Intuiting and reasoning: facilitating subconscious and conscious processing for better decisions in organizations

Abstract

Intuition research has long recognized that decision making involves two types of mental processing: intuiting and reasoning, a view known as the dual processing model. Intuiting, or intuition, is commonly understood as rapid, unconscious mental processing based on associative pattern recognition that results in affective judgments, whereas reasoning is viewed as rational, deliberate and linear (Dane & Pratt, 2007). The dual processing model depicts these two processes as alternatives and being in tension, and decision makers as favoring one or the other (Calabretta et al., 2017; Elbanna & Child, 2007; Hodgkinson & Clarke, 2007). Researchers have observed the need to balance the two processes for effective decision making. They also recognize that we still lack a unifying conceptual framework explaining how the two processes are related and how they can be exploited in organizational decision making (Calabretta et al., 2017; Hodgkinson et al., 2009; Lieberman, 2007; Sinclair, 2011; Sinclair & Bas, 2017). I concur with these researchers about the need to conceptualize intuition and rational analysis as continually interacting and interdependent processes. This view broadly aligns with what some authors call expert intuition (Dane & Pratt, 2009; Kahneman & Klein, 2009). It is argued that experts in any field have “better” intuitive insights because they have more information, based on repeated experiences, stored in memory. They therefore have more to draw from when encountering new, but similar, decision-making situations, which gives them an advantage over non-experts in making efficacious decisions (Klein, 2003; Simon, 1992). Despite the insights from the research on expert intuition, I agree that a unifying conceptual framework is still needed to explain how the processes of intuiting and reasoning are related. To develop such a framework, it is necessary to examine further the key concepts of “intuiting” and “reasoning” and their relationship. A clear conceptual framework is necessary to facilitate effective decision making and for intuition research to impact the practice of intuition in organizations. Dougherty (2018) presents a similar argument about theories of innovation. In her view, innovation theories have focused on explaining “the what” and “the why” but have failed to explain the “the how” and have therefore been ignored by managers responsible for innovation. Much of the empirical research on intuition in organizational contexts has focused on the decision makers’ experience of intuition as a psychological or bodily phenom-