CaliforniaKid wrote:Blink is really an argument for what Gladwell calls "thin-slicing." Intuitive decision making is one example of thin-slicing, and Gladwell does argue for its usefulness. However, Gladwell also carefully qualifies this argument. "Thin-slicing" can also be done in a very conscious, deliberate way, as in the heart attack example I described in the OP. And even in cases where intuitive decision-making is useful, it can go horribly wrong if done incorrectly. It works best when bound by rules and informed by a lifetime of training. Careful, conscious deliberation is still required to formulate the rules and training regimens that produce effective intuitive deciders.
Consider a few of Gladwell's examples. There's a tennis expert who’s able to tell whether a tennis player is going to double-fault just as the player is beginning his swing. There are art historians who can tell a forgery in the first five seconds of looking at it. There are many professional athletes who make baskets or hit baseballs with almost zero reaction time. These are people who have spent their entire lives training their brains to make particular kinds of intuitive judgments in the most effective possible way. As for rules, consider the case of improv comedy teams. Practitioners of improv have an all-important rule: never stop the action or turn down another participant’s suggestion. In real life, Gladwell says, we’re very efficient action-stoppers, because this keeps us safe. When amateurs do improv, they tend to intuitively want to stop the action. But action-stopping makes for bad fiction, bad drama, and bad comedy. To be good at improv, you have to systematically train yourself to follow this rule.
Applying this to religion, then, it seems unlikely that intuitive judgments are going to be effective unless they're informed by some training in Religious Studies and in the recognized rules of good decision-making.
As a side-note, Gladwell also argues that the context of intuitive decision-making is important. It's very easy to "prime" someone to behave in a particular way. Use a few aggressive words in a conversation, and you can trigger aggression in your conversation partner. Imagine, then, the power of an environment that constantly reinforces Mormon truth claims and "primes" people to have certain kinds of spiritual experiences. The LDS community is not a context that's been constructed to encourage unbiased intuitive decision-making. Rather, it's a context that's been carefully crafted to bias intuitive decision-making in a particular direction.
ETA: By the way J Green, I too appreciate your reasonableness and civility in this discussion. It's all too rare on these boards.
A few years back the military paid for me to take a leadership in crisis course from the Harvard Kennedy Center Extension. I gathered with a number of first responders, like FEMA reps, fire chiefs from the larger metropolitan areas, hospital administrators, etc. And we looked at intuitive decision making during crisis management. We reviewed case studies from 9/11, BP oil spill, Hudson River landing, etc. and we got to hear from the key individuals managing these events. Good stuff, and Gladwell is right that everything can go horribly wrong in a split second.
Your take on intuition as applied to religion is interesting and will give me something to chew on for a few days. My view from the course is that intuition works best within loose frameworks that are prepped and practiced. Aside from muscle memory, athletes are conditioned within a larger framework of repetitive events, so spotting indicators and acting on them becomes instinctive. But one of the biggest factors becomes the mechanics of how organizations are culturally architected. The way people interact changes the dynamics of how intuition works. And this gets to your observation of aggression as well as your point that spiritual experiences can be primed within a set construct. As a living organization made of humans, I would expect the church to exhibit some of these same dynamics. Interesting stuff.
Regards
". . . but they must long feel that to flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment" - Jane Austen in "Persuasion"
