the overall experience. Pure
intuitions are, in turn, such that contain nothing belonging to sensations, namely
space and time. Pure intuitions are also directly relevant to Kants idea of a priori
knowledge. He argues that such intuitions that do not contain anything relevant to
sensation are pure. Such intuitions can be generated (or encountered) in the mind a
priori, or before experience (Kant 1998, p. 156).
Pure intuitions are similar to Kants fundamental conceptual categories, which
together are involved in creating a priori knowledge:
So if I separate from the representation of a body that which the understanding thinks about
it, such as substance, force divisibility, etc., as well as that which belongs to sensation, such
as impenetrability, hardness, color, etc., something from this empirical intuition is still left
for me, namely extension and form. These belong to the pure intuition, which occurs a
priori, even without an actual object of the senses or sensation, as a mere form of sensibility
of the mind. (Kant 1998, p. 156)
Thus we arrive at a position where objects are never encountered as they are, but
are always interpreted through some kind of conceptual understanding. Intuitions,
in the Kantian architectonic system, reflect the mediation of both sensations (effects
of objects on perceivers) and the understanding of such sensation-independent
elements of experience as space and time. Guyer and Wood comment,
there are certain rules necessary for the disposition and order [] these rules add general
conditions to the concepts of any possible object of experience that go beyond the particular
features of such objects we may happen to observe and by means of which we may happen
to refer to them. (Guyer and Wood 1998, p. 52)
The gist of Kants philosophyhis Copernican turnhangs on the idea that

we are not passive receptors of experiences, but rather actively construct experience
by bringing our preconceived notions into play in interpreting it. As Jaakko
Hintikka notes,
[Kants] explanation turns on the idea that in sense perception we impose a certain rela-
tional structure on experience, namely, the structure of space and time. Hence we can
recover the relations we have ourselves imposed on our experience by reproducing them in
imagination. (Hintikka 1999, p. 131)
Kants position is a convoluted one and has generated a huge literature dis-
cussing how Kants conceptual denitions should be interpreted. (For an analysis of
Kants philosophy, see e.g. Allison 1983). The intricacies of Kants theorizing
cannot be addressed in the scope of the present work, but for further discussion, the
following guidelines can be drawn.
Experience is presented through sensations that produce intuitions relating to the
empirical content of the sensation. In addition, there are intuitions that concern the
pure forms of space and time.
These intuitions are then ordered through concepts that function as schematic
structures that determine our interpretation of experience. This is expressed well in
Kants snappy and oft-quoted one-liner: Thoughts without content are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind (Kant 1998, pp. 193194).
If the intuitions are not structured via concepts, they remain a jumble. For Kant,
concepts are composites or generalizations that combine various intuitions. But
conversely, if thoughts are not fed by intuitions, they remain empty.
The Kantian notion of intuition has been further developed in more recent
literature on a priori knowledge by e.g. Bealer (1996, 1998, 1999) and Bonjour
(1985, 1998). Both argue that at the fundament of grasping a priori knowledge are
intuitive structures that inform us of the necessity and validity of such knowledge.
Both Bealer and BonJour focus on the conceptual understanding of analytic or
necessary truths, i.e. the source of a priori knowledge. Bealer calls the justication
for analytic truths intuitions or seemings (Bealer 1999). BonJour, in turn, talks
about rational insight (BonJour 1998).
For Bealer and BonJour, intuitions function as justication of knowledge that is

independent of experience. For experiential knowledge, a sensation or a testimonial
may sufce as justication. But for coming to understand knowledge of a mathe-
matical or a logical truth, no sensation will sufce to justify the knowledge.
Bealer writes as follows:
intuitions are used as evidence (or reasons) in our standard justicatory practices. For
example, in elementary logic, number theory, and set theory. In philosophy, the use of
intuitions as evidence is equally ubiquitous. [] Each of these involve intuitions about
whether certain situations are possible and whether relevant concepts would apply. (Bealer
1999, p. 30)
For Bealer, intuitions have primarily an epistemological function. Owing to this

emphasis, he makes a clean distinction from the use of intuition in the psycho-
logical literature, arguing that the work of cognitive psychologists, such as Eleanor
Rosch or Daniel Kahneman, tells us little about intuition in the restricted use of the
term relevant here (Bealer 1996, p. 124). This is well in line with the distinction
suggested above, where Bealers position falls under the category of apprehensive
intuition, whereas Rosch, Kahneman and other psychologists deal rather with the
category of generative intuition.
For Bealer, intuition means grasping an idea with clarity:
By intuition, we do not mean a magical power or inner voice or a mysterious faculty or
anything of the sort. For you to have an intuition that A is just for it to seem to you that A.
Here seems is understood not as a cautionary or hedging term, but in its use as a term
for a genuine kind of conscious episode. (Bealer 1999, p. 30)
Bealer also draws a distinction between intuitions and beliefs:

Intuition must also be distinguished from belief: belief is not a seeming; intuition is. For
example, there are many mathematical theorems that I believe (because I have seen the
proofs) but that do not seem to me to be true and that do not seem to me to be false; I do not
have intuitions about them either way. (Bealer 1999, p. 31.)
Intuitions in Bealers rationalist philosophical account are, thus, fundamental

epistemic justications or evidence for belief in analytic truths. In other words, the
Bealerian intuition is an epistemic datum that justies a priori knowledge. It is a part
of the epistemic architecture via which we arrive to understand analytic and nec-
essary truths, such as the truths of logic. For a more in-depth discussion about the
nature of a priori knowledge, see Casullo (1999, 2003).
While in the Kantian position intuitions concern both empirical and a priori
knowledge, and the Bealerian development limits the scope of intuition to the latter,
in both positions intuition is conceived of as a component in understanding and
arriving at knowledge. The idea of intuition as immediate apprehension is that there
are components in our understanding and perceiving, be they empirical or a priori in
nature, that are arrived at and apprehended with a pressing immediacy.
1.2.2 Intuition as Immediate Insight: Generative Intuition

and Habits
While the nature of generative intuition has become a relevant question for main-
stream psychology only in the last few decades, this type of cognition gured
arguably already in the works of the American pragmatists of the late 19th and early
20th centuries. In particular, notions introduced by William James and Charles S.
Peirce can be used to elucidate intuition.
Peirce introduced two concepts close to generative intuition: abduction and
musement. Abduction is a third type of inference that complements the classical
Aristotelian division to deduction and induction. In deduction, particulars are drawn
from the law. In induction, laws are drawn from the particulars. If all ducks are
birds, then Donald the duck is a birda deduction. And if all of these ducks we
have so far seen are white, then ducks are whitean induction. Peirce, however,
argued that in science what we begin with is neither a law nor a samplebut a
hypothesis.
Such hypotheses are arrived at by something that is more than guesswork. Peirce
writes in one of his manuscripts: It is evident [] that unless man had had some
inward light tending to make his guesses [] much more often true than they
would be by mere chance, the human race would long ago have been extirpated for
its utter incapacity in the struggles for existence [] (Peirce Ms. 692, here quoted
from Sebeok and Sebeok 1981).
The formation of a hypothesis for Peirce is an act of insight that comes to us
like a Flash (Peirce 1934, 5.181). Thus, in abduction, we arrive at something
similar to the more modern psychological notion of intuition as generation of new
insight and ideas.
Peirces other relevant conception, musement, means in turn a play of thought
without purpose, where associations freely come to mind. (Peirce 1909, p. 93.) Both
musement and abduction involve tapping into cognitive resources that we cannot
control at will but that function better than pure chance or guesswork.
The concept of habit can be used to explain this ability to discovery and gen-
erative insight. Both Peirce and James drew from the work of Charles Darwin.
Darwin describes habits as follows:
How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct
opposition to our conscious will! Yet they may be modied by the will or reason. Habits
easily become associated with other habits, and with certain periods of time and states of
the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. (Darwin 1998,
p. 160.)
According to Peirce, a habit

denotes such a specialization, original or acquired, of the nature of a man, or an animal, or a
vine, or a crystallizable chemical substance, or anything else, that he or it will behave, or
always tend to behave, in a way describable in general terms upon every occasion (or upon
a considerable proportion of the occasions) that may present itself of a generally describable
character (Peirce 1934 5.538).
Unlike a mechanism, a habit is not identied by its structure, but rather by the
results that it would produce, given the right kinds of circumstances:
the identity of a habit depends on how it might lead us to act, not merely under such
circumstances as are likely to arise, but under such as might possibly occur, no matter how
improbable they may be. What the habit is depends on when and how it causes us to act.
(Peirce 1934, 5.400.)
Interestingly, habits concern then dispositions or tendencies towards a certain

kind of activity or behavior. Habits are also not just static dispositions, but develop
through experience and repetition. Peirce argues that habits
differ from dispositions in having been acquired as consequences of the principle [] that
multiple reiterated behavior of the same kind, under similar combinations of percepts and
fancies, produces a tendency, the habit, actually to behave in a similar way under
similar circumstances in the future. (Peirce 1998, p. 413.)
The idea of the non-conscious is also present in William James work. James
argued that much of thinking happens beyond volitional control, and that even
conscious thought consists of a stream of thought that we cannot quite control at
will (James 2007, p. 224 ff).
James, developed the notion of habit further in his magnum opus, Principles of
Psychology:
When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the rst things that
strike us is that they are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of daily
behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in animals domesticated, and especially in
man, it seems, to a great extent, to be the result of education. The habits to which there is an
innate tendency are called instincts; some of those due to education would by most persons
be called acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very large part of life, and that
one engaged in studying the objective manifestations of mind is bound at the very outset to
dene clearly just what its limits are. (James 2007, p. 104.)
Habits are acquired or innate routines that produce a predictable result. They are
often confused with less dynamic processes such as mechanisms or routines.
Habits, however, are not deterministic, owing to their dynamic goal- or result-
oriented nature.
Habits are plastic. They possess a structure weak enough to yield to an influ-
ence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. (James 2007, p. 105.) A mech-
anism works always the same way, no matter what the context or situation. For a
habit, the ways to reach a given result may vary a great deal, but with sufcient
practice, we can acquire habits that generate desirable results.
James draws a comparison between magnetism (a mechanism) to the desire of
Romeo and Juliet to embrace one another (a habit):
Romeo wants Juliet as the lings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves
towards her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between
them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet
and the lings with the card. Romeo soon nds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or
otherwise, of touching Juliets lips directly. With the lings the path is xed; whether it
Table 1.1 Differentiating Mechanism Habit

mechanisms and habits
Static structure Dynamic structure
Identied by structure Identied by result
Susceptible to environmental disruptions Self-correcting
(Relatively) simple Highly complex
Inorganic Organic
Local Systemic
reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is xed, the path
may be modied indenitely. (James 2007, p. 7.)
Magnetism works always the same way, regardless of environmental obstacles.

In contrast to this, living beings can change the course of their actions, if an obstacle
arises. Romeo wants to kiss Julia. Given the environment described by James,
climbing the wall is a part of executing the habit of kissing in that environment
(Table 1.1).
According to James, habits obey the law of association. The law of association
means that if processes 1, 2, 3, 4 have once been aroused together or in immediate
succession, any subsequent arousal of any one of them (whether from without or
within) will tend to arouse the others in the original order. (James 2007,
p. 24) James even argues, presciently to neuroscientic research carried out later in
the 20th century, that such association must also have a neural basis:
A path once traversed by a nerve-current might be expected to follow the law of most of the
paths we know, and to be scooped out and made more permeable than before; and this
ought to be repeated with each new passage of the current. Whatever obstructions may have
kept it at rst from being a path should then, little by little, and more and more, be swept
out of the way, until at last it might become a natural drainage-channel. (James 2007,
p. 108.)
James position lays the groundwork for the later development of research on
generative intuition. In particular, he argues that habits enable us to free up con-
scious resources by automatizing activities: habit diminishes the conscious
attention with which our actions are performed (James 2007, p. 114.).
We cannot just decide which habits we have; generating new habits or removing
old ones takes a lot of work. But the reward for this work is great: the automaticity
of such habits of action that help us generate benecial results in our everyday lives.
Habits are the driver of the capacity to pick up the correct clues for abductive
reasoning, as well as for the practice of musement. It is the experience and the
habits thereby generated for the reasoner that enable her to pick up hypotheses more
reliably than guesswork. Habits are the basis for generating intuitive insight.
1.2.3 C.I. Lewis and the Roots of Intuition
The Harvard professor C.I. Lewis did not have a technical notion of intuition like
Kant or Bealer. However, Lewis innovative account of a priori knowledge can
shed light on why some a priori knowledge just seems to us to be true (and why
some does not), and how our cognitive apparatus is built to be able to generate both
apprehensive intuitions and generative intuitions. Lewis position also offers us an
interesting view that could be developed to bridge the philosophical and the psy-
chological, or the metaphysical and cognitive, notions of intuition presented above.
According to Lewis, empirical knowledge consists of three elements: the given
or immediate data of sense, the concept, and the act which interprets the one by
means of the other (Lewis 1926, p. 240). The given roughly coincides with the
Kantian notion of empirical intuition. Concepts reflect, in turn, what we ourselves
bring to interpret experience, somewhat similarly to Kant. Lewis notion of con-
cepts combines, in other words, Kantian concepts and his notion of pure intuition.
While Lewis agrees with Kant that we cannot experience directly what is, the
given nonetheless reflects existing objects. He argues, Subtract, in what we say
that we see, or hear, or otherwise learn from direct experience, all that conceivably
could be mistaken; the remainder is the given content of the experience inducing
this belief (Lewis 1946, pp. 182183). Concepts, in turn, direct our attention in
experience, guiding us to pay attention more to some features in it at the expense of
others. (Lewis 1929, p. 14; Rosenthal 1976, p. 21; Jrvilehto 2011, p. 95.) Similarly
to Kant, the object of experience is the sensation mediated through the conceptual
apparatus.
Interestingly, while the given element in experience is roughly similar to Kants
idea of empirical intuitions in that it is that part of experience that we make sense
out of within our conceptual framework, the notion of concepts as dened by Lewis
falls closer to the psychological ideas about intuition.
Lewis proposes two ways to analyze concepts and produce a priori knowledge.
Concepts can be analyzed conventionally in terms of their linguistic meaning. For
example, the concept of human could be analyzed classically as rational animal.
But they can also be broken down on a more operative level in terms of their sense
meaning. (Lewis 1946, pp. 3738). In other words, concepts can be analyzed in
terms of the kinds of activities they entail.
Sense meaning is an analysis of a concept in terms of which we can explicate
which situations the concept is applicable, and which it is not. For example, the
concept paper contains as sense meaning the process if I were to grab it in my
hand and crumple it, it would not offer great resistance (Jrvilehto 2011, p. 72).
Such processes are, according to Lewis, employed in interrogating the given
experience and making sense of it. They can be analyzed to be series of counter-
factual statements of the form S being given, if I were to do A, E would ensue.
Sense meanings are not conscious rules or protocols that we employ in using
concepts. (Jrvilehto 2011, p. 69 ff.) Lewis is not arguing that our minds are loaded
with series of counterfactual statements or inferences. Rather, sense meanings
(the series of counterfactuals) are the result of analyzing concepts in terms of their
applicability to experience. In such an analysis, the practices that guide our inter-
pretation of experience are rendered explicit.
Lewis argues that a sense meaning when precise and explicit, is a schema; a
rule or prescribed routine and an imagined result of it which will determine
applicability of the expression in question (Lewis 1946, p. 134). A sense meaning
is an anticipatory schema that helps us determine which object is which in terms of
the concepts we have adopted. (Jrvilehto 2011, p. 70.)
Sandra Rosenthal links Lewis notion further with the notion of habit by drawing
a distinction between implicit and explicit sense meanings:
An implicit sense meaning is a disposition or habit by which humans interact with the
environment. In contrast, an explicit sense meaning is a schema or criterion in the mind by
which one grasps the presence of something to which a particular type of response is
required in order to obtain the desired result. (Rosenthal 2004, p. 230.)
Concepts, or sense meaning schemata, are cognitive structures that we use to

interrogate the world. These schemata, or criteria in mind, help us nd some parts
of experience as salient at the expense of others. This enables us to make sense of
what James famously called the blooming, buzzing confusion of the newly-born
babys experience. (James 2007 p. 488; see also Lewis 1926, p. 250.)
The philosophical conception of intuition pertains to the apprehension of a priori
knowledge. C.I. Lewis argued that such knowledge is based on our application of
concepts (Lewis 1923). Furthermore, Lewis argued that concepts are acquired by
experience, and that they are subject to both cultural evolution and subjective
evolution. (Lewis 1929, p. 233; Jrvilehto 2011, p. 102.)
The way we employ the term atom is highly different from the way it was
employed three hundred years ago. A child, in learning whales to be mammalian,
employs a different kind of concept than she did when thinking whales were sh.
The criterion of application of a concept is subject to change. After repeated
encounters with hairy cats, having hair becomes a criterion for the identication of
cats. And after sufcient anomalies in shooting alpha rays at gold laments, the
criterion of possessing a nucleus will be added to the term atom to make it more
viable with respect to empirical data.
While I argued above that there are two kinds of intuition, I will offer now a
potential avenue of inquiry that might be pursued to bridge the two.
1.2.4 Bridging the Two Intuitions
While at rst it appears that apprehensive intuition is fundamentally different from

generative intuition, both are arguably based in the functions of the non-conscious
mind. For apprehensive intuition, a given type of habit structure or conceptual
scheme may, when analyzed, produce the sense of necessity, the Bealerian
seeming, indicative of a priori knowledge. The seeming is based on the
conceptual commitments we have adopted in making sense of the world. For

generative intuition, in turn, a given type of habit structure may, when negotiated in
a proper environment, give rise to new kinds of associations, that is to say, insight.
In terms of the Lewisian framework, it may then be argued that where intuitive
insight is generated by domain-specically learned habits, likewise the intuitive
apprehension of necessary truth is generated by habits driving learned conceptual
structures.
In terms of this position, apprehensive intuition and generative intuition can be
argued to fall squarely within the same capacity: the non-conscious habits acquired
by experience. While most of this book concerns the second type of intuition
generating insightimmediate apprehension may, when seen through the Lewisian
framework, in fact function as a part of the processes that generate intuitive insight:
it drives recognition that is the basis of many intuitive processes.
In this sense, there are, at the end of the day, not two intuitions but only one: the
non-conscious capacity to generate immediate insight by utilizing immediate
apprehensions and learned conceptual structures. While psychological research has
focused more on the generative side of intuition and philosophical research on the
apprehensive, at the root of both are habits. Habits drive the conceptual anticipatory
schemata that guide our attention in what we perceive and therefore give rise to
conscious experience.
Both apprehending an analytic truth intuitively and the generation of new insight
require some kind of an existing conceptual or categorial structure that guides our
attention in experience. It is this interplay between the immediacy of the given and
the subjective applicability of concepts that generates intuitions.
Both the philosophical and the psychological intuitions are spontaneous, non-
conscious and automated. While the rst concerns apprehension and the latter the
generation of insight, both may be credibly argued to arise from the same source:
the non-conscious mind that has been influenced by experience, practice, repetition
and association.
1.3 Intuition and the Brain
There has been quite a bit of research about the participation of various brain areas
in intuitive and non-conscious thought (See e.g. Dietrich 2004; Goel 2007;
Lieberman 2000, 2007, 2009; De Neys and Goel 2011). Unfortunately, discussion
of non-conscious thought and the brain is also riddled with many common
misconceptions.
One of the most persistent of these is the idea in popular literature that intuitive
and analytic capacities would be located on the right and left brain hemispheres,
respectively. This is, however, a major error in the light of present day research.
There are some cognitive processes whose neural correlates are unilateral, i.e.
located only on one hemisphere. Perhaps the most prominent example of
unilaterality are the Broca and Wernicke areas dealing with functions associated
with language comprehension that typically reside in the left hemisphere.
Nonetheless, many if not most cognitive processes cause activations all over the
brain. Also, many cognitive processes are represented bilaterally, i.e. they take
place on both the brain hemispheres simultaneously, for example aural and visual
processing.
Even in scientic literature, it is often argued that a rough guideline to the neural
correlates of conscious and non-conscious thought is that the former coincides with
activity in the prefrontal cortex, and the latter with activity elsewhere in the brain,
with an emphasis on the limbic system.
Such an account is also an oversimplication. Jonathan Evans notes that there is
no clear-cut correspondence from one study to the next, apart from the fact that
multiple brain areas are implicated (Evans 2009, p. 38). Daniel Kahneman, in turn,
points out, the conscious and non-conscious minds do not have specic brain areas
that correlate systematically with them. (Kahneman 2011, p. 29.) Instead, corre-
lation with both types of cognition can be established with various different brain
areas.
1.3.1 Neural Correlates of Conscious and Non-conscious

Thought
Neuroscience can inform research into the non-conscious and intuition a great deal.
While there are the above caveats to keep in mind, as well as the fact that present
day neuroimaging tools are still relatively crude, establishing associations between
brain activations and cognitive processes can help us understand better the nature of
and relationship between the conscious and the non-conscious mind.
Arne Dietrich argues that the brain operates two distinct information processing
systems to acquire, memorize and represent knowledge (Dietrich 2004, p. 749.) He
calls these systems the explicit and the implicit system:
The explicit system is rule-based, its content can be expressed by verbal communication,
and it is tied to conscious awareness. In contrast, the implicit system is skill or experience-
based, its content is not verbalizable and can only be conveyed through task performance,
and it is inaccessible to conscious awareness []. (Dietrich 2004, p. 749.)
This distinction is typical to the dual process theories of cognition that argue that
the mind is divided into two separate systems (Evans 2003; Stanovich 2004).
Matthew Lieberman, a social neuroscientist operating in the context of the dual
process theories, makes the distinction into two kinds of cognitive facilities,
reflective and reflexive social cognition (Lieberman 2007, p. 276). He also speaks of
controlled and automatic cognition (Lieberman 2007, p. 279). Dietrich, in turn,
mentions other similar distinctions, such as conscious versus unconscious, declar-
ative versus non-declarative, voluntary versus automatic, or deliberate versus
1.3 Intuition and the Brain 17
spontaneous (Dietrich 2004, p. 749). These divisions coincide roughly with the
notions of rational and intuitive thought explored above.
There are several known consistent associations for both controlled and auto-
matic forms of cognition (Lieberman 2007, p. 276). Controlled cognition is asso-
ciated with brain areas such as the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), lateral parietal
cortex (LPAC), medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the medial temporal lobe
(MTL). In other words, controlled, reflective or analytic cognition is associated with
areas in the prefrontal cortex and elsewhere on the neocortex. These ndings are
corroborated by much of the neuroscientic research literature on e.g. decision-
making. (Evans and Stanovich 2013, p. 233.)
In addition, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is often implicated in
tasks requiring such cognitive functions as working memory and attention.
(Dietrich 2004, p. 748.) The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is, in turn, indicated in
conflict detection and contributing to belief-based responses with reasoning (Evans
and Stanovich 2013, p. 233). All these various areas participate in processes that
can be characterized as conscious, controlled and explicit.
Automatic forms of cognition are, in turn, associated with activations in the
amygdala (A), the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and the lateral temporal
cortex (LTC) (Lieberman 2007, p. 276). Also, the basal ganglia (BC) has been
implicated, especially in the context of implicit, or procedural memory that takes
care of autonomous motor and cognitive skills (Dietrich 2004, p. 752).
In the light of the present-day neuroscientic research, the distinction between
the prefrontal correlations of the reflective system and the correlation between the
non-reflective system and other neocortical areas, including the limbic system,
seems roughly accurate. However, both types of cognition involve various other
areas in the brain as well, not to speak of the fact that all in all it seems like the brain
processes information far more holistically than was classically thought. (See e.g.
Just et al. 2010; Owen et al. 2006.)
This research can be used to differentiate between the two types of cognition as
well as deal with such philosophically interesting problems as the zombie
hypothesis, i.e. whether conscious reflection is needed at all. Discrepancies between
activations in the two systems seems to point towards the functional necessity of
reflection and conscious thought to certain tasks. (Lieberman 2009.)
While collecting neuroscientic evidence is an ongoing process, the up-to-date
research on the brain seems to support the existence of two differentiated cognitive
systems, one reflective and the other reflexive.
1.3.2 Limitations of Conscious Processing
One of the most pressing arguments for the existence of non-conscious cognitive
processes, and as a corollary, intuition, concerns the limitations of the conscious
mind to process information. Present-day research implies that conscious pro-
cessing is dramatically capacity-constrained (see e.g. Buschman et al. 2011). If this
is the case, there must be an abundance of non-conscious systems that take care
much of our cognitive processes.
The limitations of conscious processing were identied already in the 1950s by
George Miller. In his ground-breaking paper The Magical Number 7 2 (Miller
1956), Miller showed that a person can consciously retain only about seven items of
information at a time. This nding has been corroborated several times since, and
has even been adjusted downwards. The consensus of present-day memory
researchers is that the human working memory can process three to ve units of
information at a time. (Dietrich 2004, p. 752.)
There have been also various positions where more accurate gures of conscious
and non-conscious processing have been sought for. While the assumption that we
can measure human processing with such constructs as bits is difcult to evaluate,
such abstractions do help us understand the limitations of cognitive processing
better.
The Claremont professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known for his theory of
flow, argues that we can manage very little information at any given time
(Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 29). Based on the works by e.g. Simon (1978) and
Kahneman (1973), Csikszentmihalyi argues that it is possible to process at most
126 bits of information per second. (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 29). Djiksterhuis,
Aarts and Smith place the scope of human conscious processing at around 3050
bits per second (Djiksterhuis et al. 2006, p. 82.).
Zimmermann (1989), in turn, holds that while the human conscious system can
process only about 40 bits per second, the capacity of the non-conscious system is
in an order of its own. Zimmermann presents an interesting argument based on
information theory, where the nervous system is abstracted as an information-
carrying system. (Zimmermann 1989, p. 166.)
Zimmermann calculates the channel capacities of the receptors in sense organs
from the total number of afferent nerve bers and the channel capacity of each ber.
He ends up arguing that the non-conscious information processing capacity of the
human afferent nervous system is an impressive 11.2 million bits per second, out of
which 10 million bits are dedicated to visual processing and the rest to the other
senses. (Zimmermann 1989, p. 172.) It is no wonder, then, that Zimmermann ends
up arguing, What we perceive at any moment, therefore, is limited to an extremely
small compartment in the stream of information about our surroundings flowing in
from the sense organs (Zimmermann 1989, p. 172).
Keith Stanovich points out, in the vein of William James, that human beings are
cognitive misers: humans will nd any way they can to ease the cognitive load and
process less information (Stanovich 2009, p. 69). The rst rule of the cognitive
miser is to default to autonomous processing whenever possible (Stanovich 2009,
p. 69). However, defaulting to the autonomous system is not always possible, in
particular when the existing non-conscious habits cannot deal with the available
situation. In other words, when the reflexive, non-conscious system cannot handle a
situation, the reflective, conscious system is needed.
The discrepancy between the processing capacity of the conscious and the non-
conscious systems seems to be quite large. Mere capacity cannot, however, account
1.3 Intuition and the Brain 19
for the viability of intuitions generated by the non-conscious mind. The non-
conscious system must also be structured so as to be likely to generate viable
insight. We should, therefore, turn to look how generating habits is represented by
the changes in the brain.
1.3.3 The Learning Brain
In the 1940s, Donald Hebb presented a notion that became known as Hebbian
learning (Hebb 1949). According to Hebb, repeated exercise should result in cor-
relative changes in the anatomy of the brain. The Hebbian notion, reminiscent of
James law of association, can be summed in Carla Schatzs catch-phrase: Neurons
that re together, wire together. (Doidge 2007, p. 63.)
This principle was demonstrated empirically in the Nobel-winning studies of
Eric Kandel on the aplysia snail: it was shown that by repeated stimulation of a
neuron, new synaptic connections to an adjacent neuron ring because of the other
neuron were formed (Martin et al. 1997; Kandel 2006). The neural structure of the
human brain changes with exercise end experience. The phenomenon now known
as neuroplasticity has subsequently been repeatedly corroborated in various studies.
(Gazzaniga et al. 2009, pp. 101106.)
As per the Hebbian principle, the brain creates new structures relevant for
producing viable results by repetition. In other words, habit generation correlates
with structural changes in the brain. The direct relevance of practice to acquisition
of skills has subsequently been demonstrated by studies in expertise. (See e.g.
Ericsson et al. 1993, 2007.)
Practice and experience are at the root of shaping our nervous system to learn
new skills. These skills, once developed enough, translate into autonomous habits
that do not typically require the intervention of the conscious mind. Thus the
desirable results produced by these habits become more effortless. By consciously
taking the effort to learn new skills we can create new non-conscious neural
structures that enable us to put the massive non-conscious processing capacity to
use to produce viable results.
As James noted, we are bundles of habits (James 2007, p. 104). The nature of
our habits, in turn, is determined by the neural structures created by exercise and
experience.
By practicing in a given domain sufciently long, a person can generate the
required non-conscious capacity to produce viable and desirable results without
having to think any longer about the processes that produce those results con-
sciously. In other words, by generating sufcient habitual t with a given domain or
environment, we can create autonomous systems that generate viable intuitive
insight.
In effect, the phenomenon is no different from learning to walk. Following
practicing the act of walking, the child learns to move her legs automatically while
coordinating the complex movements required to maintain balance.
Likewise, by practice and experience in a domain, a person learns processes

central to that domain so that in time they become automated. Automated non-
conscious processes are, in turn, the foundation of generating intuitive insight.
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Chapter 2
The Nature of Intuitive Thought
Abstract In the recent decades, the most prominent theoretical framework to

explain thinking concerns the dual process theories of cognition. These theories
posit the existence of two separate cognitive systems, System 1 and System 2, that
are in charge of autonomous and non-conscious cognition, and volitional and
conscious cognition, respectively. The dual process theories form a strong basis to
build a structural model of intuitive thought. Intuition is a form of cognition gen-
erated by ontogenetic System 1 processes, as differentiated from phylogenetic, or
instinctive System 1 processes. Intuition is a form of skilled action, based on
expertise. Intuition is a domain-specic capacity and thus highly context-sensitive,
generated and activated by environmental and social cues. Thus the environment
plays also a signicant role in both the generation of intuitive cognitive processes as
well as in cueing and priming the existing processes. I will argue, that in a structural
model of intuitive thought the environment can be construed as a System 3 that
has direct cognitive bearing to the processes driven by Systems 1 and 2.

Keywords Dual process theories Jonathan Evans Keith Stanovich Daniel

Kahneman System 1 System 2 John Bargh Ap Djiksterhuis Gerd Gigerenzer
Gary Klein
While it may appear at rst glance that we are conscious of much of our actions and
thought, this is not the case. In fact, a great deal of our everyday activities and
cognitive processes are non-conscious.
In the recent decades, the most prominent theoretical framework to explain this
duality of thinking concerns the dual process theories of cognition. These theories
posit the existence of two separate cognitive systems, System 1 and System 2, that
are in charge of autonomous and non-conscious cognition, and volitional and
conscious cognition, respectively.
The dual process theories form a strong basis to build a structural model of
intuitive thought. Intuition, I will argue, is a form of cognition generated by
ontogenetic System 1 processes, as differentiated from phylogenetic, or instinctive
System 1 processes. I will proceed to argue that intuition is a form of skilled action,
based on expertise generated within a domain by deliberate practice and experience.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-18176-9_2
24 2 The Nature of Intuitive Thought
Because intuition is a domain-specic capacity, it is also argued that intuitive

thought is highly context-sensitive, generated and activated by environmental and
social cues. Thus the environment plays also a signicant role in both the gener-
ation of intuitive cognitive processes as well as in cueing and priming the existing
processes. I will argue, that in a structural model of intuitive thought the envi-
ronment can be construed as a System 3 that has direct cognitive bearing to the
processes driven by Systems 1 and 2.
I will present below a structural model of intuition and intuitive cognitive pro-
cesses in the context of the dual process theories, accommodating for both the
demarcation criteria of intuitive thought processes as well as the structural rela-
tionships between the Systems 1, 2 and 3.
2.1 Dual Processing
The duality of thinking expressed in such distinctions as conscious versus non-

conscious thought, or volitional versus autonomous thought, has been addressed
traditionally in terms of various divisions of thought (see Chap. 1). The most
prominent and widely received present-day positions concern the dual process
theories of thinking.
Theorists in various areas of research have ended up with the conclusion that the
functioning of the mind can be characterized by two different types of cognition,
including cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuropsychology, naturalistic
philosophy, decision theory and clinical psychology. (Stanovich 2004, p. 34.)
The dual-process theories are involved especially with higher cognitive pro-
cesses, such as judgment and decision making (Frankish and Evans 2009). Major
contributors to this eld include Jonathan Evans (Evans 2003, 2009, 2010; Wason
and Evans 1975; Frankish and Evans 2009), Keith Stanovich (Stanovich and West
2000; Stanovich 2004, 2009) and Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman 2011; Tversky and
Kahneman 1974; Kahneman and Frederick 2005).
Dual process theories of cognition, stemming back to the 1970s and 1980s, hold
that the mind is not a single cognitive structure, but rather consists of (at least) two
quite different systems. Keith Frankish and Jonathan Evans describe the central idea
of this position as follows:
Dual-process theories hold that human thought processes are subserved by two distinct
mechanisms, one fast, automatic and non-conscious, the other slow, controlled and con-
scious, which operate largely independently and compete for behavioral control. In their
boldest form, they claim that humans have, in effect, two separate minds. (Evans and
Frankish 2009, p. v.)
These theories can be characterized either as dual system theories, or as more

localized dual process theories. In the relevant literature they are also regarded all
together as a loosely integrated whole also called dual process theories. (Frankish
and Evans 2009, p. 1.) For the sake of clarity, I will adopt here the convention of
2.1 Dual Processing 25
Dual Process Theories
Dual System Theories Dual Type Theories
Fig. 2.1 Dual process theories can be split into the two subgroups of dual system theories and
dual type theories
referring to the total group of theories as the dual process theories, the systemic
positions as dual system theories, and the process-focused positions as dual type
theories (Fig. 2.1).
The dual process dichotomies have been referred to in the literature by quite a
few different monikers. For example, experientialrational (Epstein 2002), auto-
maticintentional (Bargh and Chartrand 1999), reflexivereflective (Lieberman
2000, 2009) and unconsciousconscious (Djiksterhuis 2004; Djiksterhuis and
Nordgren 2006). In the majority of the dual process literature, the distinction to
System 1 and System 2, coined by Keith Stanovich and Richard West, is the most
widely used (Stanovich and West 2000).
2.1.1 The Two Systems
The most common formulation of dual processing is the division of the mind into
two systems:
Dual-process theories of thinking and reasoning quite literally propose the presence of two
minds in one brain. The stream of consciousness that broadly corresponds to System 2
thinking is massively supplemented by a whole set of autonomous subsystems in System 1
that post only their nal products into consciousness and compete directly for control of our
inferences, decisions and actions. (Evans 2003, p. 458.)
Frankish and Evans elaborate:

These theories come in different forms, but all agree in positing two distinct processing
mechanisms for a given task, which employ different procedures and may yield different,
and sometimes conflicting, results. Typically, one of the processes is characterized as fast,
effortless, automatic, non-conscious, inflexible, heavily contextualized, and undemanding
of working memory, and the other as slow, effortful, controlled, conscious, flexible, de-
contextualized, and demanding of working memory. (Frankish and Evans 2009, p. 1.)
Frankish and Evans go on to note that System 1 concerns associative, context-

bound and non-linguistic reasoning, whereas System 2 deals with rule-based,
abstract and language-involving reasoning. (Frankish and Evans 2009, p. 3.)
First of these systems, the System 1, is evolutionally old, and shared with most
higher animals. It is the system where most non-conscious processing, such as
instinct and emotion, takes place. It is a very powerful cognitive apparatus, able to
simultaneously process signicant amounts of information without conscious
intervention (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, pp. 9697; Kahneman 2011, p. 416).
System 1 is fast and autonomous. It is non-conscious: the processes in System 1
take place for the most part unknown to the cognitive organism. (Evans 2003,
p. 458).
System 2 is, on the other hand, evolutionally relatively recent, and typical only
to humans and perhaps some of the most advanced primates. System 2 consists of
the conscious processing capacity of the organism, and enables such things as
logical and analytic reasoning. As Evans points out, System 2 thinking is char-
acterized as slow, sequential and correlated with cognitive capacity measures,
which sounds like the stream of consciousnessor the flow of information through
working memoryand this in turn leads us to think of System 2 as conscious
(Evans 2009, p. 37).
System 2 is, however, very limited in processing capacity and also considerably
slower than System 1. Where System 1 can process several streams of information
in parallel, System 2 is mostly capable of processing only a handful of information.
System 2 processes information serially and relatively slowly (Table 2.1).
Most typically the two systems can be characterized by the rough attribution of
System 1 as the locus of non-conscious processing and System 2 as the locus of
conscious processing. As shall be seen below, this division into two completely
separate non-conscious and conscious systems is not a very viable one. However, as
a rough division it conveys some of the essential nature of human cognition.
Another critical element is the idea of the highly differentiated capacities of the
two systems. As was pointed out above (see Sect. 1.3), the human conscious
apparatus is constrained by working memory limitations, leading to the fact that the
capacity to consciously process information is very limited. (See e.g. Miller 1956;
Dietrich 2004; Lieberman 2007; Buschman et al. 2011).
Whether System 2 is equated with consciousness, working memory -driven
processes or attention, all three suffer from the same cognitive limitations that
typically manifest as the inability to focus attention: Intense focusing on a task can
Table 2.1 Typically System 1 System 2

attributed properties of the
two systems Evolutionarily old Evolutionarily recent
Shared with animals Distinctively human
Non-conscious Conscious
Automatic Controlled
Fast Slow
Implicit Explicit
High capacity Low capacity
Associative Rule-based
Non-linguistic Linguistic
Non-voluntary Voluntary
make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention.
(Kahneman 2011, p. 23.) This phenomenon was stunningly demonstrated in an
experiment by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, where they asked students
to count basketball throws. Meanwhile, a person in a gorilla suit entered the court,
but only a fraction of the participants noticed this quite signicant anomaly in the
game. (Chabris and Simons 2010.)
While the conscious capacity of the human mind is highly limited, System 1
does not seem to suffer from such limitations, as the Nobel Laureate Daniel
Kahneman argues (Kahneman 2011, p. 416). It looks like we have a huge amount
of non-conscious processing taking place every moment, taking care of the
autonomous functions in our bodies, parsing sensory information for potential
threats and interests and allegedly also creating new associations presented as the
a-ha! moments typical to creativity.
The two systems can also be differentiated in terms of whether the processes they
carry out are explicit or implicit. System 1 involves implicit processing, that is to
say, processes that create a cognitive input only of their end result. An example of
such a process would be creative rumination, or Peircean musement, leading to an
a-ha! moment. In such rumination, the processes and associations that create the
nal moment of clarity are left unseen.
Finally, a typical differentiation of the two systems concerns the role of volition
in guiding cognitive processes (Stanovich 2009; Baumeister and Tierney 2011;
Kahneman 2011). System 1, owing in part to the non-conscious and implicit nature
of its processes, concerns mostly involuntary processes. This is best exemplied by
instinctive reactions such as reacting in disgust to a scary animal like a snake.
System 2, in part, concerns the ability to guide and direct cognitive processes. It is
important to note that for most dual process researchers, System 2 does not mean a
cognitive system completely under our volition; but rather it is where volition can
be applied.
Roy Baumeister has in his willpower research introduced the concept of ego
depletion (Baumeister et al. 1998; Baumeister and Tierney 2011). Baumeister
argues that with demanding tasks, the capacity to volitional activity decreases.
Kahneman, in turn, points out that both self-control and cognitive effort are types of
work that tax the cognitive system. (Kahneman 2011, p. 41.) As research by e.g.
Harriet and Walter Mischel shows, when people are presented with a demanding
task together with a temptation such as a sweet, they are more likely to succumb to
the temptation. (Mischel and Mischel 1983.)
While there are such caveats to the twin nature of the mind, many argue that the
arrangement between the two systems is, in fact, quite optimal. As Kahneman
notes, Constantly questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and
System 2 is much too slow and inefcient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in
making routine decisions (Kahneman 2011, p. 28). He also points out,
The division of labor between System 1 and System 2 is highly efcient: it minimizes effort
and optimizes performance. The arrangement works well most of the time because System
1 is generally very good at what it does: its models of familiar situations are accurate, its
short-term predictions are usually accurate as well, and its initial reactions to challenges are
swift and generally appropriate. (Kahneman 2011, p. 25).
There is a large amount of compelling evidence that points towards the existence
of two separate cognitive systems. System 1 is evolutionally old, parallel pro-
cessing, non-conscious, high-capacity, implicit and autonomous. System 2 is
evolutionally new, serial processing, conscious, low-capacity, explicit and voli-
tional. Many researchers, however, hold that the dual system view is too simplistic.
2.1.2 Type 1 and Type 2 Processing
The dual-system formulations of dual processing present a compelling picture of

how the mind works. As Evans and Frankish, among others, argue, these formu-
lations are, however, currently oversimplied. (Evans and Frankish 2009, p. vi).
According to Kahneman, the two systems are rather characters in a story
abstractions used to make sense of how our cognition takes place. (Kahneman
2011, p. 19 ff.) He notes, System 1 does X is a shortcut for X occurs auto-
matically. And System 2 is mobilized to do Y is a shortcut for arousal increases,
pupils dilate, attention is focused, and activity Y is performed. (Kahneman 2011,
p. 415).
There are, in fact, not two separate systems that would function as independent
modules, but rather the two systems are intertwined: System 2 is partly realized in
cycles of System 1 activity, involving the mental rehearsal of action schemata
(Evans and Frankish 2009, p. vi.) Evans writes further, There may not be any
stable versions of System 2 at alljust a set of interacting units (including working
memory) that get activated to deal with a particular task (Evans 2009, p. 38). He
continues,
If System 2 requires working memory then as a system, it must also include many other
resources, such as explicit knowledge and belief systems together with powerful, type 1
processes, for identifying and retrieving data that is relevant in the current context, not to
speak of the role of attention, language, and perception in supplying content for type 2
processing. (Evans 2009, p. 42.)
Evans has proposed moving from the position of two systems to one embracing
two types of cognitive processes. According to Evans, these two types roughly
coincide with what was originally thought of as the functions of the two systems.
(Evans 2009, p. 33.)
Type 1 processes are dened as autonomous processes that do not require
working memory. Type 2 processes are dened as processes involving cognitive
decoupling and mental simulation that require working memory. One way to dis-
tinguish the two is to call them intuitive processes and analytic processes,
respectively (Table 2.2).
The easiest way to differentiate the dual type and dual system formulations is
that in the former the typically mind-related properties of the two systems are
Table 2.2 Type 1 (intuitive) and Type 2 (analytic) processes

Type 1 processes (intuitive) Type 2 processes (analytic)
Fast Slow
High capacity Capacity limited
Parallel Serial
Non-conscious Conscious
Contextualized Abstract
Automatic Controlled
Associative Rule-based
Experience-based decision making Consequential decision making
excluded from the identication criteria of the two types of processes. This includes
the evolutive distinction, the human/animal distinction and the relationship of
emotions to the two systems.
One of the critical distinctions of the two types of processes is whether they
employ working memory. In place of type 2 processes, we can talk of analytic
processes [that] are those which manipulate explicit representations through
working memory and exert conscious, volitional control on behavior (Evans 2009,
p. 42). While the working memory is often likened to System 2, the two are not in
fact entirely the same:
Working memory does nothing on its own. It requires, at the very least, content. And this
content is supplied by a whole host of implicit cognitive systems. For example, the contents
of our consciousness include visual and other perceptual representations of the world,
extracted meanings of linguistic discourse, episodic memories, and retrieved beliefs of
relevance to the current context, and so on. So if there is a new mind, distinct from the old,
it does not operate entirely or even mostly by type 2 processes. On the contrary, it functions
mostly by type 1 processes. (Evans 2009, p. 37).
Type 2 processes need the constant application of working memory, such as in

calculating by using an algorithm, in evaluating various choices in decision-
making, or in practicing a new skill. In these processes, attention is directed not
only on the outcome of the process (the solution, the decision or the product of
skill), but also on the intermediary steps.
Type 1 processes, in turn, operate autonomously, without the need of direct
attention or the application of working memory. Autonomous processes are those
that can control behavior directly without need for any kind of controlled attention.
(Evans 2009, p. 42.) Due to this independence from working memory, Type 1
processes can be either entirely non-conscious (as in creative association or
autonomous processes) or they can post only their end result into consciousness,
often with the result that the cognitive agent may be unable to explicate how she
ended up with such a result.
Type 1 processes are fast and automatic. They typically involve high processing
capacity and low effort. Type 2 processes, in turn, are slow, controlled and they
involve a limited capacity and high effort. (Evans 2009, p. 33.)
In terms of cognitive architecture, Type 2 processes are sequential whereas Type

1 processes can be massively parallel (Evans 2009, p. 33). In other words, Type 2
processes can take place only one at a time, for example in a logical inference or a
decision tree, where one step is evaluated at a given moment. Type 1 processes can,
on the other hand, take place simultaneously, and there can arguably be a great
number of such simultaneous processes ongoing (e.g. walking and whistling a tune
while the sensory apparatus is parsing the environment for potential dangers and
evaluative processes are dealing with information gathered earlier in the day,
possibly producing an insight).
Finally, Evans introduces a third type of cognition, reflective Type 3 processes,
that mediate between Type 1 and Type 2 processes. These involve decision making
and conflict resolution. (Evans 2009, p. 50). Here Evans approaches the position
advocated by Keith Stanovich, where both System 1 and System 2 are broken down
to smaller subsystems.
2.1.3 Algorithmic, Reflective and Autonomous Minds
Where Evans position shifts the focus from the modularity of the two-systems
view to a process view, Keith Stanovich has developed his position by introducing
further divisions in both Systems 1 and 2 (Stanovich 2004, 2009.)
Stanovich (2009, p. 56) argues, that it is erroneous to claim that the autonomous
System 1 consists of only one system. Rather, it is a collection of many different
kinds of subsystems that roughly coincide with the demarcation criteria of System
1. The autonomous mind contains many rules, stimulus discriminations, and
decision-making principles that have been practiced to automaticity []
(Stanovich 2009, p. 57.)
These Stanovich calls The Autonomous Set of Systems, in short, TASS:
In actuality, the term used should be plural because it refers to a set of systems in the brain
that operate autonomously in response to their own triggering stimuli, and are not under the
control of the analytic processing system. I thus have suggested the acronym TASS
(standing for The Autonomous Set of Systems) to describe what is in actuality a hetero-
geneous set. (Stanovich 2009, p. 56.)
Instead of systems or types, Stanovich emphasizes modes of processing.

Reflecting Daniel Dennetts conventions in the book Kinds of Minds (1997),
Stanovich labels the source of Type 1 processing, TASS, as the autonomous mind.
While TASS takes care of most of the functionality typically attributed to
System 1, Stanovich is not satised with the System 2 as a single system either. He
rather argues that also the System 2 is divided into at least two distinct subsystems.
(Stanovich 2009, p. 57.) The algorithmic level of Type 2 processing is called the
algorithmic mind. Finally, the reflective level of Type 3 processing is called the
reflective mind. (Evans and Stanovich 2013, p. 230.)
The algorithmic mind deals with slow thinking and computation. The reflective
mind, in turn, evaluates, initiates and discontinues ongoing processes in the
autonomous or algorithmic minds: Decoupling processes enable one to distance
oneself from representations of the world so that they can be reflected upon and
potentially improved (Stanovich 2009, p. 63).
Stanovich argues that we have a divided relationship to the genetically dictated
behavioral modules. Short-leash goals are implemented by the TASS, and have a
genetic basis. These include biological instinctive behavior and reflexes. However,
following his famous catch-phrase (and book title), Robots Rebellion, the
genetic robot can also rebel against these short-leash instructions by the long-
leash capacity of the reflective and algorithmic minds. The reflective mind can set
new goals that may well be at odds with the instinctive drives of TASS. By setting
goals as reflective individuals, we can rebel against the instinctive goals we are
programmed with by evolution. (Stanovich 2004; Frankish and Evans 2009, p. 18.)
The execution of typical System 2 features, such as cognitive decoupling, or
TASS overridei.e. the event where a System 1 input is interrupted volitionally
and a new process is initiatedare, according to Stanovich, driven by the reflective
mind: TASS will implement its short-leashed goals unless overridden by the
algorithmic mechanisms implementing the long-leash goals of the analytic system.
But override itself is initiated by higher control. (Stanovich 2009, p. 57.)
Stanovich argues that the algorithmic level is subordinate to higher level goal
states and epistemic thinking dispositions. These goal states and epistemic dispo-
sitions exist at what might be termed the reflective level of processinga level
containing control states that regulate behavior at high level of generality. (Evans
and Stanovich 2013, p. 230.) While the initiation of a TASS override may be
carried out by the reflective mind, the actual substitute process, for example a
logical calculation, will take place in the algorithmic mind.
Algorithmic and reflective minds can be differentiated in measurement of indi-
vidual differences between cognitive ability and thinking dispositions. (Evans and
Stanovich 2013, p. 230). Cognitive ability concerns the capacity of the algorithmic
mind to sustain decoupled inhibitory or simulating representations and is reflected
in general intelligence. (Evans and Stanovich 2013, p. 230; Stanovich 2009, p. 62.)
Thinking dispositions, in turn reflect various higher level states of the reflective
mind, for example collecting information, evaluating points of view, or making an
analysis of the upsides and downsides of a situation before making a decision.
Stanovichs position can, thus be summarized as a tripartite division between the
autonomous, the algorithmic and the reflective mind, where the autonomous mind
consists of several System 1 subsystems and the algorithmic and reflective mind
correspond with properties of System 2, especially concerning serial processing and
conscious reflection and decision making, respectively.
To bridge Stanovichs view with that of Evans, one could roughly say that the
System 1 subsystems, or The Autonomous Set of Systems (TASS) are responsible
for Type 1 processes. The algorithmic part of System 2 is, in turn, responsible for
Type 2 processes. And nally, the reflective part of System 2 is responsible for
Type 3 processes.
Evans and Stanovichs theories bring a lot of dynamics to the arguably too static
Dual System model. This position can now be developed further in the context of
intuitive thought.
2.2 The Structure of Intuitive Thought
Whichever denition we want to use about intuition, a feature common to practi-

cally all of them is that intuition is primarily non-conscious. This non-conscious
thought is reflected in intuitive insight.
In other words, intuition belongs in the domain of System 1. While Evans and
Stanovichs elaborations above must be taken seriously, in order to construct a
structured model of intuitive thought, it may be useful to temporarily revert back to
the Dual System terminology. The model presented below will use the Dual System
position as a starting point, but it will also incorporate the key ideas from both
Evans and Stanovichs positions.
2.2.1 The Nested Systems
To recap, human cognition is divided into two functionally different mental systems
whose properties and capacities differ highly from one another. One of these,
System 1, concerns the autonomous and involuntary cognitive functions. The other,
System 2, concerns the conscious capacity to reflect, compute and volitionally
adjust behavior.
While System 2 is limited to processing only a few inputs at a time in series, it
too employs many of the processes driven by System 1. For example, in drawing
logical inference, the rules of inference must rst have been memorized, i.e.
committed to System 1, before the algorithmic System 2 inference can take place.
System 2 drives processes that employ attention and focus and that tap into
working memory, in other words, Evans Type 2 and Type 3 processes. System 1 is,
in turn, responsible for most of our behavior and actions, as well as producing
associative thought patterns. As Kahneman points out, one of the main functions of
System 2 is to monitor and control thoughts and actions suggested by System 1,
allowing some to be expressed directly in behavior and suppressing or modifying
others (Kahneman 2011, p. 43).
The two systems are not separate mechanisms, but rather interact constantly with
one another. System 1 generates both inputs and explicit processes for System 2 to
reflect on and compute with, and conversely, System 2 monitors and controls the
suggestions of System 1 within the constraints of working memory capacity and
volitional capacity.
Instead of separating them, the two systems can be construed as a nested
system (Fig. 2.2). System 2 functions as the locus of attention, constrained by
2.2 The Structure of Intuitive Thought 33
Fig. 2.2 The nested systems
S1 S2
working memory. System 1 functions as the home of the cognitive processes. As

Engle points out, working memory is not just about memory, but rather using
attention to maintain or suppress information. He holds that working memory con-
cerns memory only indirectly, and that a greater capacity in working memory means a
greater ability to control attention rather than a larger memory. (Engle 2002, p. 20.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus that the self
shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated
with it. (Wittgenstein 2004, 5.64.) This dimensionless point is the locus of
attention: whatever we happen to be conscious of at a given moment. The locus of
attention determines the contents of System 2. Whatever enters the working
memory to be addressed either algorithmically or reflectively depends on where the
attention is directed.
The content of consciousness are the processes that register in System 2, in other
words those processes ongoing in the cognitive system that register in the working
memory. This includes perceptions processed by System 1 sensory subsystems as
well as associations and other cognitive inputs from System 1. Most cognitive
processes take place in System 1, and only scarce few of them register at a time in
System 2.
One way to observe the two systems is that System 1 is the cognitive system,
and System 2 is constrained by the center of attention within it, whether it be
centered by perception, computation or reflection. System 1 produces by various
mechanisms the thought processes out of which a few post their end result into the
conscious mind, or the System 2.
To put this into Evans terms, Type 1 processes are most of the cognitive
processes taking place in the cognitive system. Type 2 processes are the algorithmic
processes that require attention and working memory. Type 3 processes are, in turn,
the reflective selfs influence and mediation between Type 2 and Type 1 processes.
While Type 2 and Type 3 processes employ working memory and are thus driven
by System 2, both employ constantly processes generated by System 1. Thus they
also affect the ongoing Type 1 processes.
Intuition concerns the Type 1 processes that post their end result into System 2.
The massive System 1 can parse through a tremendous amount of information
without our being aware of it, reacting fast to a salient input. A typical example is the
cocktail party effect. While our consciousness interprets the dozens of conversations
going on at the party as noise, our System 1 singles out interesting inputs constantly
from the noise. And as soon as something interesting is mentioned for example,
your name your attention shifts immediately towards the interesting conversation.
The capacity alone does not, however, sufce to explain how some people can
make such great intuitive leaps of inference and innovation, whereas others do not.
To understand how intuitive thought processes are generated, we must look deeper
into the nature of System 1 processing.
2.2.2 Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Type 1 Processes
The processing power of System 1 alone does not sufce to explain how we have
such a capacity as intuition. A further look at the structure of System 1 is required.
While System 1 can be studied in terms of neural correlates, this alone does not
give us deeper insight on how intuitive insight is generated. There are areas in the
brain that are indicated in intuitive decision making (Lieberman, 2000, 2009;
Dietrich 2004; Goel 2007; De Neys and Goel 2011; see also Sect. 1.3 above). But
the question of how these neural correlations translate to intuitive thought is still
largely unknown.
In order to understand how intuitive insight is generated, we should rather look
at the origin and function of Type 1 processes that take place in the System 1. These
can be roughly divided according to their evolutionary background into phyloge-
netic and ontogenetic processes (Table 2.3).
Phylogenetic processes are non-conscious processes that are strongly heritable.
These include the functioning of the autonomous nervous system, the ght or flight
reflex and other reflexes, many emotional reactions and parental protective
behavior. Phylogenetic processes have developed through the biological evolution
of our species. They are common to every human being, most of them shared even
with the majority of higher animals. These processes have proven to function well
in ensuring the survival of our species throughout millennia.
Ontogenetic processes are acquired through experience and practice. While
phylogenetic processes drive the instinctive side of System 1 cognition, ontogenetic
processes are the driver of intuition. Intuitive thinking is, in other words, directly
linked to previous experience and expertise a nding that has been corroborated
by much of the literature on intuition. (See e.g. Klein, 1998; Gladwell 2005;
Table 2.3 Examples of Ontogenetic processes Phylogenetic processes

ontogenetic and phylogenetic
processes Skills Physical reactions
Beliefs Emotional reactions
Decision making heuristics Protective parental behavior
Expert decisions Fight or flight
Creative ideas Maximizing energy intake
Gigerenzer 2007; Dane and Pratt 2007; Kahneman 2011; Kahneman and Klein
2009; see also Sect. 1.3 above.) As Stanovich notes, System 1 is not limited to
evolutionarily compiled knowledge, but also can access information in the System
1 generated through learning and practice (Stanovich 2009, p. 71).
Intuition is not a magical know-all facility, but rather a form of skilled action
driven by ontogenetic Type 1 processes. To this end, the nested model can now be
augmented with the division of the System 1 into two subsystems, the ontogenetic
and the phylogenetic systems that drive, correspondingly, ontogenetic and phylo-
genetic Type 1 processes (Fig. 2.3).
Intuition is about utilizing past experiences and the associative nature of the
System 1 to produce viable insight in various situations. The challenge with using
intuitions is now to tell the two types of Type 1 processes apart from one another.
The differentiation between ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes gives us tools
for such differentiation.
If a Type 1 input is recognized as a phylogenetic process, it should typically be
ignored. Phylogenetic Type 1 processes have developed through biological evo-
lution to function well in our natural environment.
Fig. 2.3 Ontogenetic and

phylogenetic processes in the
System 1 and the algorithmic/
reflective minds in the System
2
ontogenetic am phylogenetic
processes S2 rm processes
S1
With cultural evolution, the environments in which we function have changed a

great deal, and instinctive behavior seldom produces viable results. Consider for
example the instinct to maximize energy intake. In the energy-abundant environ-
ment of today, this will not lead to the well-being of the person, but rather causes a
variety of discomforts if not checked by System 2, or supported with ontogenetic
Type 1 processes, such as the habit of regular exercise.
Therefore, the rough guideline in identifying the viability of Type 1 inputs is to
judge them by their evolutive background. Ontogenetic Type 1 processes have been
adapted to our present environment, and thus we should rather generally follow
these. While this is a good rough guideline, the issue of identifying viable intuitions
is considerably more complicated than this and will be addressed in greater detail
below.
2.2.3 On the Possibility of the Smart Unconscious
In the recent decades, a substantial amount of research has been gathered that points
towards a large portion of advanced cognition occurring autonomously (See e.g.
Bargh et al. 1996; Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Jacoby et al. 1992; Draine and
Greenwald 1998; Kahneman 2011; Djiksterhuis 2004; Djiksterhuis and Meurs
2006; Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006). This gives rise to the question: how smart
is the non-conscious mind?
John Bargh is one of the most vocal proponents of the automaticity of cognition
(See e.g. Bargh et al. 1996; Bargh and Chartrand 1999). Bargh has become famous
for his experiments on non-conscious social priming, where given words or
impulses have triggered new kinds of behavior (Bargh et al. 1996). Perhaps the
most famous of the priming experiments is one where one group of students where
exposed to words typically associated with old age, such as Florida, wise and
lonely. (Bargh et al. 1996, p. 236.) After the test, these students walked signi-
cantly slower. The argument is that the students adjusted their behavior automati-
cally to reflect the idea of old age.
Automaticity is developed by an interplay between internal, or more local,
cognitive processes and the environment. Bargh and Chartrand go on to argue that
mental representations are, not unlike Peirces and James habits (see Sect. 1.2),
processes that, once activated, carry out their function regardless of the initial
stimulus that activates the process:
The activated mental representation is like a button being pushed; it can be pushed by ones
nger intentionally (e.g., turning on the electric coffeemaker) or accidentally (e.g., by the
cat on the countertop) or by a decision made in the past (e.g., by setting the automatic turn-
on mechanism the night before). In whatever way the start button is pushed, the mechanism
subsequently behaves in the same way. (Bargh and Chartrand 1999, p. 476.)
Bargh and Chartrand argue that such automatic processes are in our very best
interests. They liken them to mental butlers who take care of our needs without
having to be asked to do so. (Bargh and Chartrand 1999, p. 476.)
Barghs position presents a far more potent hypothesis as is entertained typically
by dual process theorists. In the dual process theories, System 1 is often considered
as a relatively straightforward mechanism, where given stimuli trigger automati-
cally predetermined processes (be they phylogenetic or ontogenetic in nature).
Bargh seems here, however, to posit that in addition to containing such automatic
processes, System 1 could be construed as capable of very complex processing.
The social psychologist Ap Djiksterhuis takes this already controversial idea one
step further. He argues that intuitive decision making is, in fact, superior to analytic
decision making, at least if the problem at hand is complex enough. (Djiksterhuis
and Nordgren 2006, p. 96.)
On the grounds of both their own empirical work on intuitive decision making,
as well as the works of Bargh and others, Djiksterhuis and Loran Nordgren have
formulated a theory of the smart unconscious, or the Unconscious Thought
Theory (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006; Djiksterhuis 2004). The basic idea of the
Unconscious Thought Theory is that intuitions may, in fact, be preceded by a great
deal of non-conscious processing (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 106).
Following the dual process literature, Djiksterhuis and Nordgren argue that there
are two types of thought: conscious and unconscious. Djiksterhuis and Nordgren
dene conscious thought as follows:
We dene conscious thought as object-relevant or task-relevant cognitive or affective
thought processes that occur while the object or task is the focus of ones conscious
attention. This rather complex denition simply describes what laypeople would call
thought. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 96.)
Non-conscious thought is dened thus: Unconscious thought refers to object-

relevant or task-relevant cognitive or affective thought processes that occur while
conscious attention is directed elsewhere (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 96).
Djiksterhuis and Nordgren present ve principles that formulate the
Unconscious Thought Theory: the capacity principle; the bottom-up-versus-top-
down-principle; the weighting principle; the rule principle; and the convergence-
versus-divergence principle.
The capacity principle means that conscious thought is constrained by the low
capacity of consciousness (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 96; see also above
Sect. 1.3). Non-conscious thought, in turn, has no such immediate constraints, and
can process a great deal more information than consciousness (Djiksterhuis 2004;
Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006). Thus, the higher capacity of non-conscious
thought gives it an advantage in evaluation and decision-making.
The bottom-up-versus-top-down principle concerns the schematic differences
between non-conscious and conscious thought. Djiksterhuis and Nordgren argue
that conscious thought works schematically, or top-down. Non-conscious thought,
in turn, works aschematically, or bottom up. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006,
p. 97.) They argue that conscious thought is inherently hierarchical, whereas
automatic processes are not. Djiksterhuis and Nordgren found out in their experi-
ments that conscious thinkers tend to think in terms of stereotypes:
Our ndings clearly demonstrated that conscious thinkers applied stereotypes more than
unconscious thinkers did. They judged the target person in a more stereotypical manner,
and their recall was biased in that they recalled more stereotype-congruent than stereotype-
incongruent behavioral descriptions. Unconscious thinkers did not demonstrate stereotyp-
ing. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 98).
Furthermore, they argue that conscious thought is riddled with jumping to

conclusions, a nding that is well in line with the research on heuristics and biases
by Tversky, Kahneman and others. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 98; see also
Kahneman 2011, p. 79 ff.)
Whereas conscious thought operates schematically, with a tendency towards
stereotypes and jumping to conclusions, Djiksterhuis and Nordgren argue that non-
conscious thought operates aschematically, integrating information to form an
objective summary judgment. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 98.) Djiksterhuis
and Nordgren hold, rather controversially, that unconscious thought causes better
organization of information in memory. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 99.)
Finally, they argue that unconscious thought is not just a residual process of earlier
conscious processing, but an active, goal-directed process in itself. (Djiksterhuis
and Nordgren 2006, p. 99.)
The weighting principle means that the non-conscious mind automatically
weighs the relative importance of attributes relevant to decision-making, whereas
conscious thought often leads to worse results (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006,
pp. 99100). Consciousness operates with the most accessible information, putting
disproportionate weight on plausible, accessible or verbalizable attributes at the
extent of others. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 100.)
The rule principle means that conscious thought can follow strict rules, whereas
non-conscious thought works more in terms of rough estimates. (Djiksterhuis and
Nordgren 2006, p. 101.) There is some evidence towards the non-conscious minds
capacity to resolve complex evaluation-related problems, such as buying an
apartment or a car (Djiksterhuis 2004). Certain types of tasks, for example complex
arithmetics, are however unresolvable for the non-conscious mind. Incubation will
not be likely help you determine how much is 17 24. A conscious, rule-based
process is required. In tasks requiring rule following, non-conscious thought is not
of much use. Its power lies in its associative capacity.
The convergence-versus-divergence principle means that conscious thought is
focused and convergent, whereas non-conscious thought is fuzzier and more
divergent. In a series of experiments, Djiksterhuis and Meurs demonstrated that
conscious thinkers generated more typical answers to creative problems, whereas
non-conscious thinkers who were distracted from thinking about the problem
generated more divergent and creative solutions (Djiksterhuis and Meurs 2006). To
conclude, non-conscious thought appears to be more conducive to creative thinking
than conscious thought owing to its more divergent and associative nature.
While some of their conclusions about the functioning of the non-conscious is

rather controversial, Djiksterhuis and Nordgren do arrive at a similar general
conclusion as the formulation given above, in Sect. 1.3. According to them, intu-
ition is based on previous experience and access to relevant information.
(Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 106.)
In Djiksterhuis experiments, subjects made decisions about buying apartments.
They were divided to three groups: immediate deciders, analytic deciders and
intuitive deciders. The immediate deciders were shown the options and asked to
pick one straight away. The analytic deciders evaluated the options consciously
before making a choice. The intuitive deciders were distracted with a task that
occupied much of their working memory (a two-back test). After the distraction,
they were instructed to pick the option that best suited them. The results were
consistently that the immediate deciders performed the worst, whereassomewhat
surprisinglythe intuitive deciders performed better than both immediate and
analytic deciders. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, pp. 9596.)
Djiksterhuis and Nordgren argue that this is due to the working of a smart
unconscious that grinds through the available data and is able to tap into the
massive associative capacity of the non-conscious mind. In particular, the quality of
conscious decision making has a reverse correlation with the complexity of the
problem, whereas the quality of non-conscious decision making stays relatively
constant. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006, p. 103).
From this Djiksterhuis and Nordgren conclude that with simple problems, the
better strategy is to employ conscious evaluation, whereas for complex problems, it
is better to rst familiarize with the problem and then distract the conscious mind
for example with a puzzle game for a while, to let the non-conscious mind process
through the options. (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006.) This should, in the light of
the Unconscious Thought Theory, produce better results intuitively.
The research of Bargh, Djiksterhuis and their colleagues does indeed present by
the least a credible case for a smart unconscious that is grinding through a massive
amount of information without our being aware of it. This evidence is also partly
coincident with the literature on dual process theories. Perhaps the smart uncon-
scious is powered by highly advanced and complex ontogenetic Type 1 cognitive
processes that can address issues where the limited-capacity System 2 cannot come
up with enough novelty.
This would be further supported by the phenomenon of incubation typical to
creative thought, where the associative capacity of System 1 can produce new and
viable cognitive inputs from Type 1 processes (Djiksterhuis and Meurs 2006;
Csikszentmihalyi 1996). This point of view would go a long way in explaining how
incubation and intuitive decision making work, and why it, at least in some settings,
appears to trump analytic decision making.
Recently, the research of both Bargh and Djiksterhuis has, however, met with
substantial criticism. Most prominently, the critique has been grounded on a
number of failed replications of both Barghs priming experiments as well as
Djiksterhuis decision-making experiments. (See e.g. Huizenga et al. 2012; Shanks
et al. 2013.)
The critics of the smart unconscious argue that the failures to replicate warrant
caution against drawing conclusions concerning the power of non-conscious
thought. Huizenga et al., in evaluating Djiksterhuis research, blankly state that
Based on our ndings, and those of previous studies, we conclude that
Unconscious Thought Theory does not provide an adequate description of
unconscious and conscious decision processes. (Huizenga et al. 2012, p. 340.)
Shanks et al., failed, in turn, to replicate Barghs research. They state that their
results support a view that conscious thoughts are a primary driver of behavior and
that unconscious influences have limited and narrow effects (Shanks et al. 2013,
p. 10.)
John Bargh has generated some responses to his and Djiksterhuis critics (Bargh
2011, 2012). He goes on to state that there are at least three reasons why the
criticism of the smart unconscious is either non-conclusive or outright fails.
First of all, Bargh argues that the assaults on the smart unconscious are based on
an outdated idea of the unconscious mind that equates it with the subliminal. (Bargh
2011, p. 636.) In the light of the dual process theories, the nature of the unconscious
is now understood much better than in classical psychology.
Second, after closer scrutiny, many of the failures to replicate do, according to
Bargh, produce at least equivalent results between conscious and non-conscious
thought a result that is surprising enough from the point of view of the assumption
that conscious deliberation should be clearly superior. (Bargh 2011, p. 639.)
Third, he argues that the situations where more prominent positive results are
produced are such where the decision making deals with more real-life situation,
compared to the decision theorists replications. (Bargh 2011, p. 642.) Bargh also
cites a number of quite successful replications of priming experiments. (Bargh
2012; see e.g. Hull et al. 2002; Decoster and Claypool, 2004; Cameron et al. 2012.)
In the light of the present research and the debate linked with it, the question of
the smart unconscious cannot be resolved conclusively. However, when Barghs
and Djiksterhuis and their colleagues social psychological research is seen in the
wider light of both the neuroscientic evidence for non-conscious processing as
well as some of the dual process research in the eld of cognitive psychology, it is
far too early to throw it out of court only due to a failure to replicate some of the key
experiments.
In addition, while the idea of a smart unconscious may be untenable, there is
further research that goes to show how learned non-conscious processes can pro-
duce viable cognitive inputs that register as intuitive, without the need to posit
highly complex computational or intelligent interactions within the non-conscious
mind.
2.2.4 Intuition as Skilled Action
While the idea of the smart unconscious warrants further study, a large amount of
research points towards the superiority of non-conscious thinking in certain kinds of
situations that can be explained without the need to postulate a non-conscious

intelligence. Rather, this view to intuitive thinking and decision-making starts with
the assumption that instead of a complex computation, intuition is more like skilled
action.
Gerd Gigerenzer presents a four-fold taxonomy for explaining intuitions.
According to Gigerenzer, gut feelings are produced by non-conscious rules of
thumb. These are, in turn, based on evolved capacities of the brain and environ-
mental structures.
Gut feelings are intuitions as experienced. They appear quickly in conscious-
ness, we do not fully understand why we have them, but we are prepared to act on
them. (Gigerenzer 2007, pp. 4748.) The problem with the trustworthiness of gut
feelings is that many other things appear suddenly in our minds that bear a similar
clarity and that we feel like acting on, for example the urge to grab an extra dessert.
But not all such reactive System 1 behaviors are good for us.
Rules of thumb are, according to Gigerenzer, what produces gut feelings. These
are very simple heuristics that are triggered either by another thought or by an
environmental cue, for example the recognition heuristic, where a familiar brand
evokes positive feelings. (Gigerenzer 2007, pp. 4748.) Evolved capacities are what
rules of thumb are constructed of. They include capacities such as the ability to
track objects or to recognize familiar brands. (Gigerenzer 2007, pp. 4748.)
And nally, environmental structures determine whether a rule of thumb works
or not. The recognition heuristic may work well when picking up a can of soda or
even stocks, if it is directed towards trusted and well-known brands. (Gigerenzer
2007, pp. 4748.)
Here, Gigerenzer comes close to both Barghs and Djiksterhuis theorizing.
Where he differs, however, is in refusing to posit a complicated processing
mechanism in the non-conscious. Rather, Gigerenzers experiments show to some
degree that intuitions are, in fact, often quite simple.
The core idea in Gigerenzers model is quite similar to Herbert Simons idea of
intuition as recognition: The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the
expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the
answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition. (Simon 1992,
p. 155.)
Gigerenzer holds that environmental triggers give rise to simple cognitive
mechanisms that have proven to be very efcient both in terms of the evolution of
the species as well as that of the organism.
For example, the recognition heuristic a simple rule of going with a familiar
brandenables us to make surprisingly good decisions when faced with multiple
choices (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 112). Going with a familiar choice, people could make
better choices just by picking the more recognizable option, for example in pre-
dicting sports scores, or evaluating colleges (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 111 ff.).
While the evolutionary basis of such recognition is, of course, quite complicated,
requiring many non-conscious memory- and association-related tasks to succeed,
the rule of the thumb itself is relatively simple and does not require a smart non-
conscious evaluation of choices or computation. Rather, it is based on the process
triggered by the familiar choice that generates a pleasant emotional association, or a

gut feeling.
The problem with Gigerenzers position is that while there are some heuristics
that seem to work pretty well in many situations (such as the recognition heuristic),
heuristics are also notoriously misleading, and often indiscernible from negative
heuristics, or cognitive biases. In fact, the study of heuristics and biases, made
famous by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, has become one of the most
substantiated research traditions in intuitive decision making.
Gary Klein has developed a similar position to Gigerenzers in his famous
decision-making research. In Kleins recognition-primed decision making model,
decisions are made neither by a rational, conscious weighing scheme, nor by a fast
non-conscious calculation, but are based rather on quickly recognizing viable
strategies for action based on expertise. (Klein 1998.)
Like Gigerenzers, Kleins idea is based on Herbert Simons conception of
intuition as recognition. According to Kleins research, people do not in fact typ-
ically make decisions by rationally evaluating choices. (Klein 1998, loc 202.)
Rather, a great majority pick up a choice that rst comes to mind, mentally simulate
it, and if it seems to work, go with the rst viable one, without ever considering
options. This decision-making scheme follows the strategy of satiscing, (accepting
the rst viable option), made famous by Simon, in contrast to the more rational
strategy of optimizing, i.e. weighing all possible options and picking the one that
comes out on top as best. (Simon 1956.)
The difference between Gigerenzers and Kleins positions is in that where
Gigerenzer assumes that gut feelings are produced by heuristics or rules of thumb
that are typical to all humans and produced by our environment, Kleins idea of
recognition-priming is based on picking up much more individually complex
strategies of action based on prior experience and expertise.
In terms of the dual process terminology, both Gigerenzers and Kleins posi-
tions employ Type 1 processes that are triggered by an environmental event or
another thought. Kleins position, however, starts with the assumption that the
relevant ontogenetic Type 1 processes, or the primed strategies, are complex skills
or skill-sets, such as a military strategy or a chess move that is chosen based on the
recognition of its applicability to the situation at hand.
We have now three different points of view to explaining intuitive insight: rst,
Barghs and Djiksterhuiss idea of the smart non-conscious, where highly complex
operations take place automatically within the connes of System 1, if we just
distract the System 2 for a moment; Gigerenzers position, where simple and
common Type 1 processes generate gut feelings when triggered by an environ-
mental event or another thought; and Kleins position where complex strategies
committed to System 1 by experience are triggered by an environmental event or
another thought.
All three positions can, however, be seen as variants of a common theme that
was already reflected in the pragmatistss notion habits of action. This common
ground can be found in interpreting intuition as a form of skilled action.
The gist here is that we generate a considerable amount of ontogenetic Type 1

processes, or habits, by exercise, deliberate practice and daily experience. These
processes are, as Stanovich notes, ballistic in the sense that once they are trig-
gered, they typically run their course, unless interrupted with (a reasonably
effortful) TASS override or the reflective System 2s interrupting the ongoing
Type 1 process. (Stanovich 2009, p. 57.) Given the amount of sensory information
we receive every moment, not to speak of the associative Type 1 processes taking
place, such trigger events are, no doubt, abundant.
With an inexperienced person, such ontogenetic Type 1 processes or strategies
are few, and therefore also the capacity to trigger viable strategies is low. Indeed,
this was what Klein discovered in his studies: only when people were very inex-
perienced were they likely to resort typically to rational decision making schemes.
The experts would use what he calls naturalistic decision making, a simple
process of recognizing a possibly viable strategy, evaluating it by mental simulation
and implementing it quickly. (Klein 1998 loc 652 ff.)
While the question of talent still draws the lines between nature and nurture, or
genes and practice, much of research on expertise in the recent decades has started
to emphasize the latter. Especially the research carried out by Anders Ericsson and
his colleagues points out that top performers have consistently put in a tremendous
amount of deliberate practice to acquire their skills. (Ericsson et al. 1993.) This is
often quoted as the 10,000 h rule, including Ericsson himself. As Ericsson points
out, it takes about 10,000 h, or ten years, of deliberate practice to become an expert
in a domain (Ericsson et al. 2007).
It takes a lot of time and a lot of experience to build the ontogenetic Type 1
processes that can be applied in the various situations in ones domain of expertise:
to recognize the various game strategies in chess, to be able to learn the correct
moves in a game of tennis, or to learn to navigate a burning house. In other words,
to commit to the automatic System 1 a sufcient amount of skills to navigate a
demanding domain, such as chess, tennis or reghting.
In a meta-analysis of research on intuition in the managerial context, organi-
zational psychologists Erik Dane and Michael G. Pratt discovered, akin to
Djiksterhuis, Bargh, Gigerenzer and Klein, that intuitive decisions are in a great
many settings of higher quality than analytic ones (Dane and Pratt 2007, p. 33).
Dane and Pratt argue that the applicability of intuition is highly domain-specic.
Those managers who trusted their gut feelings performed better in the areas they
were experts in. Outside those areas, the value of the gut feeling was not much
better than a guess (Dane and Pratt 2007.)
In the light of the above, it seems that intuition is a domain-specic capacity that
is developed by experience and deliberate practice. In other words, intuition con-
sists of a set of skills and heuristics used to navigate a complex environment.
Experience and deliberate practice give rise to ontogenetic Type 1 processes in the
System 1 and thus hone it to function better in the domain where the experience is
generated. Such processes allow us to adapt to a culturally evolved environment to
which our biological heritage could not have prepared us.
In construing intuition as skilled action, it differs in no way from the multitude of

the other skills we acquire through experience and practice. Being able to intuitively
discern a viable chess strategy or to quickly guide remen from a burning house
about to collapse is no more wondrous than learning to walk or read.
With enough practice, skilled action is committed to the System 1 or the non-
conscious mind because we could not, owing to the limitations in working memory
capacity, by any means be able to keep in consciousness all the phases a skill
requires. Consider, for example, a top footballer or pianist thinking about every step
or every move of ngers. The performance would become impossible. The differ-
ence between the smart unconscious and the skilled action view is the amount of
complexity posited to the System 1 processes. Here, it is assumed that the mark of
the expert is in fact not the non-conscious capability to complexity, but rather the
capability to simplicity.
In having experienced a multitude of situations and scenarios that work within a
domain, these experiences have given rise to ontogenetic Type 1 processes that are
triggered with the right kinds of environmental cues. Add to this the associative
power of the non-conscious mind, and the picture of intuitive thinking starts to
clear.
Intuitive thought is based on experience- and expertise-generated ontogenetic
Type 1 processes. These enable us to function well in a culturally evolved envi-
ronment in which our genetically encoded phylogenetic Type 1 processes do not
function very well.
For a great part, intuitive thought relies on acquired habits that are triggered by
environmental cues or other cognitive processes. These processes may also com-
bine following the associative nature of the System 1, which explains Djiksterhuis
results with the individuals whose System 2 was distracted generating more creative
options than those who had their reflective System 2 online considering the
problem.
In a typical situation that is recognized based on expertise, the viable strategy
presents itself immediately and intuitively. The intuitive processes also enable us to
identify atypical situations where the decision making can be committed to the
algorithmic mind. Also here, intuitions can serve us in possibly providing func-
tional rules of thumb to suit the situation, or in deferring the creation of potential
new strategies of action to the System 1 by distracting the System 2 momentarily.
As Kahneman points out, expertise is not just one skill, but a huge collection of
skills. (Kahneman 2011, p. 238.) One expert, for example a clinician, may have
strengths in some ares of expertise and be weaker in others. Expertise could, indeed,
be construed as a collection of micro-skills, each a kind of a micro-module or habit
of action represented in an ontogenetic Type 1 process that can be triggered either
by a recognition of a cue in the environment, or a non-conscious activation arising
form the association of parallel processing in System 1.
These micro-skills allow us to navigate a highly complex and evolving envi-
ronment and develop adaptive new strategies when old ones do not work. Thus,
intuition is the capacity to produce viable domain-specic results in a context using
autonomous processes in System 1. Or to put it more simply, intuition is a form of

skilled cognition, as differentiated from skilled action.
But while positioning intuitive thought into a domain-specic skill-set in the
System 1, or a set of ontogenetic Type 1 processes, goes a long way, there is still a
piece missing from the puzzle. Namely, the role of the environment in generating
intuitive insight.
2.3 Intuition and the Environment
Roughly put, the processes that drive intuitive thought reside in the System 1. To a
great extent, they should also correlate with various brain functions. As was argued
in Sect. 1.3, much of neuroscientic research seems to warrant this assumption.
Thus it would seem to be the case that intuition resides in the brain.
However, intuition research also seems to point towards another important factor
to intuitive thought: domains, contexts and the environment. As Gigerenzer points
out, in order to understand behavior, one needs to look not only into the brain or
mind but also into the structure of the physical and social environment.
(Gigerenzer 2007, p. 76.)
In the last few decades, various positions taking the influence of the environment
seriously have arisen, ranging from embodied cognition in psychology to the
extended mind hypothesis in the philosophy of the mind.
2.3.1 The Extended Mind Hypothesis
The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers published in 1998 an influential
paper called The Extended Mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998). In the paper, Clark
and Chalmers argue that cognition can sometimes extend beyond the head. If an
object, such as a notebook, can take a part of a process that would otherwise be
considered cognitive, such as recollection, the notebook should be considered a part
of the cognitive process just as we would consider a typical brain area, such as the
hippocampus, a part of it.
Clark and Chalmers present a thought experiment concerning two people, Otto
and Inga. Ingas memory works normally. Otto, however, suffers from the
Alzheimers, and cannot memorize new information. To overcome this handicap,
Otto carries everywhere a notebook where he keeps important information. (Clark
and Chalmers 1998.)
Now say Otto and Inga want to visit the museum on the 53rd street. For Inga, the
matter is straightforward. She will simply consult her memory and nd the proper
way to get there. Otto, however, has no memory about a museum on the 53rd street.
He can nonetheless look it up on the notebook. Both Otto and Inga arrive at the
museum, safe and sound, despite the fact that for Inga, the memory was based on
her nervous system, and for Otto on his notebook. The question arises, shouldnt we
now consider the notebook a part of Ottos cognition?
In the introduction to Clarks book Supersizing the mind (2011), Chalmers
writes,
A month ago, I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central
functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and
addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires: I call up a
memo with the names of my favorite dishes when I need to order at a local restaurant. I use
it to calculate, when I need to gure out bills and tips. It is a tremendous resource in an
argument, with Google ever present to help settle disputes. I make plans with it, using its
calendar to help determine what I can and cant do in the coming months. I even daydream
on the iPhone, idly calling up words and images when my concentration slips. (Chalmers
2011, p. 1.)
Clark argues that the material vehicles of cognition can spread out across brain,
body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself (Clark 2005, p. 1.)
Chalmers, in turn, argues that when parts of the environment are coupled to the
brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind (Chalmers 2011, p. 1.)
At the heart of the extended mind hypothesis is the parity principle: the idea that
if a process in the world works in a way that we should count as a cognitive
process if it were done in the head, then we should count it as a cognitive process all
the same (Chalmers 2011, p. 2). Thus, if a calculator helps us do mathematical
operations faster than we can do with our algorithmic mind, or if a web service can
serve inspiration faster than associations in the System 1, these things should be
considered parts of our cognitive architecture.
As Chalmers notes,
The dispositional beliefs, cognitive processes, perceptual mechanisms, and moods con-
sidered above all extend beyond the borders of consciousness, and it is plausible that it is
precisely the non-conscious part of them that is extended. I think there is no principled
reason why the physical basis of consciousness could not be extended in a similar way. It is
probably so extended in some possible worlds: one could imagine that some of the neural
correlates of consciousness are replaced by a module on ones belt, for example. (Chalmers
2011, p. 6.)
Perhpaps the non-conscious mindSystem 1should be construed not only in

terms of processes locally constrained to the thinking organism, but as incorpo-
rating also embodied and extended processes. It could be argued that any process
that can in principle produce a conscious result should be incorporated as an ele-
ment of System 1 thinking. For example, by using a cloud-based database, a person
can signicantly augment her memory capacity by being able to produce items of
information at will by using a mobile device. Likewise, by using social media
resources a person can boost her capacity in such cognitive processes as inference
and problem-solving, and even creative inspiration
System 1 could be construed as incorporating all processes resulting in a System
2 input relevant to the cognitive organism, whether they originate in the brain or in
the environment. Such a picture gets, however, too fuzzy, especially given the
constantly growing evidence of neural correlations with System 1 functions.
2.3 Intuition and the Environment 47
Lumping together external influences into the System 1 is not a very viable
position. A slightly more elaborate view is needed.
2.3.2 Systems Intelligence
For a large part of the 20th century, intelligence has been likened to the capacity to
draw logical-analytic inference. It was thought for a long time that intelligence is a
mostly xed capacity that can be measured by, for example, the Stanford-Binet
intelligence quotient test. Such attitudes gave rise to the idea that the measure of
intelligence is primarily psychometric, i.e. measurable by a standardized test.
This view to intelligence has, however, been contested by many researchers. In
particular, Howard Gardners idea of multiple intelligences has given rise to a
substantial literature where the existence of other kinds of intelligences, such as
musical or kinesthetic intelligence are speculated. (Gardner 1983.)
An interesting addition to the idea of multiple intelligences is the systems
intelligence thesis developed by Esa Saarinen and Raimo P. Hmlinen. Saarinen
and Hmlinen argue:
The theory of systems intelligence claims that human beings do have intelligence with
respect to entities [] that do not functionally reduce to their individual parts, that are
dynamic and may involve emergence, non-linearity and surprising cumulative aspects.
(Saarinen and Hmlinen 2010, p. 9.)
Systems intelligence concerns the capacity to function well in complex systems,

such as social interactions or complex environments, where the feedback loops
between the cognitive agent and external factors are too complicated to be handled
analytically. Saarinen and Hmlinen dene systems intelligence as follows:
By Systems Intelligence (SI) we mean intelligent behavior in the context of complex
systems involving interaction and feedback. A subject acting with Systems Intelligence
engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her
environment. She perceives herself as part of a whole, the influence of the whole upon
herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. By observing her own interdepen-
dence in the feedback intensive environment, she is able to act intelligently. (Saarinen and
Hmlinen 2004, p. 3.)
As Jarno Rajahalme points out, we are successfully participating in many

systems simultaneously, even though we never fully know those systems and often
are not even aware of them (Rajahalme 2008, p. 29). The environment and other
people are, in line with the extended mind hypothesis, seen to couple with the
cognitive agent in ways that produce new emergent properties that would not take
place without such coupling.
Some of the important background research for systems intelligence includes the
intersubjective systems theory and infant research. In infant research, it has been
shown that babies and mothers synchronize behavior at a very early age (See e.g.
Reyna and Pickler 2009). In a sense, then the baby and the mother function as a
single system, or a dyad, coupled together through the sensory coupling transmitting
expressions and emotions. The emotions shared by the mother and the infant are not
the result of sensory input-output systems, but are co-created by the two participants
in the systemic coupling.
Systems intelligence is about the ability to be sensitive to changes in social
interactions and the environment, at times without being consciously aware of such
changes. In this sense, the concept resembles the denition of intuition delineated
above. Systems intelligence is about the (mostly) non-conscious ability to produce
viable results, with the added determination that these results are produced in a
co-creative setting within systems containing a multitude of feedback loops between
various actors and objects.
At a central role to systems intelligence is the notion of engagement: the ability
to action-orientedly, adaptively, holistically and contextually link to the environ-
ment as an ongoing process. (Hmlinen and Saarinen 2008, p. vii.)
Martela and Saarinen delineate three principles of systems intelligence. First, we
must see our environment as a system we are embedded in. Second, we need to
understand that intelligent behavior cannot be traced back only to the capacities of
an individual, but arise as features of the entire system in which the individuals
operate. And lastly, intelligent behavior is always relative to a context. (Martela and
Saarinen 2008, p. 196 ff.)
Imagine a completely car-illiterate quantum physicist visiting a car shop and
participating in tuning up a sports car. She would probably not be considered very
smart in that context. Conversely, a world class car mechanic with no grasp of
mathematics beyond basic arithmetic visiting a physics lab at CERN would no
doubt receive similar consideration. And yet, in their respective domains of
expertise, both would be top performers, and considered intelligent by their peers.
Jones and Hmlinen (2013, p. 168) determine eight different traits that can be
used to evaluate systems intelligence. They are Systemic Perception, or under-
standing how we are embedded in systems; Attunement, or the capacity to connect
with others; Positive Engagement, or the quality of our interactions; Reflection, or
the ability to think about ones own thinking; Positive Attitude, or the capacity to
approach things with a positive outlook; Spirited Discovery, or the tendency and
willingness to creative engagement; Wise Action, or the ability to grasp situations;
and Effective Responsiveness, or the skill to nd the appropriate actions in a
situation.
If we accept the role of the environment in producing intuitive insight, the
borderline between systems intelligence and intuition becomes fuzzy. Systems
intelligence is about the subjects ability to act constructively and productively in a
system. Intuition is about the subjects ability to produce viable results non-con-
sciously in a domain of expertise.
The two conceptual constructs do not quite exactly coincide. For example, while
emotions and non-conscious processes gure as important to systems intelligence,
they do not function as a demarcation criteria for it as they do for intuition. But one
might argue that the capacity to intuitive thinking gures as a very important feature
of being able to act system intelligently.
Intuition can be seen as a central systems intelligent capability that we can use to
navigate complex systems. In terms of systems intelligence, Barghs priming,
Gigerenzers environment-driven heuristics and Kleins recognition-primed deci-
sion making can be construed as cognitive events where changes in the environ-
ment recongure the System 1 to function better in the changed situation. The
newly congured behavior in turn changes the environment, and thus a feedback
loop is born.
We are not cognitively isolated individuals, but rather function in complex
systems where the structure of ongoing cognitive processes changes constantly in
accord with changes in the system. This gives rise to the question of what is the
environments role in generating cognition more generally, and intuition more
specically.
2.3.3 Intuition, Organism, and Environment
As the Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon put it, Human beings, viewed as behaving
systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is
largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we nds our-
selves. (Simon 1996, p. 53.) Simon coined an apt analogy about the interactions of
the mind and the environment. According to him, the interplay between the mind
and the environment can be compared to the blades of a pair of scissors. One cannot
quite understand how scissors work by looking at just one of the blade. Likewise,
by just looking at the brain or the environment in isolation will not inform us of
how human cognition works. (Simon 1990, p. 7.)
Bargh and Chartrand argue that most of a persons everyday life is determined
not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes that
are put into motion by features of the environment and that operate outside of
conscious awareness and guidance (Bargh and Chartrand 1999, p. 462). They hold
that most of our daily actions are driven by mental processes that are stimulated by
environmental features and events, not conscious choice and guidance. (Bargh and
Chartrand 1999, p. 465.)
Cognition is directly dependent on elements in the environment. In addition to
the literature on cognitive priming, the effect of the environment on cognitive
function has been demonstrated on several occasions. Carver et al. (1983) exposed
some participants in an experiment to hostility related words. The participants then
took part in a supposedly separate electroshock experiment. Those participants who
had been exposed to the hostile words gave longer shocks than the control group.
Leonard Berkowitzs electroshock experiment studied the effects of environ-
mental elements on emotions (Berkowitz and LePage 1967). In the experiments,
participants gave electroshocks in three different rooms. The rst was decorated
plainly. The second contained sports equipment. The third had a revolver and a rifle
on display. The results were similar to Carvers experiment: those participants in
the room decorated with guns gave larger shocks than the control groups. The
rooms decoration alone made the participants feel more aggressive. The room
changed their cognition and consequently their behavior.
Gigerenzer argues that automatic and flexible rules in dual process terminol-
ogy, Type 1 processes are adapted to our past environment (Gigerenzer 2007,
pp. 4748.) Automatic rules are such that do not require a present evaluation of its
applicability, such as many instant inferences about visual cues. This is aptly
demonstrated by the Mller-Lyer illusion, where the two arrows appear to be of
different sizes, while they in fact are not.
Flexible rules, in turn, involve an evaluation of which one to use. Gigerenzer
argues that rules of thumb are anchored not just in the brain but also in the
environment (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 49.) This is also the nding of Dane and Pratt,
who point out that intuition involves a process in which environmental stimuli are
matched with some deeply held (non-conscious) category, pattern, or feature
(Dane and Pratt 2007, p. 37.)
Environment plays also an important part in the origin of both phylogenetic and
ontogenetic processes. Phylogenetic processes have their origin in the biologically
evolved environment that our species has lived in throughout the millennia,
sculpting the phenotype.
Our phylogenetic reflexive behavior is well suited for the natural human state
and is driven by a genetic codewhat Stanovich calls short leash goals of the
genes (Stanovich 2004). However, as cultural evolution has started to distance our
daily environments from the biologically evolved ones, the plasticity of the onto-
genetic processes has taken the task to adapt our capacities to function in such an
environment. As Gigerenzer puts it, capacities of the brain are always functions of
both our genes and our learning environment (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 58.)
In taking the environment into account, Type 1 processes can be divided
according to a taxonomy where ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes can also be
extended into the environment. An extended Type 1 process is such a process or
habit of action that requires some kind of an environmental component to carry out.
Andy Clark offers an example of a phylogenetic extended process in the
swimming activity of a bluen tuna. The sh could not, of course, swim without
the water, but furthermore, the tuna employs the water in a particular way to
optimize its swimming patterns. (Clark 1999, p. 345.) Another example of a phy-
logenetic extended process can be found in the process of stigmergy employed by
ants (Heylighen and Vidal 2008, p. 593). The ants instinctively leave pheromonal
tracks in the nature that guides their activity. While individual ants are not very
intelligent, the combination of the simple insects and their environmental cues
enables them to perform quite impressive feats.
An example of an ontogenetic extended process could be writing on a word
processor or playing a song on a piano. It is relatively difcult to keep a solid train
of thought together for a very long time without using some kind of a writing
aid. And of course, playing a song without the instrument present could be quite
difcult. Even for a very experienced pianist, reproducing the nger movements of
a piece of music accurately would be hard without the instrument.
To put the role of the environment in its proper place in the generation of
intuitive thought, we can construe it as one further cognitive System, let us say,
System 3.
System 3 is responsible for generating the context for action, for the cues for
Type 1 processes and it also participates instrumentally in extended Type 1 pro-
cesses. While System 1 can be differentiated according to ontogenetic and phylo-
genetic processes, System 3 can be differentiated into the culturally evolved and the
biologically evolved environments (See Fig. 2.4.). And similarly to the other two
systems, we can to an extent affect the processes of System 3, for example by
leaving visual cues in the environment, but we cannot entirely control them.
To summarize, intuitive processes are such Type 1 processes that have been
acquired ontogenetically and vary from one individual to another. Instinctive pro-
cesses are such Type 1 processes that have been acquired phylogenetically and are
typical across the entire species. Extended processes are such Type 1 processes that
have either an ontogenetic or phylogenetic component in the structure of System 1
but that also require an environmental element to carry out.
Type 1 processes take place in the Systems 1 and 3 and only post their results
into the conscious System 2. The reflective mind of System 2 can then evaluate and
decide depending on these results, and if need be, commit the intuitive and
instinctive inputs for further scrutiny in the algorithmic System 2 mind, employing
Type 2 (algorithmic) and Type 3 (reflective) processes in so doing.
All three systems form a nested hierarchy, at the center of which is the cognitive
agent as a subject of experience. Subjective experience is determined by the locus
of attention that is the center of the attention-driving, working-memory-limited
conscious mind, or System 2. This, in turn, is fed by the various autonomous
Fig. 2.4 The three nested

systems: System 1 (the
non-conscious), System 2
(the conscious) and System 3
(the environment)
biologic-
culturally
am ally
evolved ontogenetic phylogenetic
evolved
environ- processes S2 rm processes
environ-
ment
ment
S1
S3
systems and processes of the non-conscious System 1, which in turn is constantly

influenced by events and changes in the environment, or System 3.
In this light, intuition can be dened as a domain-specic, context-sensitive
capacity to produce viable results using both non-conscious and environmental
cognitive processes.
Or more simply put, intuition is the non-conscious ability to act systems intel-
ligently in a domain of expertise.
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Chapter 3
Using Intuition
Abstract Intuition is related to the phenomenon known as flow. In both flow and
intuition, the autonomous and non-conscious System 1 and the environment work
together without the need for conscious intervention. Also, conditions for nding
flow are similar to conditions to using intuition. Intuition is also important for
creative thinking. In creative thinking, both System 1s associative nature as well as
the divergence of non-conscious thought function to generate new kinds of ideas
and to nd novel associations between old ideas. Here, too, the proper interplay
between Systems 1 and 2 is important. Finally, intuition is, perhaps most forcibly,
one of our most powerful capacities for decision-making and problem-solving, as
recent research has shown. While not every idea that pops spontaneously into our
heads is worth heeding to, by learning to identify good intuitions we can signi-
cantly boost the quality of decision-making.

Keywords Flow Creativity Decision making Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Gary

Klein Gerd Gigerenzer Daniel Kahneman Amos Tversky Heuristics Biases
Expert decisions
Intuition is a domain-specic, non-conscious cognitive capacity that produces

viable results that register as conscious inputs. There is much we can use intuitions
for. But only if we know how to.
Intuition is related to the phenomenon known as flow, rst identied by pro-
fessor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1990). In both flow and intuition, the
autonomous and non-conscious System 1 and the environment, or System 3, work
together without the need for conscious intervention. Also, conditions for nding
flow are similar to conditions to using intuition: in both cases, too much reliance on
the controlled and conscious System 2 will block the fluid functioning of System 1.
Intuition is also important for creative thinking. In creative thinking, both
System 1s associative nature as well as the divergence of non-conscious thought
function to generate new kinds of ideas and to nd novel associations between old
ideas. Here, too, the proper interplay between Systems 1 and 2 is important.
Finally, intuition is, perhaps most forcibly, one of our most powerful capacities
for decision-making and problem-solving, as recent research has shown. While not

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-18176-9_3
56 3 Using Intuition
every idea that pops spontaneously into our heads is worth heeding to, by learning
to identify good intuitions we can signicantly boost the quality of decision-
making.
Using intuition is not just a matter of listening to the gut feelings or going
where System 1 points us. Rather, using intuition is about learning to balance a
delicate interplay between Systems 1, 2 and 3.
3.1 Intuition and Flow
Flow, the state of optimal experience, is characterized as a condition where the

sense of self and the sense of the passage of time disappear (Csikszentmihalyi
1990). Csikszentmihalyi denes flow as a state in which there is order in con-
sciousness (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 6). In flow, a person is completely
immersed in the present activity.
Intuition, in turn, is the non-conscious capacity to generate fruitful thoughts,
such as solutions to a problem or novel creative ideas. Based on the research on
dual processing (Evans 2003, 2009, 2010; Stanovich and West 2000; Stanovich
2004, 2009), automaticity and unconscious thought (see e.g. Bargh et al. 1996;
Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Djiksterhuis 2004; Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006)
and intuitive decision making (Gigerenzer 2007; Klein 1998; Kahneman 2011),
intuition is here construed as an expertise-based capacity to produce viable results
by autonomous and non-conscious, or Type 1, thought processes that are ontoge-
netic in origin.
Intuition is based on Type 1 ontogenic processes acquired by deliberate practice
and experience that enable an individual to produce creative insight and engage in
powerful decision making and problem solving in a domain of expertise.
Flow is, in turn, construed as optimal performance based on non-conscious
processes. In flow, a person uses her non-conscious cognitive capacity optimally
with regard to the task at hand. Like with intuition, in a culturally evolved envi-
ronment, flow is dependent on the development of ontogenetic Type 1 processes.
3.1.1 The Denition of Flow
The state of flow was made famous by the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(1975, 1990; for a comprehensive review of flow research, see Nakamura and
Csikszentmihalyi 2002). Flow is characterized as the state of optimal experience. It
is the state we experience when we can do things almost automatically, getting
carried away so that even the sense of time and the sense of self evaporate. In terms
of what has been said above, flow can be characterized as the state where non-
conscious processes are carried out without obstacles or the intervention of con-
scious thinking.
3.1 Intuition and Flow 57
According to Csikszentmihalyi (1990, p. 49), there are several typical conditions

for flow:
1. The chance of completing the task at hand.
2. Concentration on the task at hand.
3. Clear goal.
4. Immediate feedback.
5. Deep but effortless involvement.
6. A sense of control.
7. Concern for the self disappears.
8. The sense of the duration of the task is altered.
The chance of completing the task at hand means that there are no immediate
obstacles to the task at hand. Concentration on the task at hand means that there are
no immediate distractions to take the attention away from task-relevant issues. A
clear goal means that the person in flow has a distinct idea of what is the expected
end result of the task, for example completing a sports exercise or writing a memo.
Immediate feedback means that the person can somehow monitor their progress
towards the goal, for example by counting milestones when running or pages when
writing a paper. Deep but effortless involvement means that the process is enjoyable.
A sense of control means that the person feels that the process of carrying out the
task does not cause stress and that the task and its demands are balanced. Concern
for the self disappears means that the sense of the self as a reflecting individual
fades to the background. This does not mean the same as unconsciousness, but
rather a state, where the reflective part of System 2 involved in introspection is
momentarily offline. And nally, the sense of the duration of the task is altered
means that time just seems to fly, and hours may seem like minutes to the person in
flow.
Flow is an immersive state where the System 2, or at least the reflective part
thereof, is momentarily offline. This is also apparent in recent research in flow
psychophysiology, where it is speculated that flow correlates with hypofrontality,
i.e. lower activations in the frontal areas of the brain typically associated with
reflective System 2 activity. (See e.g. Dietrich 2004; Peifer 2012.)
To experience flow, one must influence some or all of the task-related param-
eters (chance of completing, clear goals and immediate feedback) and cognition-
related parameters (sense of control, concentration). Experiencing flow is then
identiable by the indicators of flow (lack of concern for the self, or deep
immersion, and the sense of alteration of time).
In structuring ones tasks so that they can be completed, that they are broken
down into clear goals and that one gets immediate feedback, the tasks enable flow.
Structuring tasks relieves the load on the limited capacity of working memory and
System 2, putting to use the more signicant System 1 resources. As Kahneman
points out, We normally avoid mental overload by dividing our tasks into multiple
easy steps, committing intermediate results to long-term memory or to paper rather
than to an easily overloaded working memory (Kahneman 2011, p. 37).
Balancing the tasks so that one feels a sense of control and arranging the working
environment so that one can concentrate further help towards the flow state:
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the
challenges are just balanced with the persons capacity to act. (Csikszentmihalyi
1990, p. 52). The balance of skill and challenge are also relevant to System 2
capacity in two ways. In the bored state, the challenge is not sufciently demanding,
allowing the mind to wander. In the anxious state, the challenge is too demanding,
overloading working memory and causing distress. When skill and challenge are
balanced the entire capacity of System 2 can be directed to the action itself, therefore
causing an immersive feeling of being one with the action. When a challenging
enough task is met with sufcient skills, flow ensues: The best moments usually
occur when a persons body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to
accomplish something difcult and worthwhile (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 3).
Finally, the indicators of flow show the presence of the flow state. Since flow is a
state where the reflective self is entirely involved with the activity at hand with no
room for introspection, the indicators can usually only be detected after the expe-
rience itself, or intermittently during an activity if one drops out of flow.
Interestingly enough, loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self, and
certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the
self. (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 65). In the flow state, the reflective mind is
completely involved with the task at hand, with no room for introspection.
In most cases, flow requires a certain degree of skill. In a sense, conscious
thought has a kind of a problem-solving function: it is employed when ontogenetic
and phylogenetic Type 1 processes fail to produce desired results. As Kahneman
points out, most of what you (your System 2) think and do originates in your
System 1, but System 2 takes over when things get difcult, and it normally has the
last word. (Kahneman 2011, p. 25). When a sufcient level of skill is acquired,
activity can be dedicated to System 1 to proceed automatically: the complexity
and viability of acquired habits, or ontogenetic Type 1 processes, enables one to
produce the wanted results without the need for the conscious mind to intervene.
While flow typically demands relatively high skill level, an interesting variant of
flow is micro-flow: e.g. drumming the table with ngers or dgeting. These states
do not require skills at least of any considerable complexity, but they do contribute
to a state akin to flow. There are also states phenomenologically similar to flow,
such as mindfulness and awe, that indicate the fluid activity of System 1.
In flow, a persons awareness seems to meld with the doing itself. One is
immersed in the activity so that no verbal or conscious thoughts enter into ones
mind. In flow state one is, therefore, completely immersed in System 1 activity. To
this end, it is important to eliminate such distractions that may ensue either from the
environment or from System 1 itself.
As research has shown, any changes in the environment, such as demands from
other people, or the beeping of an email application, may cause new processes to
arise in System 1, causing it then to consistently cause disturbances to System 2
(Heylighen and Vidal 2008). It has been demonstrated also, in what has become
known as the Zeigarnik effect, that unnished tasks have the tendency to surface
3.1 Intuition and Flow 59
to consciousness and thus interrupt System 2 (Zeigarnik 1927; Masciampo and

Baumeister 2011).
Activation of System 2, in turn, drops the person out of the flow state. If these
environment-dependent processes are, however, somehow controlled, e.g. by
working in a closed and quiet space or writing unnished tasks into a to-do list,
System 2 is left undisturbed, and complete immersion to the task at hand is
possible.
In flow, the task being performed is its own reward. The intrinsically motivated
purpose of the task arises from what Csikszentmihalyi characterizes as an autotelic
personality (Csikszentmihalyi 1990). An autotelic personality is one that gains
motivation from the action itself, not from its external rewards or consequences.
Also, setting clear goals or identifying the purpose of a task increase the likelihood
of an autotelic experience.
The fact that constant feedback is needed from the action links with the envi-
ronmental factors involved in flow. With no feedback, it is impossible to know
whether the processes involved in the action actually produce the desired results.
Therefore, more conscious effort is required, subsequently disrupting flow.
To sum up, flow is the state where Type 1 processes are carried out unobstructed
to such an extent that no intervention of System 2 is required. This requires also that
the Type 1 processes have the required basis in System 1 (skills) and sufcient
System 3 demand for concentration (challenges).
Thus, flow can be construed as an action-oriented counterpart for intuitive
thought. In flow Systems 1 and 3, or the non-conscious Type 1 processes and the
environment, are balanced so that no intervention from the System 2 reflective mind
is required.
3.1.2 Intuition and Flow
Intuition is the non-conscious capacity to produce viable results by ontogenetic

Type 1 processes. Flow is a state of action where we employ solely Type 1 pro-
cesses. While it can be argued that there are also instinctive states where we are in
flow, in a modern, complex and culturally evolved society, reaching flow requires
to a great extent intuitive, or ontogenetic Type 1 processes. In this sense, flow is
Type 1 doing, whereas intuition is Type 1 thinking.
Everyday life requires some combination of intuitive, instinctive and analytic
thought. When we have generated a sufciently complex ontogenetic capacity of
action, we can then act more often in a state of flow, with more seldom need for
conscious interruptions. With sufciently developed ontogenetic processes in
placewith sufcient skillwe can commit much of our work and cognition to the
System 1, without needing the intervention of System 2.
It may well be that in a natural state, the human organism can reach flow often
just by relying on instinctive, or phylogenetic, processes. These processes have
developed throughout millennia of natural selection, and they are very robust in
terms of survival in a natural environment. The human organism has not, however,
gone through signicant biological evolution through the last sixty thousand years
or so (Renfrew 2008). Cultural evolution has, in turn, speedily changed the envi-
ronment in which we live. Therefore, acting on instinct alone does not enable us to
reach flow state very consistently. Indeed, many reactions driven by the more
aggressive, energy-maximizing or sexual instincts tend to lead to trouble in the
modern society.
Intuition, or the ontogenically developed Type 1 processes that drive our indi-
vidual automated behavior, can, however, enable us to adapt to even such a complex
and culturally developed environment. By acting and practicing in a culturally
complex environment, we are able to acquire skills more suited to survival and
well-being in the modern society.
Learning to play the piano or to kick a football may be more fruitful skills to live
a good life in modern society, than knowing how to hit another person on the nose.
And in such a complex environment, adapted ontogenetic processesintuitionis
what can also consistently keep us in the state where we can rely on the automated
processes that drive our behavior. Such adaptation to a culturally evolved envi-
ronment can also feed our Type 1 ontogenetic processes so that we can quickly and
intuitively recognize viable ways to function in novel situations.
While intuition, as here dened, is not a necessary requirement for reaching
flow, it seems to be the best bet in terms of the everyday life of a culturally evolved
society. By acquiring sufcient skills within a domain, by eliminating conscious
distractions, by generating sufcient feedback and by balancing each task according
to the present skill level, a person may rely on her individually generated intuitive
cognitive capacityand reach the flow state consistently.
Both intuition and flow tap into the System 1 non-conscious capacity. While
flow appears to ensue from the unconstrained functionality of System 1, and the
balance between Systems 1 and 3, ontogenetic, or intuitive Type 1 processes play a
prominent role in facilitating flow in the modern society. Owing to the fact that our
environment has, through cultural evolution, changed a lot from the one to which
we are biologically accustomed to, phylogenetic, or instinctive Type 1 processes
often do not generate viable results. As Csikszentmihalyi points out,
Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is ne as long as everything goes well.
But the moment biological or social goals are frustratedwhich in the long run is inevi-
tablea person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or
else he will waste his energies in inner turmoil (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, p. 207).
By learning sufcient skills and tapping into themand, most importantly,

knowing to trust those skillswe can often let our intuitive System 1 capacity
guide us in acting, making decisions and generating insight in everyday life.
Insofar as that intuitive capacity consistently produces viable results, we may
experience the state of flowthe optimal state of acting as a human being in the
modern society.
3.2 Intuition and Creativity 61
3.2 Intuition and Creativity
Creative people know that sometimes ideas may arise from very surprising sources.
The author of the popular comic book series V for Vendetta, Alan Moore, expressed
his frustration about having to explain where his ideas come from. He himself had
no idea (Moore and Lloyd 2005, p. 268). August Kekul famously saw the answer
to his benzene molecule conundrum in a dream (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 101).
Albert Einstein was momentarily stumped during a lecture and after nobody in the
audience knew the answer either, Einstein told the audience to leave some space in
their notes for the time being. Ten minutes later, in the middle of a later point,
Einstein exclaimed: Ive got it. (Isaacson 2007, pp. 159160).
In all these cases, the product of creativitythe comic, the scientic break-
through, the solution to the calculationwas produced by a typical case of System
1 use: an autonomous, non-conscious, associative process that posts its end result
into the working memory, or the System 2. Furthermore, these creative insights
were all produced by a combination of ontogenetic Type 1 processesconventions
of comic writing, of chemical sciences, or of mathematicsthat the creative
individual had acquired through experience and practice. Moore, Kekul and
Einstein were all experts in their respective elds, and could therefore commit many
of their cognitive processes to their well-trained System 1.
The processes that produce creative breakthroughs are to a great extent intuitive:
produced by ontogenetic Type 1 processes that have been acquired within a domain
of expertise. As Kahneman notes, intuition, creativity and increased reliance on
System 1 form a cluster (Kahneman 2011, p. 68). (One could also add the state of
flow into this cluster.)
Interestingly, though, there is a twist: intuitively viable Type 1 processes alone
do not sufce for creating new thingsafter all, they are about the viability of
working in a domain, and hence often based on acquired habits based on past
experience. The associative capacity of System 1 must be put to play, coupled with
processes conducive to creating new associations and breaking down acquired
habits to reach creative solutions.
3.2.1 Dening Creativity
One of the paradigmatic descriptions of intuitive experiencethe a-ha! moment, a

new idea that pops surprisingly into the headis also a typical expression of
creativity. Creativity, however, is not just about the moments of inspiration. It is
also about hard and systematic work towards building something newwhether it
be a work of art, a solution to a problem or a scientic theory.
The denitions of creativity range as diverse as the denitions of intuition:
various researchers have come up with different ways to approach the phenomenon.
Plato held that creativity happens when god-like Muses influence people (Plato
1997c). The denition in the Encyclopedia Britannica is that creativity is the

ability to bring into existence something new (Kerr 2014). According to Robert
Sternberg, creativity is the ability to produce something that is both novel and
appropriate (Sternberg and Lubart 1999, p. 3). Finally, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
denes creativity as a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is
changed (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 8).
Theresa Amabile lists three components of creativity: expertise, creative-thinking
skills and motivation. Expertise means understanding the domain where one
operates: in a word, knowledgetechnical, procedural and intellectual (Amabile
1998, p. 78). Creative-thinking skills, in turn, determine how much flexibility
we have in operating within a domain. Our learned skills are a blessing and a curse at
the same time: on one hand, they enable us to function well, when situations
correspond with the past, but on the other they delimit us when a new kind of a
situation arises. To face new challenges, we need creative-thinking skills that
determine how flexibly and imaginatively people approach problems. Do their
solutions upend the status quo? Do they persevere through dry spells? (Amabile
1998, p. 78).
Finally, without motivation hardly any creative work gets done. As what comes
to motivation, Amabile strikes a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic moti-
vation, in favor of the former:
Not all motivation is created equal. An inner passion to solve the problem at hand leads to
solutions far more creative than do external rewards, such as money. This component
called intrinsic motivationis the one that can be most immediately influenced by the work
environment (Amabile 1998, p. 78).
Csikszentmihalyi lists likewise three key parameters to creativity: the person, the
domain and the eld. The person is the individual taking part in creative thinking.
The domain consists of a set of rules and procedures that determine acceptable
conduct. Domains include areas of life such as mathematics, physics, postmodern
literature, chess, football and so forth. And nally, there is the eld: the collection
of the individuals who determine whether a work or a solution is accepted in a
domain or not (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 28).
The creative individual needs some understanding of the domain in which she
operates: [] Edisons or Einsteins discoveries would be inconceivable without
the prior knowledge, without the intellectual and social network that stimulated
their thinking, and without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread their
innovations (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 7).
Furthermore, the expertise and understanding must be put to use so that the
people responsible for that domains eld can qualify the work as appropriate for
the domain:
There is no way to know whether a thought is new except with reference to some standards,
and there is no way to tell whether it is valuable until it passes social evaluation. Therefore,
creativity does not happen inside peoples heads, but in the interaction between a persons
thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.
(Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 23.)
Creativity is systemic interaction between Systems 1, 2 and 3. The domain and

the eld, in System 3, dictate the framework in which a System 2 input produced by
Type 1 processes can be considered creative. This input, in turn affects System 3,
changing its structure and affecting the domain, thus also updating the conditions
for a creative contribution.
According to Csikszentmihalyi creativity occurs when a person, using the
symbols of a given domain such as music, engineering, business or mathematics,
has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the
appropriate eld for inclusion into the relevant domain. (Csikszentmihalyi 1996,
p. 28). In other words, creativity concerns ideas or products that change or trans-
form existing domains.
3.2.2 The Dynamics of Creativity
Csikszentmihalyi likens the creative process to genetic evolution: Creativity is the

cultural equivalent of the process of genetic changes that result in biological evo-
lution, where random variations take place in the chemistry of our chromosomes,
below the threshold of consciousness. (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 7). Creativity
enables us to vary behaviors and seek new solutions to problems. In other words,
creativity enables us to adapt to both the biologically and culturally evolved
environments.
Interestingly, it is exactly the creative solutions to the challenges of the bio-
logical environmentsustenance, shelter, communication and so forththat
actually started to produce the culturally evolved environment. This in turn poses
new challenges that again require creative solutions, and so forth, producing an
ongoing process of cultural change.
Creativity is not a singular job, nor a task for just the System 1 or System 2. In
fact, creativity is a lot about the ability to switch between contradictory opposites.
In a sense, then, creativity is about being able to function in the constraints of a
paradox.
As Csikszentmihalyi notes, we have two contradictory ways to act: a conser-
vative tendency that is geared towards self-preservation and saving energy, and an
expansive tendency that drives us towards exploration, novelty and risk. Curiosity,
according to Csikszentmihalyi, belongs to the scope of the latter. Csikszentmihalyi
1996, p. 11).
The creative individual is able to switch between what J.P. Guilford famously
called convergent and divergent intelligence (Guilford 1967). Convergent intelli-
gence means the capacity to draw conscious inference, and coincides roughly with
Stanovichs notion of the algorithmic System 2 mind (Stanovich 2004, 2009). It
involves solving well-dened problems that have a pre-determined singular correct
answer. Divergent thinking, in turn, concerns the capacity to generate lots of new
ideas, to change ones trails of thought, to switch perspectives and to generate ideas
that are new, original and unusual. Convergent intelligence, in other words, is a
measure of performance in terms of the existing habits of action. Divergent

intelligence measures performance in terms of forming new habits.
Typically creativity is equated with divergent thinking. However, creativity is
not just the capability to generate new ideas, but new, viable ideas. To this end, the
capacity to rene the new ideas further is just as important to creativity as is coming
up with novel associations. And this capacity for development requires convergent
thinking.
There are two kinds of creativity: the ability to produce novel ideas in a domain
(generative creativity) and the ability to resolve conflicts within a domain (problem-
solving creativity). In terms of Type 1 processes the two work almost in an opposite
fashion. The rst type of creativity involves the associative power based on
acquired ontogenetic Type 1 processes. Ideas can be construed as a network, or
associative memory, where each idea is linked to many others. This reflects the way
our brain is constructed as a neural network. As one idea is evoked, many
associated ideas are activated at the same time. While such network activations
arguably take place constantly in System 1, only a few of such associations register
in System 2 as a conscious thought. As Kahneman (2011, p. 52) notes, most of the
work of associative thinking is silent, hidden from our conscious selves.
With a sufciently wide expertise in a domain, a creative individual can create a
rich variety of associations which may produce new, viable results for that domain.
As Csikszentmihalyi notes, without sufcient exposition to a domain, a person
cannot be creative (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 29).
Expertise can, however, also be a burden. To this end, the other type of crea-
tivity, problem-solving, works in the opposite way. Instead of creating novelty on
the grounds of existing ontogenic Type 1 processes, problem-solving creativity
works by breaking down existing thought patterns.
We seek to understand the world through concepts and patterns, and try to
squeeze our experiences into a coherent whole (Kahneman 2011, p. 115; Klein
1998, loc 2191). Add to this Stanovichs principle of the cognitive miser (default to
System 1 thinking whenever possible; see Sect. 1.3 for details), we typically follow
the habituated patterns that have proven to work. Except when they dont.
In such cases, one needs to think outside the box, or employ what Edward de
Bono called lateral thinking (de Bono 1990). This means that one must be able to
break down the acquired Type 1 processes and to generate completely new kinds of
patterns of thinking and behavior.
There are various ways one can intentionally break down habituated Type 1
processes. Lateral thinking skills involve challenging fundamental assumptions or
introducing randomness in the creative process (de Bono 1990). Gary Klein
describes how experts can use leverage points to create new avenues of inquiry. A
leverage point is a small difference that makes a large difference (Klein 1998, loc
1395). It is a focus for building solutions to problems, a salient feature identied on
the grounds of expertise that can help the expert to redirect her activities to create
novel solutions.
Generative creativity and problem-solving creativity work with associating and
breaking down existing Type 1 processes. Both types of creativity require a
dynamic between divergent and convergent thinking: the capacity to move from
novelty to renement, and back to novelty again to create associative patterns that
are somehow new, viable and recognized by a eld of experts in a domain.
3.2.3 The Role of Intuition in Creativity
While at the rst glance, creativity and intuition would appear to be more or less the
same thingthe capacity to produce viable results using Type 1 processesthey
are, in fact, not. Every human being has intuitive processes driven by ontogenetic
Type 1 processes that are input into the System 2 as insights, whether they abide by
them or not. But not every human being practices creativity on an active basis. The
difference is whether we take the intuitive insight and do something new with it
within a domain.
Due to our habit driven nature many people become quite repetitive in their life
patterns, with no interest in creative thought. As Csikszentmihalyi notes, without a
good dose of curiosity, wonder, and interest in what things are like and in how they
work, it is difcult to recognize an interesting problem (Csikszentmihalyi 1996,
p. 53). The creative process starts with the acknowledgment of a puzzle or a
problem, something that needs to be done to which the existing skills are not
sufcient. While intuition and creativity do coincide, their relationship is slightly
more complicated.
Intuition works as a driver to creative thought. In other words, intuitive thought
processes and the results they post in System 2, are one of the most powerful ways
to generate new insight and to feed divergent thought. Creativity is practically
impossible by System 2 processes alone. System 2 produces results via the algo-
rithmic mind, and the algorithms are based on already existing thought processes. It
would be difcult to imagine a creative individual with no intuitive processes
whatsoever. Creativity is not fundamentally algorithmiceven if several ways of
algorithmic and rule-based thought can in fact feed creativity. For novel results, the
associative capacity of System 1 is required.
Regardless of the clich of the creative individual as constantly generating new
ideas and insight, creativity also requires focus, convergent thought and therefore
the input of the System 2 and the algorithmic mind. Also, changes in the envi-
ronment, or System 3, can fuel creativity. As Csikszentmihalyi notes, It is easier to
enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to
make people think more creatively (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 1).
The most important criterion for creative thought is the ability to vary between
convergent and divergent thought, or System 2 and System 1 driven thought,
respectively. Djiksterhuis and Meurs discovered in their experiments that in dis-
tracting the conscious mind for a while in a creativity task produced more varied
and creative results:
Throughout the experiments, the items participants listed under unconscious thought
conditions were more original. It was concluded that whereas conscious thought may be
focused and convergent, unconscious thought may be more associative and divergent
(Djiksterhuis and Meurs 2006, p. 135).
An important, albeit contested, intuitive facility linked to creativity is incuba-

tion: the capacity to commit ideas to rest and coming up with viable new ideas or
solutions after a given period. The creativity literature is abundant with anecdotes
about the creative genius use of incubation (Djiksterhuis and Meurs 2006, p. 136).
It is exemplied in this quote from he inventor Frank Offner:
I will tell you one thing that I found in both science and technology: If you have a problem,
dont sit down and try to solve it. Because I will never solve it if I am just sitting down and
thinking about it. It will hit me maybe in the middle of the night, while I am driving my car
or taking a shower, or something like that (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 99).
While the notion has been at times contested, there is also a growing amount of
empirical evidence in favor of incubation (Djiksterhuis and Meurs 2006, p. 136).
Incubation, like all creative thought, requires some knowledge of the eld in
question:
it is obvious that incubation cannot work for a person who has not mastered a domain or
been involved in a eld. A new solution to quantum electrodynamics doesnt occur to a
person unfamiliar with this branch of physics, no matter how long he or she sleeps
(Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 102).
Incubation also typically requires some period of more analytic grappling with a
problem, as Dane and Pratt point out (Dane and Pratt 2007, p. 40). Before incu-
bation, working analytically with the topic may prime relevant Type 1 processes
and enhance creativity.
Incubation takes place in the non-conscious System 1, utilizing its associative
power. It could be speculated that the insight occurs once the System 1 has pro-
duced an association that somehow ts with the existing understanding of the
domain. Insight would, from this point of view, be then a type of non-conscious
recognition, or pattern t, in a similar vein to Herbert Simons and Gary Kleins
idea of intuition as recognition. Csikszentmihalyi describes this as follows:
The insight presumably occurs when a subconscious connection between ideas ts so well
that it is forced to pop out into awareness, like a cork held underwater breaking out into the
air after it is released (Csikszentmihalyi 1996, p. 104).
In incubation, Type 1 processes are activated by the problem at hand so that new
associations can take place in the autonomous processing of the System 1. Thus,
new kinds of solutions and associations (for example, associating the Ouroboros
snakes image with the benzene molecule as with Kekul) are generated.
As the psychologist Liane Gabora points out associative (or System 1) thought is
conducive to unearthing similarity or relationships between items not previously
thought to be related (Gabora 2007, p. 10). Analytic (or System 2) thought is, on
the other hand, conducive to hammering out causal relationships between items
already thought to be related (Gabora 2007, p. 10). Analytic thought requires
attention and the activation of System 2, whereas associative thought requires

deactivation of System 2 and the uninhibited functioning of System 1.
To sum up, creativity can be divided into two categories: generative creativity
and problem-solving creativity. Both types of creativity involve producing some-
thing new (a product or a solution) within a domain. Creativity is driven by intuition
and the associative capacity of System 1. But it also requires an interplay between
the associative and divergent System 1, the convergent System 2 and the domain-
specifying System 3.
Creativity is intuition put to use in generating new ideas, products and solutions
that change the domain of expertise.
3.3 Intuitive Decision Making
Ever since Tverskys and Kahnemans groundbreaking work on heuristics and

biases, intuition and the non-conscious have been edging towards mainstream
discourse as viable contenders to the rationality-based models for decision-making
(Tversky and Kahneman 1974, 1982; Kahneman 2011). In the literature on the non-
conscious mind, it is often, in fact, argued that intuitive decision making may even
be superior to conscious, rational decision-making (Djiksterhuis 2004; Djiksterhuis
and Nordgren 2006; Klein 1998; Gigerenzer 2007). Gary Klein also demonstrated
that everyday decisions do not often follow the rational models at all, and that in
particular expert decision making is more often intuitive than rational (Klein 1998).
In the popular literature Malcolm Gladwells bestseller Blink brought intuitive
decision making to the awareness of both the general public as well as leaders in
business and politics (Gladwell 2005). This has given rise to an avalanche of
anecdotes about intuitive decision-making, ranging from the Apple CEO Steve
Jobs avowal of the superiority of intuitive thought to the countless stories of
executives whose intuition prevailed (Isaacson 2011; Dane and Pratt 2007). To this
end, popular literature, ranging from self help books to the blogosphere, is full of
advice about trusting your gut feelings and going with the flow.
Intuitive decision making is not, however, as simple as just trusting the gut
feeling. While indeed many of our non-conscious System 1 inputs serve us well,
there are also many that do not. As Gerd Gigerenzer points out, hunches are often
good, except when they are not (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 17). The question is, when can
we trust our non-conscious mind to decide?
We get a lot of inputs into the System 2 that are generated by the associative
machinery of the System 1. But which of these should we heed to? Which of the
System 1 inputs are actually viable for decision making, and which should we
ignore? The problem is ever the more pressing owing to the fact that phenome-
nologically, i.e. in terms of the experience of the inputs, both phylogenetic and
ontogenetic Type 1 processes feel approximately the same. But in a culturally
evolved environment typically only ontogenetic Type 1 processes produce viable
intuitive insight.
3.3.1 The Phenomenology of Intuition
How do we recognize an intuition? We all more or less know that a-ha! moment,
when somebody just gets it. But how does it actually feel? In other words, what are
the demarcation criteria for some cognitive event to qualify as intuitive?
Intuition registers as surprising, forceful conscious cognitive event or System 2
input that we typically trust. There are a three indicators that are identied as typical
to intuitions. Intuitions are considered immediate, clear and forceful. In addition to
these three typical criteria, it is possible that sensations typically associated with
flow, such as deep feeling of presence, may also be used to demarcate intuitive
inputs.
The immediacy of intuitions means the sudden appearance in consciousness of
the product of a non-conscious process, without our awareness of the process itself.
These are the snap judgments that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his bestseller
Blink (Gladwell 2005). This immediacy of intuitions is exemplied in the heuristics
and biases work of Kahneman and Tversky. They show that intuitive thought takes
place almost immediately once an appropriate stimulus has been presented
(Kahneman 2011, p. 19 ff.).
The clarity of intuitions means that there is typically no ambiguity about the
intuitions once they appear. Intuitive inputs typically appear clear and well laid out,
seemingly without contradictory elements. As Gerd Gigerenzer argues, intuition is a
judgment, that appears quickly in consciousness, whose underlying reasons we are
not fully aware of, and is strong enough to act upon (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 16).
The force of intuitions is a typical phenomenological feature of intuitions in that
as a clear and immediate cognitive event happens, without our understanding the
process that led there, we are usually very certain about it.
In addition to the three typical criteria, it seems that mood influences intuitive
thinking (Kahneman 2011, p. 69). It is possible that positive sensations typical to
the flow experience may also function as indicators of intuitive inputs. In flow, a
person feels a pleasant, balanced sensation of fluidity of action. If a System 2 input
is accompanied with such a feeling of fluidity, it could also be qualied as intuitive,
in particular insofar as it has not been preceded by previous algorithmic thought.
The problem with all that is said is that our instinctive cognitive events, or
System 2 inputs produced by phylogenetic Type 1 processes, are phenomenolog-
ically almost similar in nature. When an instinctive process takes hold, it also
appears with pressing immediacy, without carrying an algorithmic process evi-
dently with it. An instinct also feels very clear (I must have this chocolate bar!)
and is very pressing and forceful in naturethat is, until the System 2 kicks in and
contests the instinctual input.
The same holds also with negative heuristics, or cognitive biases, aka cognitive
processes that produce unwanted results, such as the tendency to orient towards
conrming existing beliefs (the conrmation bias) or the tendency to trust expla-
nations after the fact (the hindsight bias). As Kahneman points out, being condent
about an intuition is not a reliable guide to its validity (Kahneman 2011, p. 239).
3.3 Intuitive Decision Making 69
To this end, while the three identication criteria do serve us a great deal in
identifying intuitions, there remains the fact that both instincts and negative heu-
ristics share roughly the same phenomenology. To this end, just trusting our gut
is hardly a very good rule of the thumb. We rather need to employ both our System
1 and System 2 to put intuition to work.
3.3.2 Heuristics and Biases
Consider the following calculation:
22?
The answer appears in your conscious mind practically as soon as you lay your
eyes on the calculation. This is a Type 1 ontogenetic process posting its result
immediately into your System 2. The environmental factor (the calculation on the
page) triggers the learned process and the end result is surprisingly immediate. You
probably were not aware of the algorithm producing the answer (for example in
thinking about two oranges and two apples or something similar). The answer just
pops right into your head.
Now consider the next puzzle:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball
cost?
Again, the ontogenetic Type 1 processes kick in and the answer is obvious: the
ball costs 10. Except that does it?
Interestingly, more than 50 % of the students at top universities such as Harvard,
MIT and Princeton gave this answer (Kahneman 2011, p. 45). And yet it is the
wrong answer. If the ball costs 10 and the bat costs 1$ more, the bat costs $1.10.
Their combined costs would be $1.20. The correct answer is that the ball costs 5
and the bat a dollar more, that is to say $1.05.
This is not a difcult problem for a top university student to solve. And yet the
majority of students failed to solve it (Kahneman 2011, pp. 4445). Their System 1
jumped to a conclusion, and System 2 failed to spot the error.
Consider next this famous problem:
Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy.
As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and
also participated in antinuclear demonstrations (Kahneman 2011, p. 156).
Which one is the more probable, that Linda is a bank teller, or that Linda is a
bank teller who is active in the feminist movement? Almost 90 % of the under-
graduates presented with this task chose the latter option (Kahneman 2011, p. 158).
Yet this is a massive logical blunder. The probability of Lindas being a feminist
bank teller is statistically signicantly smaller than the probability of her being a
bank teller. This is a simple fact of class inclusion: feminist bank tellers are all a
part of the larger group of all bank tellers. This is known as the conjunction fallacy.
As Tversky and Kahneman point out, Like it or not, A cannot be less probable
than (A&B), and a belief to the contrary is fallacious (Tversky and Kahneman
1982, p. 98).
Why are we then so persuaded to believe the latter option? Even once the
statistical facts are laid bare, our minds tend to want to keep with the feminist
option. Even at the face of logic, our System 1 resists. This is because System 1
does not work by the rules of logic.
These are examples of heuristics and biases that were made famous by the
research of Tversky and Kahneman (see e.g. Tversky and Kahneman 1974;
Kahneman et al. 1982; Kahneman and Frederick 2005; Kahneman 2011). While the
System 1 has a massive capacity, it is also riddled with problems.
Heuristics are rules of thumb that System 1 uses to simplify complicated deci-
sion-making situations. The technical denition of heuristic is a simple procedure
that helps nd adequate, though often imperfect, answers to difcult questions.
(Kahneman 2011, p. 97). They are mostly based on Type 1 ontogenetic processes in
the sense that in many life situations these kinds of shortcuts have proved to work
well.
Cognitive biases are likewise System 1 shortcuts, but ones that consistently
prove to be detrimental in everyday life. These biases, while sharing the phe-
nomenology of intuitions in terms of immediacy, clarity and force, typically mis-
guide our thinking. To this end, one of the most important skills in using intuition is
to learn to recognize the most typical cognitive biases.
System 1 is prone to jumping to conclusions. As Kahneman has found in his
research, System 1 often replaces a difcult question with an easier one (Kahneman
2011, p. 97). The System 1 is prone to dealing with only the information that is
close at hand (Kahneman 2011, p. 85). And while many of the heuristics, or the
rules of thumb, of System 1 are useful, negative heuristics, or cognitive biases are
typically very detrimental (Kahneman 2011, p. 110).
There are a huge number of heuristics and biases uncovered by research in the
recent decades. Table 3.1 lists some of the most well known and typical ones. There
are no short cuts to dealing with cognitive biases. In order to differentiate intuitions
from negative heuristics, you need to be aware of the typical ways our minds can
fool us. Fortunately, by familiarizing with the common heuristics and biases, you
can protect your decision-making from the most typical System 1 blunders.
Affect heuristic means allowing emotions such as fear or pleasure to guide
decision making. The idea of affect heuristics usefulness is based on Antonio
Damasios concept of somatic markers: the recognized factors in a situation are
associated with an emotion from past experience. This guides our decision making
correctly (Damasio 2005). Unfortunately, emotional response may also be produced
directly by phylogenetic processes, in which case the algorithmic mind should be
brought to play, at least insofar as one is situated in a culturally evolved
environment.
Table 3.1 Heuristics and Examples of heuristics Examples of cognitive biases

biases
Affect heuristic Attribute substitution
Anchoring Base rate fallacy
Availability heuristic Bias blind spot
Familiarity heuristic Conrmation bias
Representativeness heuristic Conjunction fallacy
Recognition heuristic Hindsight bias
Take-the-best Stereotyping
Anchoring heuristic means the tendency to stick to a recently perceived anchor.

In Kahnemans experiment, participants were asked to estimate the number of UN
members in Africa. Before the test they got to spin a rigged wheel of fortune, which
should have had no effect on the evaluation. However, the number had a signicant
effect: on average, those who saw the number 10 on the wheel of fortune answered
25 %, and those who saw 65 answered 45 % (Kahneman 2011, p. 119).
Availability heuristic means judging a problem according to the examples that
come to mind. The availability substitutes a question for another, which produces
systematic errors. A typical effect of the availability heuristic is an availability
cascade, a nonevent that is inflated by the media or the public, until everybody
thinks it is an absolute truth. This is typical when media blows some phenomenon
out of proportion, such as the annual pig or bird flu scares, and people feel like
everybody getting sick around them, thanks to the constant bombardment of
information about the disease.
Familiarity heuristic is a variation of the availability heuristic, where in decision
making situations a familiar and well known option is preferred over a superior
novel one. This is a heuristic that guides a lot of consumer behavior, to the point
that people often prefer an inferior familiar product over a superior, unfamiliar one.
Representativeness heuristic is exemplied in the Linda example, where the
more representative option is chosen even when statistically less likely. Recognition
heuristic, another variation of the availability heuristic, means choosing a recog-
nized option from a variety of choices (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 8). And nally, take-
the-best heuristic means stopping evaluating choices as soon as a clearly dominant
feature over one choice is discovered (even if as a total evaluation the other choices
would work better) (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 82).
It can be argued that some of the above heuristics could be benecial. There are,
however, a number of automated thought processes which have a solely negative
impact. These negative heuristics, or more commonly, cognitive biases, are such
automated thought processes that systematically misguide our thinking.
Attribute substitution means displacing a more complex problem with an easier
one to solve. This is exemplied by the bat-and-ball puzzle: instead of making the
necessary calculation that the puzzle requires, the two numbers ($1.10 and 10)
guide us towards a simplied subtraction.
Base rate fallacy means ignorance of a base rate, or the statistical typicality of an
event, when the representativeness of the exemplar guides us otherwise. Consider
this example:
Michael is a slender man who wears glasses and likes to listen to Mozart. Is he more likely
to be a truck driver or an Ivy League classics professor? (Baumeister 2005, pp. 206207).
Nearly everyone thinks Michael must be a professor, ignoring the base rate that
there are millions of truck drivers in the world, and only a few Ivy League classics
professors.
Bias blind spot means that we tend to see ourselves as less biased than other
people. Conrmation bias means the tendency to seek only conrming evidence for
existing beliefs and to ignore contradictory evidence. Conjunction fallacy, exem-
plied in the Linda task, is about assuming the higher likelihood of a specic option
over a more general one.
Hindsight bias means the tendency to see choices as obvious after the fact and
ignore the role of chance and other incidental factors. As Kahneman notes, if you
follow your intuition, you will more often than not err by misclassifying a random
event as systematic. We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we
see in life is random (Kahneman 2011, p. 117).
Rolf Dobelli offered a great example of this bias on his lecture at the London
School of Economics. Imagine a million monkeys that predict the Dow Jones every
Friday. They have only two buttons to press: up and down. Every Friday, the
monkeys that predicted correctly are kept and the rest are removed from the
group. After 20 weeks, there will be one monkey left that has predicted the Dow
Jones correctly every single time. Now, biographers will want to know all about this
monkey and its history, and books will be written about the monkeys method of
predicting the Dow Jones.
Finally, stereotyping means assuming a member of a group shares features with
the entire group, without any actual knowledge of that individual. Stereotyping
functions, for example, as a driver for racism.
This is only a small sample of the most typical heuristics and biases; there are
dozens more that are well known in the literature and no doubt a tremendous
number that we do not quite know about yet. (For a review of the heuristics and
biases literature, see Kahneman 2011, p. 107 ff.)
In the light of the heuristics and biases research, it would seem at the rst glance
that the System 1 is so riddled with errors that we should keep as clear of it as
possible. However, while this research does mean we should take some caution in
listening to our intuitive insight, interestingly enough, our heuristics can, in fact,
also function in our favor.
The take home message from this research is to familiarize oneself with the most
typical thinking errors and to evaluate ones thinking accordingly when making
decisions. But if we were to abstain completely from intuitive decision-making
based on heuristics and biases research, we would throw out the baby with the
bathwater.
3.3.3 Heuristic Intuitions and Expert Intuitions
While heuristics often malfunction owing to their taking shortcuts in decision

making, and while they are displayed typically negatively in the heuristics and
biases literature, there are compelling arguments also in favor of the usefulness of
them.
Most prominently, Gerd Gigerenzer argues that heuristics can, in an everyday
life context, function in fact quite well. He notes that most heuristics and biases
ndings are based on laboratory testing. Gigerenzer laments,
Generations of students in the social sciences have been exposed to entertaining lectures
that point out how dumb everyone else is, constantly wandering off the path of logic and
getting lost in the fog of intuition. Yet logical norms are blind to content and culture,
ignoring evolved capacities and environmental structure. Often what looks like a reasoning
error from a purely logical perspective turns out to be a highly intelligent social judgment in
the real world. Good intuitions must go beyond the information given, and therefore,
beyond logic (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 104).
It may well be that many heuristics in everyday life situations are, in fact
benecial. Identifying Linda as a feminist, buying a familiar brand, or following
emotional associations are all heuristics that may well work in our favor.
Gigerenzer maintains that Tversky and Kahneman are correct in that our minds
are not built for statistical reasoning (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 94). However, unlike
Tversky and Kahneman, Gigerenzer argues that this is a good thing: Rigid logical
norms overlook that intelligence has to operate in an uncertain world, not in the
articial certainty of a logical system, and needs to go beyond the information
given (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 94).
To this end, in an uncertain environment, not assuming regularity but rather
going with gut feeling may work better. And indeed, Gigerenzer has found out that
in very volatile environments, such as the stock market, heuristics such as famil-
iarity, recognition and take-the-best function better than statistical reasoning
He also argues that the famous Linda experiment is rigged from the point of
view of everyday life. We typically assume that if we are asked a question, all the
information provided is relevant for the question:
The unconscious inference is thus: if the experimenter reads to me the description of Linda,
it is most likely relevant for what he expects me to do. Yet the description would be totally
irrelevant if one understood the term probable as mathematical probability. Therefore the
relevance rule suggests that probable must mean something that makes the description
relevant, such as whether it is plausible (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 95).
Gigerenzer concludes that picking the statistically fallacious answer to the Linda
problem may, in fact, be the better answer in a complex everyday life setting:
Logic is not a sensible norm for understanding the question Which alternative is
more probable? in the Linda problem. Human intuition is much richer and can
make reasonable guesses under uncertainty. (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 96).
Based on Gigerenzers reasoning, it may well be that many of the known

heuristics, when applied properly, can also be very benecial. Gigerenzer and
Daniel Goldstein did an experiment where a number of American and German
students were asked whether San Diego or San Antonio had the bigger population
(Goldstein and Gigerenzer 2002, p. 76). Strangely, only two thirds of the American
students, who knew a great deal about both cities, answered correctly. Almost
everyone of the German students, however, got it right: the answer was San Diego.
How could it be that those students who knew less about the issue would provide
the right answer more consistently?
Especially using recognition-driven heuristics in complex environments seems
to have a degree of viability not offered by rational thinking. Gigerenzers answer is
that the German students employed the recognition heuristic (Gigerenzer 2007,
p. 8). Gigerenzer presents two ways to look at intuitions. One is the idea that
intuition solves complex problems with a complex strategy. The other concerns
psychological, simple principles (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 18). This division is similar
to the one presented above, in Sect. 2.2 concerning the differentiation between the
smart unconscious and intuition as skilled action.
The rst option assumes roughly that the System 1 is somehow able to process
complex algorithms and large amounts of information faster and better than System 2.
The second assumes that intuition works with surprisingly simple tools in generating
viable insight.
Often it is thought that intuition processes information in a similar way to
explicit information processing units, such as System 2 algorithms or computer
programs. However, as Gigerenzer argues, the explanation for intuitive behavior
typically requires no such complex processing. One of his examples concerns the
gaze heuristic baseball players use to catch a ball. An expert baseball player might
not be able to even begin to explain how he catches the ball (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 8).
Here we have, again, the typical feature of intuitive thought and skilled action:
the person is aware only of the result of the process, and describing how it takes
place is difcult, if not impossible. Scientists have thought that the player behaves
as if he had unconsciously carried out complex mental operations, like solving
differential equations. Gigerenzer, however, maintains that the answer is much
simpler. The players use several rules of thumb, such as the gaze heuristic, where
you keep the angle of gaze towards the ball constant while running (Gigerenzer
2007, p. 10).
He points out, that the gaze heuristic sufces to explain a solution to a complex
problem (catching the ball) without the need to posit any calculations whatsoever.
No other parameters are relevant for a successful catch apart from the angle of gaze
Similarly, in quite a few elds, a simple rule of the thumb often works better
than a complicated calculation. A simple rule is also less prone to error (Gigerenzer
2007, p. 11). This is most evident in a very complex environment, such as the stock
market. In fact, Gigerenzer found that the recognition heuristic works better in
picking winning stock than nancial experts predictions, insofar as the stock picker
is sufciently ignorant of the stock market (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 27 ff).
Gigerenzer denes recognition as the ability to tell the novel from the previously
experienced, or the old from the new (Gigerenzer 2007, pp. 109110). He lines out
two factors why the recognition heuristic works: the impact of quality and the impact
of publicity. Impact of quality means that high-quality objects receive more attention
from the media and the public. The impact of publicity, in turn, means that those
that are mentioned more often are recognised better. And nally, the validity of
recognition lies in the fact that the more often recognized items are of a greater
quality (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 114).
Insofar as heuristic intuitions are concerned, gut feelings do not require a lot of
information. It sufces that some factor in the environment triggers the ontogenic
Type 1 processes responsible for the heuristic (such as the ball triggering the gaze-
following process of the catcher). As Gigerenzer notes, good intuitions in fact
ignore information. They are shortcuts, but such that have become useful in a
majority of cases in a complex environment (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 38).
However, heuristic generalizations apply only to a limited case of intuitive
decision making. For more demanding situations, what is needed is expertise.
Expertise works often better without the intervention of the conscious mind.
Indeed, conscious thought can even be detrimental to expert performance. As
Gigerenzer notes, thinking too much about skilled action can slow down and even
disrupt performance. Expert performance works best when honed to automaticity
Gary Klein found out that deliberation works, but typically only outside ones
eld of expertise (Klein 1998 loc 372377). Kahneman and Klein argue, based on
Kleins research on re-ground commanders, that a typical expert choice is not
based on extensive evaluation, but rather on drawing from what they already knew:
The initial hypothesis was that commanders would restrict their analysis to only a pair of
options, but that hypothesis proved to be incorrect. In fact, the commanders usually gen-
erated only a single option, and that was all they needed. They could draw on the repertoire
of patterns that they had compiled during more than a decade of both real and virtual
experience to identify a plausible option, which they considered rst (Kahneman and Klein
2009, p. 516).
Expert intuitions are based on two parameters: rapid recognition of viable

processes and ontogenetic Type 1 processes. As Kahneman notes, we are not
surprised when small children can recognize animals like dogs. Expert intuition
works the same way: by having learned to recognize familiar elements and act
appropriately (Kahneman 2011, p. 11). To perform as an expert, we need sufcient
skills and habits, that is to say, ontogenetic Type 1 processes. In addition, we need
the capability to recognize when the skills and habits are applicable.
Kleins idea of naturalistic decision making is based on the recognition-primed
model for decision making. Recognition-priming means that there are existing
cognitive structures that are activated when their viability is recognized by System 1.
As Klein found out, experts do not compare all the available options, but rather
satisce in the sense that they act as soon as a viable course of action presents itself
(Klein 1998).
Djiksterhuis found out that the quality of decision making depends on the correct
application of either conscious or non-conscious thought. Conscious thought works
better for simple problems. Non-conscious thought, in turn, for complex ones:
When people were faced with complex decisions, a few minutes of distraction during which
people could engage in unconscious thoughtbut not in conscious thoughtled to
superior decisions compared with circumstances under which people could not engage in
unconscious thought or to circumstances under which people engaged in conscious thought
(Djiksterhuis 2004, p. 596).
Djiksterhuis and Nordgren found out in their experiments that in addition to

expertise, recent conscious exposure to a sufcient amount of relevant information
can also guide non-conscious decision making (Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006).
Similar results were found in Kahnemans research on job interviews (Kahneman
2011, p. 231).
In other words, in complex decision making relying either on domain-specic
expertise (as dened in Sect. 2.2) or by familiarizing oneself with as much as
possible of the topic at hand, and then diverting System 2 to other tasks, the quality
of decisions may be higher (Djiksterhuis 2004; Djiksterhuis and Meurs 2006;
Djiksterhuis and Nordgren 2006).
To sum up, both correctly applied heuristics as well as expertise and recent
experience can function as a ground for intuitive decision making. Heuristics are
based on simple rules that eliminate much variation in a complex environment.
Expertise, in turn, relies on more varied ontogenic Type 1 processes that have been
created with practice and experience and that are activated either by recognition-
priming or by distracting the System 2.
While Djiksterhuis rule to use System 2 for simple decisions and System 1 for
complex ones does go a long way in guiding intuition, especially when coupled
with identifying and eliminating both phylogenetic, or instinctual Type 1 inputs and
typical biases, there is one more thing to take into account when using intuition: the
validity of the environment in which the decision is made.
3.3.4 Valid Environments
At the rst glance, the advocates of the heuristics and biases view originated by
Tversky and Kahneman, and the naturalistic decision making view, originated by
Gary Klein, seem to be opposed. The heuristics and biases view seems to imply that
intuitions should not be trusted. Kleins research with re-ground commanders,
nurses and military commanders seems to point the opposite way: experienced
individuals should rather trust their intuition than their rational mind.
In an interesting joint paper, Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein address the
compatibility or lack thereof of the two views. The paper, subtitled A Failure to
Disagree, (Kahneman and Klein 2009) ends up with a conciliatory view that ts
together both major positions. This is a view that is also supported to a great extent
by the ndings presented earlier in this book.
While expertise does, as a general rule, predict viable intuitions, this is not
always the case. In some highly volatile environments, such as the stock market or
political science, the value of expertise in intuitive thinking seems to vanish almost
entirely (Kahneman 2011). In an experiment comparing amateurs and professional
stockbrokers stock picking, the amateurs did better (Gigerenzer 2007).
This seems somewhat surprising, given that the ontogenetic Type 1 processes
the stockbrokers have developed should work just as well as those of the re-
ground commanders.
The key issue, Kahneman and Klein found out, is the validity of the environment
in which expertise is developed and deployed: reliably skilled intuitions are likely
to develop when the individual operates in a high-validity environment and has an
opportunity to learn the rules of that environment (Kahneman and Klein 2009,
p. 521). Kahneman elaborates:
The accurate intuitions that Gary Klein has described are due to highly valid cues that the
experts System 1 has learned to use, even if System 2 has not learned to name them. In
contrast, stock pickers and political scientists who make long-term forecasts operate in a
zero-validity environment. Their failures reflect the basic unpredictability of the events that
they try to forecast (Kahneman 2011, p. 240).
Where Klein had studied people working in relatively stable environments (re-
ground commanders, clinical nurses and other experts), Kahneman had researched
stock pickers and political scientists trying to make forecasts (Kahneman 2011,
p. 239). To this end, Kahneman and the heuristics and biases researchers were
rather skeptical about the viability of intuitions, whereas Klein was optimistic.
In studying the evidence, Kahneman and Klein, however, discovered that re-
ground commanders, nurses and chess Grand Masters work in environments that
are to an extent predictable. Fires proceed throughout houses usually in similar
ways. And in every chessboard conguration, there are only a limited number of
legal moves available.
Kahneman and Klein characterize a high-validity environment as follows:
We describe task environments as high-validity if there are stable relationships between
objectively identiable cues and subsequent events or between cues and the outcomes of
possible actions. Medicine and reghting are practiced in environments of fairly high
validity. In contrast, outcomes are effectively unpredictable in zero-validity environments.
To a good approximation, predictions of the future value of individual stocks and long-term
forecasts of political events are made in a zero-validity environment (Kahneman and Klein
2009, p. 524).
In the stock market, stock valuation is not determined only on the grounds of
objective fact, but also the subjective evaluations of stock pickers. This creates an
untenably complicated system of feedback loops, where regularities are difcult if
not impossible to learn.
Employing expert intuitions is possible only in domains that are predictable and
stable enough to create the kinds of ontogenetic Type 1 processes that are required
to generate skilled intuitions: When evaluating expert intuition you should always
consider whether there was an adequate opportunity to learn the cues, even in a
regular environment. (Kahneman 2011, pp. 242243).
To generate expert intuitions, one must work in an environment that is regular
enough to be predictable. In addition, one must have had an opportunity to learn
from these regularities through practice and experience. But what about when the
environment is not regular enough, as is the case with the stock pickers and political
scientists?
In a non-valid environment, we should rst and foremost acknowledge the fact
that uncertainty plays a massive role in the outcome of any given decision. We
should be very aware of the hindsight bias and the million monkeys pressing a
button. It is perfectly possible that successes for example in the nancial market
happen simply because a sufcient number of people are working in a highly
volatile environment. Some are always bound to rise to the top of the heap.
But working in a non-valid environment is not just a lost cause to be
acknowledged. Here, too, we still have two strategies that might improve the
chances of making great decisions: heuristics and algorithms.
First, as Gigerenzer has pointed out, in a highly complex environment, using a
simple rule of the thumb may in fact be more fruitful than resorting to a more
complicated decision scheme. In volatile environments, the most viable options
may still push to the surface of the background noise in being picked again and
again. Thus ignoring information may enable the use of the recognition heuristic:
in an uncertain world, a complex strategy can fail exactly because it explains too
much in hindsight. Only part of the information is valuable for the future, and the
art of intuition is to focus on that part and ignore the rest (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 85).
Finally, if both expert intuitions and heuristics leave us stumped, we can still
resort to the one nal option: using the System 2, such as in sticking to the base
rate. If your intuition does not serve you, one of the best rules of thumb is to stay
close to the base rate. Unless you have a pressing reason to think otherwise, stick
with Michael being a truck driver and Linda a bank teller, period. Only if sufcient
additional information surfaces, should you then re-evaluate your judgment. Or if
you are an expert with Ivy League professors, or feminism.
There are also several decision-making algorithms that have been demonstrated
to perform better than human decision makers in certain situations. This is not a
universal nding, but as Kahneman and Klein point out, applies to low-validity
environments (Kahneman and Klein 2009, p. 523).
To sum up, in a valid environment, expertise and recent substantial experience
with a domain can fuel intuitive decision-making. In a non-valid environment,
taking into account their limitations, heuristics may function well. Finally, if neither
expert intuitions nor heuristic intuitions work, we must resort to algorithmic
decision making. Keeping this in mind, let us now turn to construct a model of
applying intuition in real life decision-making.
3.3.5 Using Intuition in Decision-Making
As has become quite clear, just trusting our System 1 inputs, or listening to gut
feelings is hardly an appropriate guideline for efcient intuitive decision making.
The unviability of phylogenetic processes in a culturally evolved environment, the
lack of domain-relevant Type 1 processes or expertise, the abundance of cognitive
biases and the possibility of nonviable environments all draw limits to how far
intuition can go.
And yet, taking these limits into consideration, we can learn to become very
efcient intuitive decision-makers. Efcient use of intuition is, like all effective
thinking, establishing a proper division of labor between System 1 and System 2.
As Kahneman points out, we must simply learn to recognize the signs of a cog-
nitive mineeld, and turn to System 2 for reinforcement (Kahneman 2011, p. 417).
Gerd Gigerenzer presents the idea of fast and frugal decision trees (Gigerenzer
2007, p. 173). Such trees support our intuitive minds so that a big amount of
decision-relevant parameters are arranged in a hierarchy where each parameter
bifurcates into either a default fallback position, or proceeds through the tree.
Fast and frugal decision trees involve n + 1 exits or leaves, or potential end
results. Therefore, a tree of ve salient parameters would produce six potential
courses of action, which is small enough for System 2 to work with. Full decision
trees, by comparison, involve 2n leaves. For the same ve parameters a full decision
tree would produce 64 options, making the deployment of System 2 difcult if not
impossible (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 176).
Full decision trees become quickly computationally intractable when the number
of parameters grows large enough. A fast and frugal tree, on the other hand, can
manage a large number of parameters and still produce very good results. As
Gigerenzer found out in an intensive care unit setting, a fast and frugal tree out-
performed both more complex analytics as well as the intuitions of medical pro-
fessionals (Gigerenzer 2007, p. 175).
In the light of what has been said above, using intuition in decision making
could easily become an endless he saidshe said affair where the various
parameters influencing the validity of intuition (ontogeny, domain-specicity,
applicable heuristics, lack of recognized biases, validity of the environment etc.)
would get in the way of the decision-making. This would easily put us into the
situation of Buridans donkey, who died of hunger due to indecision. With all these
parameters affecting the validity of intuitions we would endlessly evaluate the Type
1 inputs, desperately trying to make sense whether to trust them or not.
And yet, the truism repeated in self help guides and anecdotes that you should
just trust your gut doesnt hold either. So what to do?
My suggestion is that we bring our all three evolved cognitive capacities
(reflective mind, algorithmic mind and intuition) maximally to play in decision
making. We should, in fact, evaluate reflectively our intuitive inputs, and insofar as
they appear as valid intuitions, trust them. In all other cases, we should use a
decision-making algorithm or another analytic System 2 tool such as a checklist, a
spreadsheet, a Bayesian calculation, or even a SWOT analysis to resolve the

decision.
I have often quipped at lectures that If you know what youre doing, trust your
intuition. Otherwise, think it through. In terms of expert intuition, this is relatively
accurate, but in the light of all of the above, it is an oversimplication.
To this end I would like to end this chapter on decision-making with a fast and
frugal decision tree that works as a guide to efcient intuitive decision-making
(Fig. 3.1). This decision tree can then be used to evaluate Type 1 inputs that are
immediate, clear and forcefuli.e. share the phenomenology of an intuition. Using
this decision tree you can quickly and relatively trustworthily resolve whether or
not to go with the gut feeling.
The decision tree has four parameters that need to be satised in order for an
intuitive input to be trustworthy. These parameters are ontogeny, domain validity,
expertise and experience and lack of known biases. In each four cases, if the
parameter is not fullled, you should turn to evaluate the situation using your
algorithmic mind. In other words, tap into the analytic capacity of thinking.
The rst question is whether the input has been produced by phylogenetic or
ontogenetic Type 1 processes. In the former caseunless you happen to be in a
natural environmentyoure generally better off by evaluating the situation using
the algorithmic mind. The urge to grab an extra dessert is hardly an indicator of
viable behavior in our energy-saturated environment. Rather, use System 2 to
contrast the urge with the amount of sweets consumed this week.
If the input does not qualify as one of the most typical phylogenetic Type 1
processes (energy intake, ght or flight, sexual behavior), the next evaluation
Fig. 3.1 A fast and frugal An immediate, clear and

decision tree for using forceful idea appears.
intuition
Intuition vs. Instinct: YES
Does it concern a phylogenetic Type Use the algorithmic mind
1 process to evaluate.
NO
Domain Validity: NO
Is the environment that the intuition Use the algorithmic mind
concerns regular enough to allow to evaluate.
expertise?
YES
Expertise and Experience: NO
Do I have expertise or recent Use the algorithmic mind
in-depth experience to evaluate.
concerning the domain ?
YES
Known Biases: YES
Does the input represent one of the Use the algorithmic mind
to evaluate.
bias, base rate fallacy etc.)
NO
Trust the intuition.

concerns the validity of the domain. The question you should pose is whether the
domain which the intuition concerns is regular enough to generate expert intuitions.
If it is not, you can still see if one of the more useful heuristics work, or you can use
an algorithm. This calls, again, for System 2-driven evaluation.
If you are dealing with an ontogenetic Type 1 process concerning a valid
domain, the next question is of your personal access to expertise in that domain.
Have you either had the chance to accumulate sufcient expertise in the domain, or
have you recently familiarized yourself with a substantial amount of data con-
cerning the domain? If you have no expertise nor recent experience, evaluate
analytically.
Finally, if you are dealing with an expertise- or experience-generated ontoge-
netic Type 1 process in a valid and familiar domain, check whether the intuition
falls under one of the most typical biases.
If this is not the case, trust the intuition.
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Chapter 4
Conclusion
The gist of the story is this:

Intuition helps you make better decisions, to be more creative and to nd flow. But only if
you know how to use it.
Intuitive decision making is limited by many factors influencing the validity of

the intuitions, ranging from the amount of expertise or recent experience to the
validity of the environment, from origins of the insight to the effects of cognitive
biases.
In order to be able to leverage the intuitive inputs that System 1 posts in System
2 unannounced, we must also train the System 2 to work better with intuitions. But
once we know how to evaluate our intuitions, we have a tremendously more
powerful cognitive capability available to us than in just keeping to the algorithmic
calculations performed by System 2.
Understanding intuition helps us be more creative. Yes, the ideas that pop in
your head in the middle of the night are often very good, and the reason to this is
that they are produced by the arguably massive non-conscious and associative
processing taking place in System 1. In order to cultivate creativity, you should
ensure System 1 gets enough inputs to work withcreative inspirationand make
sure that the System 2, or the conscious mind, does not interfere with the associative
processes ongoing in System 1.
Understanding intuition also helps us reach flow. Flow is, one could argue, the
intuitive state of action, where System 1 and System 3 (the environment) interact
unobstructed so that the interventions of System 2 are not needed. At the heart of
both flow and intuition are the non-conscious Type 1 ontogenetic processes that are
created by experience and practice.
Intuition is not just about the brain, but concerns also our environment. It can be
argued that the environment should, in this context, be construed as a System 3 that
bears direct relevance to the nature and quality of cognitive processes. In order to
function systems intelligently in an environment, we must nd an intuitive way to

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-18176-9_4
86 4 Conclusion
establish systemic feedback loops between systems 1, 2 and 3 and develop

sensitivities to establish dyadic, co-creative interactions in our environment.
Intuition concerns in particular the non-conscious ontogenetic processes that
result from our minds adapting to the culturally evolved environments so that we
can function in them better. Both ontogenetic, intuitive processes and phylogenetic,
instinctive processes, are processed in the autonomous, non-conscious and asso-
ciative System 1. They only post their end product into the controlled and conscious
System 2.
Intuition has been something of a mystery throughout the millennia of under-
standing human cognition. In the recent years, work in cognitive psychology,
neuroscience, positive psychology, evolutionary psychology and philosophy of the
mind have, however, taken giant leaps in building models that help us explain how
we can think well without thinking, generate insights without conscious effort and
make fast, high-quality decisions. What the American Pragmatists called habits, or
what the German Idealists immediate apprehension, we now know to be a very
fundamental property of our cognitive architecture.
Intuition is the non-conscious capacity to produce viable insights within a valid
domain of expertise. Using intuition requires a delicate interplay between the Systems
1, 2 and 3. There are situations where intuitions can be identied as invalideven
when they feel rightwhere decisions should be delegated to the algorithmic mind.
Identifying such situations concerns understanding the type of the process
generating the insight, the validity of the environment, the availability of data either
by expertise or experience, and the applicability of known biases. An insight that
clears these hurdles is very likely to be a very useful intuition. This is the complex
view.
The simple view is this:
If you know what youre doing, trust your intuition.
Otherwise, think it through.

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN WELLBEING AND

QUALIT Y OF LIFE RESEARCH

The Nature and

The Nature and Function

ISSN 2211-7644 ISSN 2211-7652 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015938756

Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

Printed on acid-free paper

Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media

of intuition for well-being and decision-making is studied in the context of positive

1 Background for Intuition Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 The Nature of Intuitive Thought . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

2.3 Intuition and the Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Keywords History of intuition

Scientic study of intuition is relatively new.

The Author(s) 2015 1

1.1 A Brief History of Intuition

1.1.1 Rationality and the Non-conscious Mind

1.1.2 Platos Horses: Dividing the Human Mind

In the dialogue Phaedrus, Plato wrote as follows:

1.1.3 The Surfacing of the Non-conscious Mind

1.2 The Two Intuitions

Intuition is a difcult concept to dene.

1.2.1 Intuition as Immediate Apprehension: Apprehensive

Kant presents an architectonic model of cognition, where perceptions are rst

The gist of Kants philosophyhis Copernican turnhangs on the idea that

For Bealer and BonJour, intuitions function as justication of knowledge that is

For Bealer, intuitions have primarily an epistemological function. Owing to this

Bealer also draws a distinction between intuitions and beliefs:

Intuitions in Bealers rationalist philosophical account are, thus, fundamental

1.2.2 Intuition as Immediate Insight: Generative Intuition

According to Peirce, a habit

Interestingly, habits concern then dispositions or tendencies towards a certain

Table 1.1 Differentiating Mechanism Habit

Magnetism works always the same way, regardless of environmental obstacles.

1.2.3 C.I. Lewis and the Roots of Intuition

Concepts, or sense meaning schemata, are cognitive structures that we use to

1.2.4 Bridging the Two Intuitions

While at rst it appears that apprehensive intuition is fundamentally different from

conceptual commitments we have adopted in making sense of the world. For

1.3 Intuition and the Brain

1.3.1 Neural Correlates of Conscious and Non-conscious

1.3.2 Limitations of Conscious Processing

1.3.3 The Learning Brain

Likewise, by practice and experience in a domain, a person learns processes

Abstract In the recent decades, the most prominent theoretical framework to

The Author(s) 2015 23

Because intuition is a domain-specic capacity, it is also argued that intuitive

2.1 Dual Processing

The duality of thinking expressed in such distinctions as conscious versus non-

These theories can be characterized either as dual system theories, or as more

Dual Process Theories

Dual System Theories Dual Type Theories

2.1.1 The Two Systems

Frankish and Evans elaborate:

Frankish and Evans go on to note that System 1 concerns associative, context-

Table 2.1 Typically System 1 System 2

2.1.2 Type 1 and Type 2 Processing

The dual-system formulations of dual processing present a compelling picture of

Table 2.2 Type 1 (intuitive) and Type 2 (analytic) processes

Type 2 processes need the constant application of working memory, such as in

In terms of cognitive architecture, Type 2 processes are sequential whereas Type

2.1.3 Algorithmic, Reflective and Autonomous Minds

Instead of systems or types, Stanovich emphasizes modes of processing.