Expert intuition: what is it, characteristics, and how does it work?

What is expert intuition? Let's look at how we apply expertise without being aware of it.

Expert intuition is a type of intuition based on experience and based on the repeated practice of certain actions and based on the repeated practice of certain actions related to the profession or modality in which the subject is considered an expert.

And by means of this intuition, the expert can successfully solve a task in a short time through rapid recognition of the context in which it is to be carried out.

Throughout this article we will see what expert intuition is and what impact it has on our lives.

The two systems of thought

Before explaining what expert intuition is in greater depth, it is useful to give a few brief details about the two ways in which the human mind develops thoughts and ideas. According to psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, thoughts are created by two antagonistic cognitive systems as follows.

System 1 is the way of thinking quickly and intuitively.. This thinking system serves to process our surroundings and to seek protection (e.g., when feeling fear, escape).

System 2 is slow, reflective thinking.. This type of thinking is analytical, which allows us to think about the pros and cons and then make the decision that we consider correct (e.g., hearing a song on the radio and turning it over in our head until we remember the name of the singer).

We will now explain in more detail what expert intuition consists of.

What is expert intuition?

Expert intuition is the ability to find a good solution to a given situation very quickly that professionals with a long history of experience have.. In these cases, the person has not needed to reason out the reasoning behind the solution because he or she has solved numerous similar problems on previous occasions, and this extensive experience allows him or her to recognize the problem and then the corresponding solution in a matter of seconds.

Psychologist Gary Klein conducted extensive research on expert intuition where he analyzed how professionals with a long track record had developed intuitive abilities in their work.

This type of intuition can be crucial in professions where decisions need to be made on the fly. because they are urgently required, as is the case of health professionals, police officers, firefighters, elite athletes, among other professions.

Next we will expose some examples in which the expert intuition is carried out with the objective of being able to understand it in more detail.

Examples of its application in professions

Klein's research with fire chiefs is a clear example of how expert intuition works.

When a firefighter was faced with a complicated situation during a fire, he would focus solely on the most accurate option he considered among the wide repertoire he had learned over his years of experience.

Then He would first run an imaginative simulation of his plan of action to see if it would work, in which case he would move on to the next step.if it would work, in which case he would take action. Otherwise, I would look for another option. All of this was thought out in his head on the fly as he immediately intervened.

Klein presented an actual case of a firefighter who, while trying to put out a fire in a burning house, quickly sensed that the best a firefighter who, while trying to put out a blazing house fire, quickly intuited that the best option he had at that moment was to escape urgently. Shortly thereafter the house collapsed. This is an example that explains expert intuition as an everyday experience that is acquired after years of professional experience.

A psychotherapist with a long history of practice has had many opportunities to understand the patient's reactions to what is being discussed in therapy and, as a result, can develop expert intuition to find the right words and tone to help the patient calm down and convey that he or she can trust your help, understand the patient's problem and, depending on what is being asked, how he or she will respond.

After having seen some examples of expert intuition put into practice, we will move on to see how to develop the necessary skills to be able to carry it out successfully.

How can we develop expert intuition?

It is important to emphasize that a true expert in a domain or profession knows what his or her limitations are in the area in question..

Whether a professional can develop the necessary skills to make his or her expert intuition effective from his or her background, depends fundamentally on the immediacy of the feedback received on his intuition and also on the fact that he has been able to put it into practice on many occasions. on many occasions.

Another relevant aspect to develop expert intuition is that it is made with contextually repetitive patterns, so that it makes it possible to make predictions about what can be triggered after a given intuition.

Moreover, in order to have this expert intuition, it is not enough to master a single skill related to one's profession, but it is also necessary to be able to handle it with solvency.It is necessary to have a good command of several skills.

Chess is a good example to explain how to acquire expert intuition. A chess master is able to instantly understand the position in which a certain figure is and immediately find a solution to successfully solve the move.

According to some investigations carried out with chess masters, it has been demonstrated that at least 10,000 hours of practice are necessary to reach a good level in chess or, what is the same, to practice 5 hours a day during 6 years in which thousands of moves are learned.

In this way, according to the disposition of the chess pieces on the board, you can intuit the ways in which your opponent can attack and thus defend yourself in one way or another. This practice of 10,000 hours to master chess could be extrapolated to the mastery of other modalities.

Can we rely on this way of solving problems?

When someone trusts his intuition and beliefs, he relies on the cognitive ease with which those ideas come to mind and the sense of coherence they have. is supported by the cognitive ease with which those ideas come to mind and the sense of coherence they have. That is to say, he does not find any contradiction when putting that idea into practice and also considers that the results will be satisfactory.

However, even if these conditions are met, there is no guarantee that the results he expects after carrying out his idea will be satisfactory.

That is why we should never rely 100% on an intuition, even if it is our own. Because, no matter how much confidence we have in our intuition, there is no absolute certainty of knowing to what extent it is valid.

So we could be guided by two factors to assess the probability of an intuition coming true:

• That it occurs in a regular context, so that it can be predictable what will happen afterwards.
• Having practiced enough in similar contexts, being able to have learned various regular patterns and their outcomes.

If both cases are present, there is a good chance that our intuition is valid, as in the case of chess, where the context is regular and the expert has thousands of hours of practice behind him.

When an expert intuition is given in a regular environment and our reasoning through the system 2 of thought has been able to understand and memorize those regularities, it is possible to predict what will happen, it is possible to predict what will happen next and, in this way, it is possible to make a decision urgently and with a high degree of certainty of and with a high degree of certainty that it will be carried out successfully.

In cases where all of the above are present, we could rely on expert intuition.

Trying to have expert intuition in situations that are unpredictable is a form of self-deception. For, in case the intuition is fulfilled, if there is no reasonably predictable situational pattern or similar to others already experienced before, the success of such intuition would rather be due to luck. Therefore, we cannot trust our intuition if there is no stable regularity in the environment in which it is triggered.

The accurate intuitions are due to the fact that system 1 of your thinking has learned to establish with great rapidity of action without the need for system 2 to have learned to express these intuitions in words..

Some modes of intuition can develop rapidly, as is the case of intuition arising from a bad experience in the past (e.g., feeling tension when passing through a street where in the past a very unpleasant incident occurred).

Although, it is true, that many times you can feel anxiety in a certain context or when someone is talking about a particular topic, without consciously recognizing any action or situation that triggers the anxiety state.. In the event that an unpleasant experience follows, we retrospectively speak of the state of anxiety that precedes the unpleasant event as an intuition.

In the case of the previously mentioned fireman, he had the intuition to leave the place of the fire to escape from a danger of collapse and this was propitiated in part because he had been during many occasions reflecting on many types of fires and on everything that could happen without it had not yet happened in real life.

There is another true story of a young army officer with no combat experience who had been given a scouting mission in unknown territory when, as he passed through a narrow ravine, he began to feel tension because he had learned during his years of training to detect that places like that were ripe for ambush.

One usually learns quickly through the emotions aroused by certain contexts; but developing an expert intuition is not the only way to learn.But developing expert intuition requires many years and hours of practice, because being an expert in a field or profession does not require mastery of just one skill, but a Wide range of interrelated attitudes.