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Some studies claim to demonstrate that intuition is more reliable than evidence-based decision-making. Which makes me wonder, if a study presents evidence that intuition is superior to evidence, does it prove itself wrong?

And anyway, the preponderance of the evidence seems to favor evidence and logic after all (and is that circular reasoning?) … see, for example, “The Future of Decision Making: Less Intuition, More Evidence,” Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business Review, 1/7/2010.

Last week’s column proposed that while practitioners of the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) rely on evidence and logic and are trained in their use, we aren’t Spock-like logicians, immune from emotional influences. We’re as likely to rationalize as anyone else, and because of our analytical skills we’re better at it.

Some correspondents argued that, this being the case, there’s really no hope. As we can’t escape the control of our emotions we should all just stop worrying, be happy, and, I guess, embrace our inner monkeys.

Which means, I guess, that if you can’t achieve perfection you shouldn’t try to improve. Sounds like a rationalization to me.

Opinion: The better we are at being objective, the better off we are, if for no other reason than the protection it provides from the propagandists, marketers, and political consultants who use our emotions against us every day.

If we know their techniques we can watch out for them. So here’s an A-list of cognitive traps that are easy to fall into and hard to climb out of. If we’re alert to them, maybe we can avoid them.

Arguing: Arguments are about winning and losing. Discussions are about improving shared understanding and solving shared problems. If you find yourself trying to prove you’re right, you’re probably leading with your emotions, because the need to win is an emotional response.

If you’re arguing, stop, clarify where you and the other disputant disagree, and ask what evidence would settle the matter. Or, ask what problem you’re trying to solve together.

If you can’t get the other person to stop arguing, change the subject. You might as well. Your exchange of words is pointless.

Anecdotes: Marketers, sales professionals, and political consultants all know anecdotes are more persuasive than statistics. All they are, though, are statistics performed on a sample of one. Unless it’s fictional. Then, the sample size is zero.

Anecdotes illustrate a point. They prove something is possible. That’s about it.

Ad hominem arguments: In case you don’t know the term, an ad hominem argument goes like this: “You said 2 + 2 equals 4. You know who else said this? Hitler!”

Ad hominem arguments surround us. “Of course you think that way. You’re an engineer.” “Ignore him. He’s a bean counter.” Or if you’re in a Myers-Briggs situation, “It’s what you’d expect from an ENTJ.”

Tribalism is a special case of ad hominem argument, and a particularly dangerous one. It’s separating the world into us and them, creating a powerful emotional need to prove that we’re right and they’re wrong.

Anger: While an appeal to any of your emotions is, of course, an attempt to get you to decide something emotionally rather than on its merits, anger is the most dangerous of the bunch, for two reasons. First and foremost, anger makes you stupid. As does fear, but unlike fear, anger hangs around long after the stimulus has passed. It needs to be released. People who are angry aren’t always angry about anything in particular. But they’ll find something.

Anger is also unlike fear in that fear is ultimately about personal benefit — avoiding harm — so there’s some rationality to where it takes you.

If someone is trying to make you angry, you’re being played. I guarantee it.

Assertion: Argument by assertion replaces evidence with confidence. If you aren’t sure of the actual facts, and someone else makes a confident assertion, most of us, most of the time, are inclined to give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

“I don’t know the evidence, but I don’t accept what you’re telling me,” isn’t the most diplomatic statement you can make, after all.

Agreement: Far and away the most dangerous pitfall when it comes to avoiding emotion-driven decisions is hearing what you want to hear. Most of us, most of the time, accept “facts” that support what we want to be true without subjecting them to the slightest scrutiny.

Imagine you’ve avoided these traps. You’ve made a solid, evidence-based decision. Suddenly dispassion is counterproductive. To muster the energy and persistence you’ll need to make your decision real, you have to want it, and want it bad.

Deep down in your gut.

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What this country’s founders had in common was, more than anything else, the Enlightenment — an intellectual heritage that considered evidence and reason to be superior to faith, tradition, and authority as ways of understanding the world.

By 1800 the Enlightenment was already in decline, supplanted by world views that placed more stock in emotional ways of knowing.

Ten years and a day ago, 19 individuals who placed their faith in tradition and authority attacked this country, sacrificing themselves in doing so.

Their attack was, in a very real way, an attack on our Enlightenment legacy. But while much of how we responded was admirable, a re-commitment to that legacy was not part of our national conversation.

How we think about what “to know” means is very much part of the American experiment, and should not be a matter of fashion. But right now, in America, Enlightenment thinking is out of fashion.

I’ve seen first-hand an all-too-common response when someone frames problems and solutions in terms of evidence and logic: Dismissive eye-rolls by those who consider “I trust my gut” to be the alpha and omega of decision-making technique, as they explain to each other that “… of course he deals with the world this way … he is, after all, a technician, incapable of looking at the big picture.”

Here’s how bad it is: Mexico — a country with a third our population and an economy one tenth as large, has 20% more students enrolled in undergraduate engineering programs than we do. Clearly, young Mexicans see engineering as a route to affluence and respect. Young Americans consider it a path to harder work, a lower career ceiling, more limited wages, and less respect than what they can achieve through less intellectually demanding alternatives.

(They are, by the way, half right, but also half wrong. More S&P 500 CEOs earned undergraduate engineering degrees than any other major. But as a path to CEO-hood, engineering ranks below Operations, Finance, Marketing, Sales, and Planning & Development — source: “Leading CEOs: A Statistical Snapshot of S&P 500 Leaders,” SpencerStuart, 2006.)

It’s popular these days to talk about different ways of knowing as if they’re all equally valid. From the perspective of personal happiness, perhaps they are. From the perspective of career success they probably are as well, hence the well-known value of “emotional intelligence” as compared to, say, actual intelligence.

Okay, that was a cheap shot, and, worse, one that devalues an important ability –interacting effectively with other human beings.

Which doesn’t affect the point in the slightest. As evidence I offer Ben Franklin’s autobiography — a wonderful and wonderfully readable document by one of America’s leading followers of the Enlightenment. In it he offers quite a few situations that led him to discover effective principles for working with other people.

Here’s what this means: Engineers and others who base their professional success on the use of evidence and logic can use their engineering thought process to become better at interpersonals. Those who reject the “left-brain” approach to things can’t, however, use their emotional intelligence to become better engineers.

There’s a danger here: Claiming intellectual superiority over their more intuitive colleagues is an easy trap for technical professionals to fall into. Except for subjects like belief and aesthetics, evidentiary decision-making is certainly superior to intuition — the world did, after all, turn out to be round. But there’s a difference between the superiority of an approach and the superiority of the person taking it.

We’ve all been in conversations in which someone … sometimes a person with considerable experience and success … says that while they can’t explain their position, they’re pretty sure they’re right about it.

Often they are. Sometimes, the inability to explain comes from too much knowledge and experience rather than too little — the person has consciously run through the logic of similar circumstances so often that they’re no longer conscious of what they’re doing, very much as a guitar player might have a hard time explaining which fingers do what, exactly, when playing a difficult piece.

The inability to explain, that is, doesn’t make a person wrong. Unpersuasive? Yes, which is why the onus is on them to understand their internal logic well enough to explain it.

Do engineering and the other STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) belong in the Enlightenment category? Yes, of course they do, which is different from placing all scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians there.

We are just as subject to human foibles as anyone else. And when we succumb to them, we are, if anything, more dangerous, because if we aren’t careful, we’ll use our expertise at applying evidence and logic to rationalize decisions we made just as irrationally as anyone else.

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