Pattern recognition primes decision-making

How do experts, in some situations, intuitively make the right decision?

The psychologist Gary Klein tells the story of a team of firefighters that entered a house in which the kitchen was on fire. Soon after they started hosing down the kitchen, the commander heard himself shout, “Let’s get out of here!” without realizing why. The floor collapsed almost immediately after the firefighters escaped. Only after the fact did the commander realize that the fire had been unusually quiet and that his ears had been unusually hot. Together, these impressions prompted what he called a “sixth sense of danger.” He had no idea what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. It turned out that the heart of the fire had not been in the kitchen but in the basement beneath where the men had stood.[1]

How does this happen? Essentially, it is the process by which experience is applied to pattern recognition and informed decision-making. The greater the experience, the more patterns in the repertoire from which to select a potential match.

As Klein described it in our joint article, he and his collaborators investigated how the commanders could make good decisions without comparing options. The initial hypothesis was that commanders would restrict their analysis to only a pair of options, but that hypothesis proved to be incorrect. In fact, the commanders usually generated only a single option, and that was all they needed. They could draw on the repertoire of patterns that they had compiled during more than a decade of both real and virtual experience to identify a plausible option, which they considered first. They evaluated this option by mentally simulating it to see if it would work in the situation they were facing…. If the course of action they were considering seemed appropriate, they would implement it. If it had shortcomings, they would modify it. If they could not easily modify it, they would turn to the next most plausible option and run through the same procedure until an acceptable course of action was found.[2]

There are essentially two phases:

Klein elaborated this description into a theory of decision making that he called the recognition-primed decision (RPD) model, which applies to firefighters but also describes expertise in other domains, including chess. The process involves both System 1 and System 2. In the first phase, a tentative plan comes to mind by an automatic function of associative memory—System 1. The next phase is a deliberate process in which the plan is mentally simulated to check if it will work—an operation of System 2.[3]

#psychology #expertise

See also:

  1. Thinking, Fast and Slow – Kahneman (2013), § “Introduction.” ↩︎

  2. Ibid., ch. 22 § “Intuition as Recognition.” ↩︎

  3. Ibid. ↩︎