Kahneman, D. (2011). Expert intuitions: When can we trust it? In Thinking Fast and Slow (pp. 234-244). New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

As we wrapped up Chapter 21, “Intuitions vs. Formulas”, we asked the question – what about all those instances we’ve heard of where expert cognition and behavior were remarkable and impressive? That brings us to chapter 22, “Expert Intuitions: When Can We Trust It?” It is only logical to come to this question after the last chapter determined that a simple statistical equation was more accurately predictable than the average expert’s prediction. Additionally, humans are susceptible to environmental and biological factors and a simple statistic tends not to be. Well, Kahneman and his colleagues had the same questions. Kahneman was a staunch believer that the statistical route was the proper route but a colleague with opposing views, felt just a strongly in the opposite direction. How can two intelligent, well researched professionals have such opposing views? Well, they decided to work together to figure that out… and they did – for years. Chapter 22 is about that process and conclusions. To read their resulting article see, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree”.

In a nutshell, an excerpt from their abstract:

“They conclude that evaluating the likely quality of an intuitive judgment requires an assessment of the predictability of the environment in which the judgment is made and of the individual’s opportunity to learn the regularities of that environment. Subjective experience is not a reliable indicator of judgment accuracy.”

That is, it seemed to come down to the type of expert, the reliability of their variables that went into their evaluation, and therefore the predictability of their field. So, a firefighter with many years of experience can find reliable indicators within a fire which they can use to predict short term actions that may need to be taken. Whereas, in politics, experts who may have been working in the field for years, may not realize that their variables are lacking validity. That is, they are commonly looking at one question and substituting another which they have seen before – one for which they feel they can answer based on previous experience but it is not the same question. They don’t realize they are doing this. The answer comes easily so they feel overly confident in their answer. Overconfidence is usually a sign that they are wrongly creating a coherent story in their mind from invalid variables.

All together, another incredibly interesting chapter which brings to mind the current political environment. As a matter of fact, Kahneman even brings up an example of political substitution of one question for another that results in completely invalid conclusions. That is, Kahneman references Gladwell’s book Blink, in which he describes a failure of so called, intuition. Malcolm Gladwell described the election of President Harding, “whose only qualification for the position was that he perfectly looked the part. Squared jawed and tall, he was the perfect image of a strong and decisive leader ” (p. 236). The truth is, he was also previously a senator and had been working in politics for some time before his fellow Republicans thought he should run for President because he so looked the part. Quite possibly, the American people were also swayed by his appearance and voted for someone who looked the part rather than someone who they felt was especially qualified for the position. If that was the case, they substituted an easier superficial question about appearance for the more difficult qualifications evaluation, resulting in an unreliable prediction based on an invalid question.

This rings familiar of the 2016 election of a politically inexperienced business man, Donald Trump, over a very qualified and experienced career politician, lawyer, former first lady, Secretary of State, and Senator – Hilary Clinton. Donald Trump posed the very question that aided in Harding’s election – Does she look like a President? He posed this question in many ways, saying, she just doesn’t look Presidential to him, she doesn’t have stamina (an often used stereotypically male term to describe virility), or appear as strong and healthy as himself. If people couldn’t predict his likely success in the role, they could much more easily think he looked the part of a big strong man who would be a decisive leader. Harding died two years into office and despite that Harding was said to have “embraced technology and was sensitive to the plights of minorities and women”,  his presidency was marred by scandal that his friends and colleagues were profiting off the presidency – i.e.,”using their official positions for their own enrichment” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/warrenharding). Donald Trump’s presidency is still to be written in history but as they say, if we don’t learn from the past, we are doomed to repeat it (Santayana, 1863) which is an example of searching for reliable variables from the past to improve predictability of the future and a warning not to use simpler invalid evaluations, such as appearance in substitution.