Mental Simulation, Intuition and Insight

In an earlier post, I mentioned Gary Klein, who studies naturalistic decision making or intution.

In his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions , he explains how he started by interviewing fire-fighters. He found that when fire-fighters make life and death decisions, they don't consider alternatives and evaluate them according to criteria to determine the best option as suggested by the process recommended by many Operations Researchers for rational decision-making .

Instead, fire-fighters run mental simulations to try to predict the outcome of one course of action after another until they find one that they believe will work.

Without this understanding, it would appear that they are using intuition to make decisions. However, Klein believes that this type of mental simulation only works after many years of experience.

Also in an earlier post, I mentioned that the ultimate goal of Operations Research is the creation of a paradigm shift. Another word for paradigm shift that applies to individuals is “insight” or the “Aha” effect.

In this article, Klein explains how a friend of his gained insight with the help of an associate.  The associate ran the friend through a mental simulation.  Through the mental simulation, his friend could see the fallacy in his thinking and discover how to change is mindset.

A tool of Operations Research is computer simulation. Computer simulations can take many months to build. They also can be difficult to interpret and explain. Because of these latter issues, much of the time computer simulations do not have an impact commensurate with the effort to build them.

If we follow Gary Klein's advice, we should use mental simulation to explain the findings from our computer simulations. This might help us have more impact in changing paradigms.