Intuition; A Human Tool for Generalization

Editor's Note: In this paper, delivered at the International Conference of the Society of Human Ecology, held June 9-14, 1991 in Goteborg, Sweden, Donald B. Strauss enlarged on a theme he had introduced in 1989 in his keynote address to the Third International Conference of the Society.

In his earlier address, Strauss had suggested that finding generalized, holistic patterns in issues of huge complexity is quintessentially a human ecology skill. In his 1991 address, he defines intuition as a critical, subconscious process where generalization takes place. Decision-makers, he maintains, need to heighten their awareness and hone their access to these subconscious processes—not merely to understand them better, but to guard against the distortions and unwarranted weights that may be assigned to critical areas of a problem because of unacknowledged prejudice and/or ignorance, with all the emotional baggage these entail.

He discusses in detail how intuition can be distorted by narrow, specialized focus, which often is resistant to change. Following is the slightly edited last half of his 1991 paper, describing intuition, how to teach our intuition, how to use intuition creatively, and how to understand intuition your own and that of others.

Strauss concludes with the implications for democracy and offers a theoretical framework for citizen participation. The two papers, of which this part is of particular interest to those interested in learning to practice human ecology on a conscious level, may be had in their entirety from Donald B. Strauss, 684 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021

Intuition

Admittedly I am placing more emphasis on the subconscious process in decision-making than is customary. I do this not only because I believe the subconscious plays a crucial role, but also because I think we can train our subconscious just as we have learned to train our conscious minds. Many words have been used to describe various levels of this subconscious activity. In this paper I have subsumed them all under the one word "intuition."

Here are the first two of the six definitions for intuition found in Webster's Third New International (Unabridged) Dictionary.

1. the act of looking upon, regarding, examining, inspecting;

2. the act or process of coming to direct knowledge or certainty without reasoning or inferring, revelation by insight or innate knowledge.

These two definitions reflect the dual connotation of instinctive and cognitive processes given by Webster to his word. And these same two quite different connotations appear in other references as well. For example, these three definitions are given by M.R. Wescott in a chapter on intuition from the Encyclopedia of Psychology, p. 251ff;

• 1. Intuition is a special "knack of the mind" by which some persons arrive at conclusions without formulation of the premises.

• 2. Intuition is the faculty of knowing what is beyond demonstration of proof. [Ed. This corresponds with the second of Webster's definitions and coincides with what is known among theologians by the name of "faith."]

• 3. Intuition is that which follows, rather than precedes, rational thought, and is the crown of reason.

And still another definition of intuition from the psychological literature, but this one stressing more the cognitive connotations, is the following, from an article by Beryl ULiff Benderly in Psychology Today, September 1989, p. 36

There are, we've been told for generations, two distinct ways of knowing: the cool, methodical path of reason and the abrupt, electrical flash of intuition. At least since Oedipus sought out the oracle at Delphi, we've sensed the difference between the seer's penetrating vision and the expert's detailed knowledge. But today scientists are challenging that ancient dichotomy. Expertise and intuition, they believe, are not separate phenomena but "aspects of the same thing." This seemingly counter-intuitive opinion comes from Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, professor of psychology and computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of a group of researchers busily stripping intuition of its mystique. They reject the view that intuition is an inexplicable personal gift, explaining it instead as the predictable product of the way experts think. And their work suggests another, even bigger surprise: Intuition may be an ability that individuals can work toward and organizations can foster.

For this discussion, I am emphasizing the cognitive connotation of intuition, and therefore our ability to educate and control it. My definition refers to the process by which our brains select and filter related "programmed" facts and information from our memory and present them to our conscious level of thinking in a generalized form that we can comprehend.

This subconscious world in my concept of intuition includes many other varieties of mental functions that extend along a spectrum like the following: hunch prejudice superstition belief intuition knowledge wisdom

Contrast this spectrum with one we can compose involving conscious decision-making: define problem set goals gather facts identify different interests invent strategies select a strategy make decision.

We don't normally think of intuition as a human trait that is compatible with education and analysis. Yet it plays such an important role that to ignore it when we think cognitively about decisionmaking is to overlook a critical part of the process. No matter how analytical we may be in seeking to understand both the details and the total dynamics of a complex system, I am arguing here (with considerable, authoritative research in support of this thesis) that the final mental leap to a conclusion is primarily intuitive. Intuition is our natural "tool" for reaching holistic and simple understanding of complex issues. This interpretation of intuition is vividly described in an aphorism from a book by Walter Todd Siler, The Artscience of Neurocosmology (Simon.& Schuster 1990)

Intuition is to nuclear fusion what rationality is to nuclear fission.

Recent brain research suggests that the subconscious mind is even more powerful at synthesizing huge complexity than the above references would indicate, Bits and pieces of learning seem to be retained in our minds in a vast collection of neurons, which appear to be chaotically ordered but which,in fact, behave according to some hidden rules of order. If we consciously direct our minds to look for some information, "the search results from self-organizing activity in the limbic system, which funnels a search command to the motor systems. As the motor command is transmitted the limbic system issues what is called a reafference message, alerting all the sensory systems to prepare to respond to new information." (This quote and the following two paragraphs are based on The Physiology of Perception, by Walter J. Freeman, Scientific American, February 1991, pp.78-85.)

My layman understanding of this mental activity is as follows: We store our information in microscopically small bits, which can be assembled rapidly and in an almost infinite number of clusters. Some of these bits are closer to the surface of our conscious perceptions and can therefore be consciously and easily retrieved, examined, and, changed. Others. are deeper and more difficult to manipulate with a conscious effort. Only a vivid and emotionally felt experience or prolonged and intensive mental effort will reach them.

But this ability of the subconscious mind to create patterns of associated ideas from chaotically stored bits of information gives it greater power and flexibility than is available to us at the conscious level and may underlie the brain's capacity to generate insight and to invent the "trials" of trial-and-error problem solving. It also may highlight the value of having highly interactive models, on which the human decision-maker can play rapid games of "what if" as one means for testing and understanding the hidden rules of order that transfer chaotic complexity into related clusters, and which in turn are critical as we strive to comprehend a problem on the way to making decisions.

In the last few years, an increasing number of conferences have been held and articles written on intuition. The following quotes are from a report summarizing one of these conferences (The Intuitive Leadership Project Cultivating the Intuitive Aspects, of Leadership, Report of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, U/MN, April 1988.)

Harlan Cleveland': "Intuitive leadership has to do with knowing what the people are thinking by keeping a good nose and ear to the ground and paying attention." p.16

Words like "intuition" and "creativity" are used to refer to the uses of certain capabilities of the unconscious mind in the service of the conscious mind... "The access of information and the capability of synthesis displayed by the unconscious, intuitive mind are sometimes quite startling, in view of both common sense and scientific assumptions about the nature of mental processes." p. 20.

The above sampling of recent literature reaffirms and refines the dual connotations of intuition: (1) intuition for solving problems or making judgments by means of information and/or processes that are informal, unexplicit, or obscure; (2) intuition conceived as a cognitive/emotional step which goes beyond judgment, decisionmaking, or learning to reach a full comprehension and appreciation of a personality, situation, or subject matter. (This modified definition is based on a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Psychology by M.R. Westcott, p. 253.)

Teaching Our Intuition:

Experience is a good teacher of intuition. A vivid experience both trains our intellect and conditions our intuition, whereas a solely analytical exercise will have a much weaker impact. (Many of the arguments from here, on are my own "intuitive" speculations. I have not been able to find much empirical research to support them. If such research has been done, perhaps these speculations will encourage others to assemble and evaluate it. If not, perhaps they will stimulate it.) But for many of today's important decisions, we need to anticipate what might be the outcome of our actions before trying them out in the real world. Trial and error is often just too dangerous and too expensive. We need better ways of educating our intuition and this means, at least for a start, better ways of managing complexity with synthetic vividness so that our projected outcomes have both a rational and an emotional impact. This will greatly aid our intuition to perform its miracles without our first having to undergo live, expensive, and often disastrous experience.

While intuition plays an important role throughout the formation of a decision, its greatest impact is during the "end game," at which time the mind rapidly zooms between conscious analysis and hidden perceptions of the issues, and between specialized details of the problem and a generalized perspective of the problem as a whole. Intuition acts as a guide as the mind searches through a maze of information and perceptions, always inventing, revising, and selecting the strategies for solving the problem.

Actually, there is a lot of science and technology that most children in a developed society pick up and store away in their in memories without consciously having to learn it...things to do with how our bodies function, how to use electricity, how cars work, where certain environmental dangers lurk. When these various scientific discoveries were new, individuals had "consciously" to learn about them through study, often through disastrous experience. More and more of this information gets tucked away into our intuitive memories with each succeeding generation.

A fascinating perspective, on how scientific progress has assisted our cognitive intuition is the following excerpt from The Evolution of Cognition, by William M. Benson and David G. Hays, from Journal of Social and Biologica! Structures, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1990.

The procedures of arithmetic calculation, which we teach in elementary school, are algorithms These procedures are so familiar to us, and so obviously elementary, that we forget that their creation was a major cultural achievement. Attempting long division in Roman numerals, however, should remind us of just how very difficult computation can be without a good system of notation. Nor did the ancients have explicit rules of procedure. Marrou, in describing education in the Hellenistic period, writes:

"Strange though it may seem at first, it is nevertheless quite clear that addition, subtraction, multiplication and division...were, in antiquity, far beyond the horizon of any primary school...Before these procedures were gathered and codified, the calculations our children routinely make required the full attention of educated adults, who solved them on a case-by-case basis."

As a grandfather, I am constantly being confronted with bits of science and technology displayed by my grandchildren as they poke at the VCR, play with their pocket computers, or even as they talk "naturally" about subjects that I once had to work at with "unnatural" mental effort. Much of this knowledge is stored in their 21st century minds in easily accessed chunks of related information information which in my 20th century mind must be recalled, if at all, with a conscious and often unrewarding memory search. Each new generation can begin its formal education at a far more sophisticated level than its parents could have.

However, while such subliminal and experientially installed "intuitive" information has the many advantages of quick recall and instant application, it has the disadvantages of resisting change and evaluation as the conditions to which they are applied vary or change. We need to find linkages between our subconscious, intuitive mental processes and our conscious learning capabilities in order to keep our intuitive processes updated along with our cognitive acquisition of new knowledge.

Creativity and Intuition:

Thus far I have stressed the role of intuition in synthesizing what we already know in order to reach a balanced and holistic decision. This subconscious mental activity is mysterious enough. But of course there is that even more mysterious and important mental process—the creation of new ideas we did not know we had. These are the moments of recognition pictured in old cartoons by a flashing light bulb over the head of the cartoon character: Einstein and relativity, Edison and his incandescent light (which inspired the cartoonist's image), Mozart and a melody, Picasso and a painting.

Einstein's own insights into these moments of inspiration are particularly revealing. Here are two:

"If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaningful, then we are engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition." (From Albert Einstein The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 37.)

"We now know that science cannot grow out of empiricism alone; that in the constructions of science we need to use free invention which only "a posteriori" can be confronted with experience as to its usefulness." (From Subtle Is the Lord The Science and life of Albert Einstein, by Abraham Pais, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 14.),

All too often we think that flashes of insight or invention originate from some divine intervention over which we have no control. I will not argue here that such moments of inspiration may not occur. But in the more mundane activities associated with decision-making, the sudden awareness of a new idea springing up within us is almost always the product of long periods of intense and conscious work, interspersed with periods of unconscious "mulling over" what we have been working on, until some combination that seems both right and new rises to the surface of our consciousness and can be shared with others. This must then be followed by another round of conscious effort, with the process repeating itself until an acceptable solution is reached. The new skill we must develop is one that tells us how to build conscious bridges between the conscious and subconscious processes of the mind without dampening these spontaneous and creative subconscious outputs.

Rollo May has described this moment of creation well:

The breakthrough does not come by just "taking it easy," by "letting the unconscious do it." The insight, rather, is born from unconscious levels exactly in the areas in which we are most intensively, consciously committed...The idea, the new form which suddenly becomes present, comes in order to complete an incomplete gestalt with which I was struggling in conscious awareness. One can quite accurately speak of this incomplete gestalt, this unfinished pattern, this unformed form, as constituting the "call" that was answered by the unconscious.

These moments of creativity are, at their best, the essence of progress and the engine that advances civilization. But creativity springs from the "wild" part of the mind. There are always many more irrational, even destructive ideas created than those that could become beneficial. If we were to accept and act upon every idea that pops up from the subterranean depths of our minds, chaos and trouble would be the result. This is where the built-in, innate reluctance of the human mind to accept change justifies its existence. Rollo May recalls that Carl Jung saw:

...a kind of opposition between unconscious experience and consciousness. He believed the relationship was compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality. The compensation also works on specific problems: if I consciously bend too far one way on some issue, my unconscious will lean the other way. This is, of course, the reason why the more we are unconsciously smitten with doubts about an idea, the more dogmatically we fight for it in our conscious arguments:, (From The Courage To Create, by Rob May, a Bantam Book published by arrangement with the W.W. Norton Co., 15th printing 1990; p. 66 and p. 62)

This leads us into dangerous territory. On the one hands if subconscious intuition is as critical to the decision-making process as I have argued, then we must develop its potential as vigorously as possible. On the other hand, we must erect safeguards against the irrational and dangerous. We must do this by, accomplishing the following incompatible tasks:

• Overcome the mind's reluctance to change

• Suppress irrational and destabilizing ideas

• Encourage "wild" and creative ideas

As difficult as this mental juggling act is when attempted for oneself, it becomes much more difficult when attempted with a group of decision-makers with different perspectives and interests, and is exponentially more difficult when attempted with a total electorate of millions. And yet this is where this line of argument eventually must lead us. Again, hear Rollo May:

When you have the potentialities for tremendous mass communication, you inevitably tend to communicate on the level of the half million people who are listening. What you say must have some place in their world; must at least be partly known to them. Inevitably then, originality, the breaking of frontiers, the radical newness of ideas and images, are at best dubious and at worst totally unacceptable. Mass communication presents us with a serious danger, the danger of conformism. This very fact throws considerable weight on the side of regularity and uniformity against originality and freer creativity; (No reference given)

These are thoughts that we will grapple with in the concluding section of this paper: Implications for Democracy.

Understanding Intuition: Yours and Mine

If we accept that subconscious processes play a significant role in decision-making, then we need to improve the way we understand both our own and those of others with whom we interact. One obvious way of doing this is to try to become aware of the effects of intuition as we go about inventing and evaluating solutions. This, of course, is easier said than done, but this might be one way of going about it:

If you are engaged in planning for the future energy needs of your community and one of your colleagues is both expert at and enthusiastic about solar heated homes, you may anticipate that she will most probably introduce solar heating solutions into the deliberations. You may also anticipate that she will interpret the results of experimentation with solar heat either via models or from actual construction more favorably than you do. What you may not be so prescient about are how your own interpretation of the results is influenced by the hidden biases of your own intuition.

One way to dig beneath the conscious surface and verbally rational reasons given for such interpretations is for different individuals to play "what if" games with similar fact patterns and strategies. If interprerations of the results from the same strategies continue to differ, a further game could involve asking one another, in precise detail, this question: "What I don't understand about your interpretation is this can you help me understand you better?" This may help uncover the hidden "programs" and biases in your respective intuitions.

Implications for Democracy

Most hotly contested issues today involve technical matters. In such cases, there is a tendency for experts to define the problem as scientific, and for lay persons to define it is political. (For the ideas in this and the next paragraph, I am indebted to the chapter on "Risk, Technology, and Society" by Thomas Dicta, R. Scott Frey and Eugene Rosa in Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Riley E Dunlap and William Michelson [eds], Greenwood Press, 1991.) Scientists, often stubbornly resist accepting new theories and cling to old ones long after the evidence would indicate a change. Lay persons have similar resistance to change and, in addition, often form opinions based on faulty perceptions.

Several factors appear to underlie the bias in lay perceptions...people tend to overestimate the frequency of unlikely events that are dramatic in their consequences because the drama of such events makes them cognitively available and thus easier to recall...Risks highly, dreaded by the public are those perceived to involve a lack of control, catastrophic potential, fatal consequences, or inequitable distributions of risks and benefits. Such risks are far less acceptable to the public than to experts, who give little or no consideration to these qualitative factors in their formal analyses. One conclusion consistent with these findings is that lay persons are not very good at assessing the risks they face.

These findings pose in stark outlines the troublesome question: What is the proper decision-making role of citizens in a modern democracy? Cold logic would seem to indicate that the role of the citizen should be confined to selecting representatives and leaving the substantive issues to them. This, however, leaves out some very valid considerations of equity and public acceptability and, again to cite Dietz et al, "the fact that the public is often unfamiliar with (scientific) evidence does not justify dismissing public concerns... The likelihood of conflict resolution is improved if all stakeholders (author: including, of course the experts) are allowed to participate in...devising proper management strategies."

To achieve a holistic, generalized decision we need the inputs of both experts and lay generalists. In a democracy, the usual way of obtaining these inputs is via the vote. A vote is a highly abstract, simplified, and generalized expression of how one feels about a candidate or an issue. No matter how cerebral you imagine you have been in preparing for your vote, when you get into the polling booth, your intuition is in charge. From this perspective, the vote is an aggregated intuitive act of "we, the people." Pursuing further the line of argument above, the challenge is to educate the intuition of the mind of "the body politic."

In theory, this could be accomplished by educating the entire citizenry on each issue upon which they are asked to vote. And again, in theory, this is what a political campaign is supposed to do. But in practice, political education is synonymous to proselyting. Candidates and politicians find it much more effective to speak in sound bites designed to activate opinions already programmed and embedded in intuition than to persuade with reasoned, rational arguments directed to the conscious part of the mind.

The political process is seldom used to invent better solutions, but rather to win political power. "Facts" are used to illuminate a point of view, not to search for truth. Not only would a truly educational campaign on a complex, highly technical subject be ineffective, it probably would be totally impractical given our current levels of education, the present method of financing political campaigns, the recognized and accepted goals of adversarial politics, and the amount of time most citizens are willing to devote to the effort. Under these conditions, the successful politician is the one who best understands the majority intuition of the electorate and who learns best how to trigger it to vote for his/her candidate or program.

A Theoretical Framework for Citizen Participation

I have no magic "fix," but I do believe that those who search for better ways to make democracy work need to give more consideration to the role of citizen intuition. This means (bold) greater recognition of how the mind makes up its mind (bold in other words, how to establish procedures that will permit the average citizen to tackle huge complexity in mind-sized bites while avoiding the deliberate distortion of simplistic sound bites.

This would require a more "managed" process of democratic decision participation than most, people would now accept, and probably more than our current expertise in large-scale facilitated meetings would warrant. The process would prohibit short radio and TV half-truths, and would replace them with more rigidly-structured opportunities for the public "we, the people" to become engaged in facilitated discussion, with major problems presented in logical segments, and with frequent opportunities to record opinions as the process unfolds rather than to compress all citizen input into one vote at the end of the process.

Theoretically, the managed process would follow logical steps such as definition of the issues, examination of existing conditions, presentation of available facts (including those still uncertain or in dispute), discussion of goals, development, of possible strategies, playing "what if" with the consequences of these strategies, and finally the selection of the favored strategy.

Based on the discussion here presented, it is my thesis that this process would elevate, through education, the group intuitive powers of the citizens involved.

Let me admit that there are dangers of manipulation and brainwashing in such a managed process for citizen participation. But I believe that these dangers are fewer than the current dangers inherent in expecting citizens to understand highly complex, technical issues without such guidance and structure The only alternative, other than the status quo, is to yield the primary decision-making responsibility to those in power through election or appointment. History seems to indicate (or at least so my prejudices interpret history) that the common sense of the common person is better than that of those in power on the big issues requiring value judgments. Our challenge, as I see it, is to find ways of elevating to a higher level of understanding the expertise of the common person on complex issues, so that democratic decision-making can operate more effectively.

In closing, I have a politically unrealistic proposal that just might stimulate others to shape it into a more practical form. This scheme is designed for shaping policy on major issues such as desired population growth rates, environmental initiatives, taxation, selection of alternative energy sources, preservation of open spaces, etc. Implementation of the broad policies reached by citizens on these issues would be the responsibility of elected and appointed officials. (I do not suggest this procedure for election of candidates to office. At the same time, I believe that citizens who have been obliged to participate in such a process on policy issues would be far more discerning in their judgment of those best qualified for election.)

The task of wider and more direct citizen decision-making would be much simpler if the process were conducted by a small sample of the entire electorate with the following characteristics:

• The decision-making body would be as small as possible and still reflect the entire electorate. Statistical sampling technicians claim this can be as small as 1 percent of large populations.

• The electorate would accept that a decision of such a statistical sample would accurately and fairly reflect that of the whole group.

• All citizens would be subject to serve on such a decision-making body for as long as necessary to become educated in the problem at hand and to work collaboratively toward a solution. Time for serving might be one day a week for as long as necessary, with compensation paid by employers for such public service much as is now the case for jury duty. (And be it noted here, that jury verdicts are traditionally "accepted" by the public.)

For each critical issue, citizens would be selected and drafted for this public decision-making service just as juries are today by statistical methods that would assure that they represented a true cross section of the community they are chosen to represent. Their term of service would be one day a week, with release time and compensation paid by their employer for as long as the task required. Their decision could be binding, presuming that it reflects the will of the total electorate; or it could be merely advisory to the legislature for subsequent debate and enactment into law.

The specific details are unimportant for our present purpose, which is merely to indicate that there are procedures, if we decide to seek more rational and effective decision-making through participative democracy.

In summary, I have argued that intuition plays a larger role in our decision-making, both private and public, than is generally recognized, or for that matter than has been recognized by those engaged in decision-making research. I have suggested some ways for improving our intuitive capabilities which need further investigation, and that such investigation could have profound implications for the conduct of our society.

...Donald B. Strauss...

© Copyright 1991
Institute for domestic Tranquility