Daniel Kahneman: Your Intuition Is Wrong, Unless These 3 Conditions Are Met
At the World Business Forum, Kahneman explained when people can trust their intuitive judgment and when they shouldn't.
By Emily Zulz | November 16, 2018 at 01:18 PM

Daniel Kahneman. (Photo: Bloomberg) Daniel Kahneman. (Photo: Bloomberg)
Can intuition play a role in investing? According to Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Memorial Prize-winning behavioral economist, no.

During a speech given at the World Business Forum in New York City, Kahneman explained when people can trust their intuitive judgement and when they should be wary of it.

“Intuition is defined as knowing without knowing how you know,” he explained. “That’s the wrong definition. Because by that definition, you cannot have the wrong intuition. It presupposes that we know, and there is really a prejudice in favor of intuition. We like intuitions to be right.”

According to Kahneman, a better definition — or a more precise one — would be that “intuition is thinking that you know without knowing why you do.” By this definition, the intuition could be right or it could be wrong, he added.

Because, according to Kahneman, intuition can often be wrong. To show an example of this, Kahneman had the crowd guess the GPA of a college senior he called Julie. He told the crowd one fact about Julie — that she read fluently at a young age — and then asked them to judge how good of a student she had been.

From research, Kahneman, who wrote The New York Times bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” said that most people guess that Julie has around a 3.7 GPA.

“You might think that this is a good answer,” he said. “It’s a terrible answer. It’s an intuition, and it’s absolutely wrong. If you were to do it statistically, you would do it completely differently. Actually, the age that people read is very little information about what student they will be 20 years later.”

According to Kahneman, this is an example of an intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence, and it’s wrong statistically.

“In general, confidence is a very poor cue to accuracy. Because intuitions come to your mind with considerable confidence and there is no guarantee they’re right.”

There are certain times when intuition can be correct. For instance, Kahneman explained, chess players and married couples generally have accurate intuition.

“Intuitions of master chess players when they look at the board [and make a move], they’re accurate,” he said. “Everybody who’s been married could guess their wife’s or their husband’s mood by one word on the telephone. That’s an intuition and it’s generally very good, and very accurate.”

According to Kahneman, who’s studied when one can trust intuition and when one cannot, there are three conditions that need to be met in order to trust one’s intuition.

The first is that there has to be some regularity in the world that someone can pick up and learn.

“So, chess players certainly have it. Married people certainly have it,” Kahnemen explained.

However, he added, people who pick stocks in the stock market do not have it.

“Because, the stock market is not sufficiently regular to support developing that kind of expert intuition,” he explained.

The second condition for accurate intuition is “a lot of practice,” according to Kahneman.

And the third condition is immediate feedback. Kahneman said that “you have to know almost immediately whether you got it right or got it wrong.”

When those three kinds of conditions are satisfied, people develop expert intuition.

“But unless those three conditions are satisfied, the mere fact that you have an idea and nothing else comes to mind and you feel a great deal of confidence — absolutely does not guarantee accuracy,” he added.

— Related on ThinkAdvisor:

Daniel Kahneman’s Solution for Minimizing Investors’ Regrets
Michael Lewis: A Warning for Index Investors From the Oakland A’s

Emily Zulz
Emily Zulz
Emily joined the ThinkAdvisor team as a reporter in the summer of 2014. She previously worked as a reporter for The Daily Journal in Kankakee, Illinois for a year and as a reporter and editor for The Daily Eastern News in Charleston, Illinois for two and a half years. Prior to joining ThinkAdvisor, Emily worked on Groupon’s editorial team in Chicago as a fact checker for three years. She graduated cum laude with a BA in journalism from Eastern Illinois University, and she has been the recipient of two journalism awards for her news reporting at daily newspapers.