Essay On Intuition Without Reasoning

Marine Biologist Jacques Cousteau once emphasized that “if we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope.” Although a world without invalid or fallacious reasoning would lead to a more rational decision-making and more enhanced quality of life, on the other hand, avoiding intuition without reasoning may hinder our ability to make quick decisions.

In a fallacy-free world we would expect to see less of decisions driven by misperceived fear, miscalculated threats, and false authority. For example, in psychology, we learnt about the Stanley Milgram experiment. The testees continued to inflict pain on innocent citizens because they believed that the people dressed in lab coats were authority. This experiment mirrors the way society operates. One such case is in advertising, which heavily relies on techniques such as bandwagon, false analogy, red herring, and hasty generalisations to

Often emotions contribute to our intuitive decisions which cloud our judgement. Emotions are part of the reason why we choose who to marry or which university course to major in. But we don’t realise that our emotions can change and this can alter the way we view our relationship, so the intuition may no longer be useful in generating the answers we would like. As mentioned earlier, intuition is based on forming patterns of previous experiences. We may become very skilled at using intuition without reasoning in one area and become overconfident and attempt to apply our intuition to another unfamiliar area. Intuition tends to go for solutions that keep the pattern consistent, so our choice of alternatives will also become more limited. In these cases, using logic is more preferable because we can map out the various options through facts, statistics, and analytical