Intuition as Emergence: Bridging Psychology, Philosophy and Organizational Science

Abstract

Accelerating environmental uncertainty and the need to cope with increasingly complex market and social demands, combine to create high value for the intuitive approach to decision-making at the strategic level. Research on intuition suffers from marked fragmentation, due to the existence of disciplinary silos based on diverse, apparently irreconcilable, ontological and epistemological assumptions. Not surprisingly, there is no integrated interdisciplinary framework suitable for a rich account of intuition, contemplating how affect and cognition intertwine in the intuitive process, and how intuition scales up from the individual to collective decision-making. This study contributes to the construction of a broad conceptual framework, suitable for a multi-level account of intuition and for a fruitful dialogue with distant research areas. It critically discusses two mainstream conceptualizations of intuition which claim to be grounded in a cross-disciplinary consensus. Drawing on the complexity paradigm, it then proposes a conceptualization of intuition as emergence. Finally, it explores the theoretical and practical implications.

Analysis and Intuition Effectiveness in Moral Problems

“…Second, a parallel-competitive view is consistent with growing evidence from experimental and neurological studies (Alós-Ferrer & Strack, 2014;Healey et al, 2015;Howarth et al, 2019;Kuo et al, 2009;Lieberman, 2007). Third, the adoption of a parallel-competitive view corresponds with recent trends in management and organization studies, where the focus is about to slightly shift from a dominance of defaultinterventionist accounts towards a parallel-competitive view (Adinolfi, 2021;Adinolfi & Loia, 2022;Hodgkinson & Sadler-Smith, 2018;Keller and Sadler-Smith 2019;Luoma & Martela, 2021;Zaitsava et al, 2022). This is also in line with the conclusion from Cecchini (2021) that recent empirical findings strongly favor an independent rather than a hierarchical dual-process theory in the moral domain.…”

Awareness: An empirical model

“…There is now a consistent body of research delving into the nature of decision-making, particularly into the role of cognition, intuition, and emotion in human decisions (Soosalu et al, 2019). Notably, intuition and cognition deal with two different ways to process information, which we call intuitive and analytical (Adinolfi and Loia, 2021). Although dual-process theories come in several forms, they reflect the generic fundamental distinction between the two processes.…”

“…The outcomes of intuition are perceived as a holistic "hunch", a sense of calling or overpowering certainty, and an awareness of knowledge that is on the threshold of conscious perception (Bechara and Damasio, 2005). In their comprehensive review of literature on intuition within the field of management, Dane and Pratt defined intuition as "affectively charged judgment that arises through rapid, nonconscious, and holistic associations" (Dane, 2007;Adinolfi and Loia, 2021). We can say that Blaise Pascal's cognition theory has obtained its deserved consideration after nearly 350 years.…”

Guest editorial: Beyond rationality in organizations’ choices: exploring the dark and the bright sides of non-rational decision-making

“…In particular, since the emergence of the disrupting concept of bounded rationality (Simon, 1947) – that questioned the previously dominating assumption of perfect rationality – scholarly interest has moved toward understanding the deviations of the human mind from logical and rational choice paths (Cristofaro, 2017). Prolific have been works investigating the role of intuition (Barnard, 1938; Simon, 1987; Dane and Pratt, 2007; Julmi, 2019, 2023; Loia and Adinolfi, 2022), affective states (Bachkirov, 2015; Fodor et al , 2016; Fodor and Pintea, 2017; Cristofaro, 2019, 2020), heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973, 1974) and cognitive traps (Hammond et al , 1998) within the decision-making processes of organizational agents – who are dealing with an increasingly complex business environment also further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and other dramatic changes (e.g. Russo-Ukranian war, energy crisis and climate change).…”