In the realm of the psychology of decision-making, the role of expert intuition is under attack. People's inclination is to trust intuition and to point to many examples, across various disciplines, in which experts are able to make difficult judgments in seemingly negligible amounts of time. But this trust of intuition has been undermined by the research of other psychologists who have taken care to expose and document thoroughly the cognitive biases that can impede both our use of intuition and our ability to judge the use of intuition in a broader sense. How, then, can we know when expert intuition is to be trusted?
Gary Klein's research has provided a basis on which to establish how expert intuition, also known as naturalistic decision making, works at its best, which it does according to a recognition-primed decision model. One of his studies examined the thought process of experienced fireground commanders, the leaders of firefighter teams. One finding was that fireground commanders do not only consider a small number of options in deciding how to approach a firefighting situation; they tend to consider only one option. When presented with a situation, the commander was observed to think of one option spontaneously and then mentally simulate acting on that proposed course of action to see whether it would work. More specifically, Klein formulated the recognition-primed decision model as occurring in two steps. In the first step, a tentative plan comes to the mind of the expert by an automatic function of associative memory; the situation provides one or more clues recognized by the expert. Second, the plan is mentally simulated to see whether it will work.
When, then, can expert intuition be tested? Klein's model implies that the successful application of expert intuition will be limited to circumstances in which situational clues are reproduced and can be recognized over time. Situational regularity and individual memory are critical components of success. Reliable intuition is primarily — and, arguably, nothing more than — recognition. By this somewhat controversial inference, intuition is essentially memory. Consequently, all cases in which we might anticipate expert intuition to be valid are not equally conquerable by this faculty. Some environments may not be sufficiently regular to be predictable, and, of course, even in regular environments, the presumed expert must draw on a sufficient depth of practice. We can conclude, for example, that if a dedicated stock picker is to make judgments as skilled as those of a dedicated chess player, that person will do so not by relying primarily on intuition. One might note that, with or without intuition, it is incumbent on any true expert to know the limits of his or her knowledge.