This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models" by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Should you trust your intuition? Is it true that your gut instinct is always right, as the popular adage goes?
They say that your gut instinct is always right, but it really depends on what the situation is. In circumstances suited for slow, deliberate thinking, making a decision based on a gut feeling or intuition is usually not a good idea.
Here’s how using your intuition can lead you astray.
When Intuition Can Lead You Astray
Should you trust your intuition? When reasoning, we naturally defer to conventional thinking and our intuition, which is our ability to reason subconsciously. However, conventional thinking and intuition are shaped by inflexible assumptions, which means they can be rigid.
For example, the practice of bloodletting–withdrawing someone’s blood for medicinal purposes–was part of conventional medical practice because it fit neatly with Humorism, the theory that we’re composed of four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). Since Humorism was an entrenched assumption, it led to a rigid belief in the efficacy of bloodletting for roughly 3,000 years until the practice was largely discredited in the late 1800s.
(Shortform note: In Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argue that we defer to conventional thinking because it’s convenient and allows us to avoid the complexity of the real world. Because conventional thinking is typically founded upon anecdotes, rather than quantitative data, it results in misconceptions. Consequently, they argue, appealing to conventional wisdom often leads us away from truth.)
In light of this rigidity, conventional thinking and intuition can mislead us in situations where they’re inappropriate. For instance, in the case of bloodletting, the conventional assumptions of Humorism misled physicians into harming their patients.
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