Daniel Kahneman: belief

Transcript context

…If you’re called in by a CEO to give advice — and I think sometimes you are — how can I reduce the noise in my decisions, the decisions of the CEO, when there’s not a simple way to average? The firm doesn’t have a dozen CEOs. What’s your advice? My advice is divide and conquer. That is, there is one thing that we know that improves the quality of judgment, I think. And this is to delay intuition. I think there is in the audience a friend of mine, Gary Klein, who is violently opposed to what I’m saying, as are many others. But I’m here. [laughter] So I think delaying intuition is a very good idea. Delaying intuition until the facts are in, at hand, and looking at dimensions of the problem separately and independently is a better use of information. The problem with intuition is that it forms very quickly, so that you need to have special procedures in place to control it except in those rare cases — and Gary Klein and others have demonstrated that — where you have intuitive expertise. That’s true for athletes — they respond intuitively. It’s true for chess masters. It’s true for firefighters, captains, as Gary Klein has shown. So that’s intuitive expertise. I don’t think CEOs encounter many problems where they have intuitive expertise. They haven’t had the opportunity to acquire it, so they better slow down. And just take more time on each decision.…

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