The Intelligence of Instinct

Cognitive Biases

Emily Freeman

The Intelligence of Instinct

by Emily Freeman

In her presentation "The Intelligence of Instinct" at RailsConf 2018, Emily Freeman discusses the complex interplay of fear, instinct, and decision-making, drawing on psychological theory and personal anecdotes to highlight how our instincts can serve as valuable pre-incident indicators. She begins with a poignant personal experience of feeling unsafe in a hotel elevator, which prompts her to explore the nature of fear as more than just a gut feeling, arguing that it is the brain processing numerous cues to deliver critical information.

Key Points Discussed:

- Understanding Fear: Freeman explains that fear arises from the brain synthesizing data from various inputs, culminating in instinctual responses to threats.

- The Two Brains: Inspired by Daniel Kahneman's concepts, she differentiates between "System 1" (quick, instinctual thinking) and "System 2" (deliberate, logical thinking), asserting that both systems can work in tandem to enhance decision-making.

- Intuition as a Skill: The talk emphasizes that intuition is not merely a feeling but a crucial skill that can be honed through experience, particularly in engineering contexts where recognizing code smells or anomalies can prevent disasters.

- Distinction between Fear and Anxiety: Freeman makes an important distinction between fear, which is a response to immediate threats, and anxiety, which is rooted in anticipation of potential threats, underscoring the physiological similarities yet conceptual differences of both.

- Real-life Examples: She recounts the stories of Kelly, a woman who ignored warning signs that led to a dangerous encounter, and Army Reservist Martin K. Richburg, whose instinctive alertness saved lives in a possible bombing scenario, illustrating that intuition can manifest in various critical situations.

- Recommendations for Application: Freeman proposes a methodical approach to utilizing gut feelings: recognizing the instinct, investigating the suspicion, and engaging System 2 for deeper analysis. This includes articulating concerns with colleagues to facilitate discussion and find solutions.

Conclusions and Takeaways:

- The presentation emphasizes the importance of trusting one's instincts while also critically analyzing situations through a logical lens.

- By acknowledging and respecting our intuitive responses, we can improve our decision-making processes in both personal safety and technical fields.

- Furthermore, the integration of emotional intelligence with technical expertise is vital in cultivating a holistic understanding of risks involved in software development and engineering strategies.

00:00:11.300 Last year, I got on a hotel elevator in Toronto with three men: a staff member of the hotel and two others. I hesitated before getting on, but I thought better of it; there was a staff member. It was a nice hotel, but I did something that should have clued me in: when I got on the elevator, I pushed the button for the wrong floor. The staff member got off on the fifth floor, and I had 14 more to go. The doors closed, and I felt the large man behind me grab my backpack. He picked it up slightly and asked, 'Why are you wearing this cock-block?' I froze. I made myself small and tried to ignore him for eight more floors. He persisted, asking, 'What's in there?' My heart raced much faster than the floors were ticking by; eight, nine, ten. I realized that if they wanted, those two men could drag me off the elevator and into their room, and I would be more or less helpless. Finally, the doors opened, and the man to the right, who was much less drunk than the man behind me, dragged him off. The door shut, and I was alone, but I felt anything but safe. I felt vulnerable, exposed, fragile, and scared. I went up in the elevator to the wrong floor, found the stairwell, walked down it. It was eerily quiet. I found my door, fumbled with the key, got inside, locked the door, and called my mom. I sobbed. I got lucky; that story could have taken a much darker direction.

00:00:56 I travel alone a lot for my job to conferences, and that experience fundamentally changed how I act on the road and the precautions I take. After that experience, I became extremely interested in the instinct of fear because the clues were there for me. I hesitated before getting on the elevator. I had a bad feeling and pushed the button for the wrong floor. Why? What did my gut see, and what was it trying to tell me? Why didn't I listen? So, I did what every developer does; I went to Google. I discovered Gavin de Becker's book 'The Gift of Fear.' This book delves into dozens of stories about violence and the precursors to violence with the hopes that we can begin to recognize the warning signs and avoid harm. De Becker opens his book with an incredibly gripping story.

00:02:12 A woman named Kelly had gone grocery shopping and arrived at the front door of her building to find it unlocked. She was frustrated at the neighbors who consistently left the door to the building unlocked but also a little relieved that it would be easier to get in with those groceries. As she headed up the stairs to the fourth floor, one of the bags broke, and her groceries tumbled down the stairs. As this was happening, she heard a voice from the fourth floor below, saying, 'Got it, I’ll bring it up.' De Becker goes on to say that from that moment, Kelly didn't like that voice. She instinctually knew something was wrong. The man who walked up the stairs had a very friendly face. He handed her the item and went to take her bag, but niceness isn’t kindness. Kelly didn’t let go of the bag, and in that moment, they both held onto the handle. It was a moment of tension and decision; the man had pushed himself into Kelly's space, and she had to choose whether to trust him or ask him to let go. Kelly went against that internal guiding voice; she let go. The man took the bag up to her apartment, stopped at the door, and she turned to him and said, 'Thank you, I’ve got it from here.' It was the second time she asserted herself. She made herself clear, and a kind person would have walked away, but this man wasn't kind; he insisted he’d help her take it inside. Everything in Kelly said no, but then she convinced herself he was nice, he was just trying to help, it was probably fine. She let him in, and he held her at gunpoint and raped her.

00:06:07 After he got up, got dressed, closed the window in her bedroom, he said he was going to the kitchen to get a drink of water and that she should stay right there. She didn’t; she knew in her gut he intended to kill her, and this time she listened. She got up off the bed and walked as his shadow down the hall, right behind him. When de Becker tells the story, he says the man could have felt her breath if she’d been breathing. Kelly went out her front door, across the hall, opened the unlocked door of her neighbor, walked inside, locked the door, and told him to be quiet. We know now that that one incredibly brave decision saved her life. That story is every woman's worst nightmare. We think about it on a weekly, if not daily, basis. But it’s not just women who have intuition. In 2006, Army Reserve Staff Sergeant Martin K. Richburg was in Iraq, talking to his wife on the phone outside an Internet café when a man approached with a blue bag. Richburg had a bad feeling; something didn’t seem quite right. His suspicions led him to watch the man closely. The man set the bag on the café's air conditioner and quickly walked away. Richburg, alerted to the danger, chased after the man and found out that an IED was located in that bag. The building was evacuated before the bomb detonated, and his quick action saved the lives of 12 soldiers and five Iraqi civilians.

00:08:35 Military field reports frequently cite a sixth sense—what they like to call a 'spidey sense.' The Office of Naval Research has put nearly four million dollars toward research on intuition. That’s the military—a group not exactly known for being in touch with their feelings. The Department of Defense calls this 'sense making' and defines it as a motivated, continuous effort to understand connections which can be among people, places, and events in order to anticipate their trajectories and act effectively—which is military speak for listening to your gut. Not a lot of writers end up at West Point. Apparently, fear is not a gut feeling. Fear is your brain delivering critical information derived from countless cues that have added up to one conclusion: stop, get out, run. But sometimes fear isn’t life or death. Most of us, thank God, don’t experience threats to our safety in our everyday lives. Instead, we experience a more subtle, less threatening form of fear. Sometimes, our gut feelings are as simple as a code smell or that shiver of hesitation before a deploy.

00:10:52 I’m Emily Freeman, and I’m a Developer Advocate for Kickbox. Our API is a smarter, better reCAPTCHA that ensures your users are real people with legitimate email addresses. I’m thrilled to be here with you all at RailsConf—it’s my first RailsConf, so I’m very excited for this great conference! This talk is going to explore fear, instinct, and denial. We’ll focus on our two brains—what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 and System 2—and we’ll look at how we can start to view our feelings as pre-incident indicators. There are endless dark alleys in our codebases. I think we all have that one feature that really shouldn’t work the way it’s built, but it does, and you don’t want to touch it. You’re pretty sure it’s going to explode everything at some point. You’re just kind of hoping that it won’t happen while you’re on call.

00:12:04 I’m lucky enough to have never experienced anything like Kelly, and I’ve never served in our military, but I think most of us drive, right? So imagine you’re in your car driving down the highway. There’s light traffic, but you’re moving along at a pretty good clip. Suddenly, you tap the brake and back off; you don’t like something about the SUV in front of you. Now, you’ve got no real cognitive reason to take your foot off the gas. They haven’t signaled or swerved. But then they do what your gut said they would do—they move over into your lane. If anyone here rides motorcycles, you know it’s even more intense; you develop a sixth sense for other drivers. So what’s happening here? Well, I have some bad news: you’re not actually clairvoyant. That would be cool! I don’t recommend you quit your probably lucrative day job, change your name to Miss Cleo, and open a stand-up at the mall instead. Your brain did what it does best: it took a thousand inputs and distilled them into one conclusion, within seconds.

00:15:00 What did your brain see? Maybe the driver checked their mirror. Maybe the car moved ever so slightly over in the lane. The signals are much less important than the result and your discernment of the basic instinct of fear. Fear is one of the key reasons humans have survived as a species; it has kept us alive, and it’s an incredibly useful and powerful gift—a skill honed by thousands of years of evolution. This feature of fear comes out of the box for us; we have it, all of us, built in, and we don’t need special training to experience its effects. But you can become an expert in your own intuition by purposefully training yourself to recognize the warning signs and precursors to danger—even the risks lurking in our codebases.

00:17:35 Now, I want to take a minute to distinguish anxiety and worry from true fear. I suffer from anxiety and I’m sure many of us in this room deal with some kind of anxiety or depression. Even those of us who don’t experience occasional worry. The difference between fear and anxiety is rather subtle, sometimes indistinguishable; both feelings elicit the same physiological response. Your brain is alerted to a stressor, and the hypothalamus arouses the autonomic nervous system. Your body begins to reserve fluids and controls the release of saliva, tears, and gastric acid. It creates cortisol, which actually assists in blood clotting, and noradrenaline is released to strengthen your skeletal muscles. Your body literally prepares to experience harm; your heart rate intensifies to increase the amount of oxygenated blood in your system, your pupils dilate, blood vessels constrict, and your mental acuity increases, making you hyper-aware of yourself and your surroundings. The difference is time: fear is a response to an immediate threat; anxiety, however, is rooted in anticipation. That’s the key to discerning fear from anxiety: time. If your worry hits you like a ton of bricks, you’re worried and bruised and ruminating.

00:20:34 Psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. He was a man who intimately knew fear. Kahneman's parents were Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to France in the 1920s. His father believed that Jews were safe in France and chose not to flee to Tel Aviv in Palestine. Kahneman prayed daily to live just one more day as his family hid in the woods during this time. His father died of untreated diabetes just six weeks before D-Day. His research partner was Amos Tversky. Nearly everyone who interacted with Tversky talks about him as the smartest person they had ever met, and he had an incredibly sharp humor. While leading a group in the Israeli army, he dealt with men who didn’t want to wear their helmets; they felt that if a bullet had their name on it, it was God’s will. He remarked, 'What about all the bullets that say to whom it may concern?'

00:22:12 In their book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow,' Daniel Kahneman describes the work he and Tversky conducted over their careers researching judgment and decision-making. It’s brilliant; I highly recommend it. Though at times, it’s a little bit dry. So if your brain’s like mine, the audio version will help you work through those particularly thick statistical bits. Kahneman and Tversky became extremely interested in the cognitive biases and heuristics that humans use to make decisions. Heuristics are shortcuts that your brain uses to simplify complex problems, and while it mostly works, your brain can sort of deform logic in order to come up with conclusions faster. It’s a speed-accuracy trade-off. Cognitive biases are assumptions our mind has made based on existing patterns.

00:24:00 For example, the availability heuristic makes all of us more likely to believe that we may die in a plane because we’re sucked out of the window if the engine blew, especially if we’re flying Southwest this week, than in a car on the way to the airport. But we know statistically that air travel is the absolute safest way to get from one place to another. Over the decades of research, Kahneman and Tversky theorized that the human brain has two styles of thinking—what they call System 1 and System 2. System 1 is quick, instinctual, and driven by emotions. I like to think of this as our 'mean-girl' brain—this 13-year-old hormonal monster that lives inside all of us. On the other hand, System 2 is highly logical and quite deliberate. I’ll refer to this as our 'nerd brain.' Now, most of us in this room are engineers, and if you’re not, you probably work fairly closely with us, so you know the type.

00:26:43 We like to think we’re always running on our nerd brain, right? Because we measure ourselves on intelligence. We’re smart, rational, data-driven. But the bad news is we are also driven by emotions. We make snap judgments all day long. Humans, all of us, default to System 1, our mean-girl brain. I know it’s pretty hard to hear. I’ll give you a minute to absorb that. System 2 is expensive, so it’s most efficient to run on System 1 most of the time. It’s unconscious and processes information quickly. All right, this is audience participation time. The Ruby community is fantastic, so just shout out the answers—don’t be shy! Which line is longer, light blue or dark blue? Good job! T plus 2 is... and complete the phrase! War and... good job! Congratulations, you’ve accessed your System 1. That’s pretty easy. So if we run on our mean-girl brain most of the time, what’s the nerd’s job?

00:31:02 Well, System 2 is conscious and effortful, so let’s really exercise our brains. What’s 24 times 19? Significantly harder than 2 plus 2, right? Funny story: when I was giving this to my boss as practice, he had done it on the calculator, and he just blurted it out. I’m like, I know what you did! How many golf balls fit in a school bus? It’s actually 660,000—that’s apparently. Which chemical element has the shortest name? No! Tin! Not so easy, huh? We’re just like a whiteboard away from a full-on technical interview there! If you access and utilize your nerd brain often, you begin to feel rundown. It takes much more energy to think with System 2 than it does with System 1 because it’s rather lazy. But what if you could use both to your advantage?

00:32:45 Remember Staff Sergeant Richburg? System 1 alerted him that something was wrong, and that curiosity and innate suspicion triggered his System 2. Your lazy emotional System 1 is an alerting system. This cat would probably not be a very good watch cat, and the buttoned-up rational System 2 is the investigator. Now, you’re never going to be able to fully trust your System 1; it is rife with bias. System 1 runs purely on existing patterns: snakes are bad, homeless people are dangerous, hackers live in their mothers’ basements. But not all snakes will kill you—few will, and Reall Confluence makes it very clear that we do not endorse you picking snakes! Most homeless people are absolutely harmless, and less than 50% of hackers live in their mothers’ basements. Probably.

00:35:11 While you can’t trust the conclusions your System 1 makes, you can trust its ability to trigger your System 2. And System 2 is what delves into the details, forms hypotheses, and creates algorithms. Michael Lewis, the author of 'Moneyball,' became interested in the Oakland A’s impressive performance against teams with triple, sometimes quadruple their budget. You think that the team with the highest player salaries would get the best players and be most successful in the league, right? That would be an efficient market, and economists, like developers, love efficiency. Only it didn’t work out like that. At that time, Major League Baseball wasn’t efficient at all. The Oakland A’s held their own against even the wealthiest teams in the league, like the Yankees.

00:37:10 His interest piqued. Lewis dug... or you could say his System 2 dug in. Like most sports, baseball players are picked by scouts, and scouts, like all humans, run on their mean-girl brain. They fell victim to the biases we all do. For example, a handsome player with an athletic build is most likely overvalued because he just looks the part. Due to their budget limitations, Oakland realized they had to find players that were undervalued, so they turned everything upside down. They approached player selection with an entirely new perspective. These scouts for the Oakland A’s looked at statistics no one else did. Other scouts leaned heavily on stolen bases and batting averages. Oakland looked at on-base percentages and slugging percentages to gauge offensive success. They even went so far as to seek out unattractive players, often with some kind of physical oddity. The players, on average, were a bit fat; actually, Lewis likes to say that if you lined them up against the wall, they looked more like accountants than professional athletes.

00:40:16 One player even had two clubbed feet. I’m not kidding. They employed a catcher with a busted elbow and a pitcher with this very odd submarine-style pitch; that’s like long and lanky. The scouts used their System 1 to make those snap decisions. For example, if that shortstop runs with a limp, maybe he belongs in our team of misfits; then they defaulted to their nerd brain to test those assumptions. They measured every player against the statistical algorithm they produced. Engineering isn’t baseball; it’s not dangerous. Thank God! If your job is dangerous on a daily basis, we should probably talk. How do we make this instinct of fear intelligent, and how do we apply it to our everyday not-so-dangerous engineering jobs?

00:43:08 First, pay attention when your gut sends you a message: listen. Think of it as a precognitive fire alarm; if you find yourself thinking, 'It’s probably fun,' no, it’s probably not. If you find yourself wondering, 'What are the chances?' High! The odds are high. Stop! Your brain has noticed something; take action! But don’t freak out—not yet. Action does not mean panic. It doesn’t mean alert your CEO; it does not mean deleting the entire service you just wrote because you think it sucks, or canceling the scheduled deploy. It simply means acknowledge your curiosity and allow it to transition into suspicion.

00:45:35 Now, suspicion has a bad connotation in our society, but it's derived from the Latin 'suspicier,' which simply means 'to watch.' So observe; look more closely. Finally, trigger your System 2 to ask questions. The more detailed and difficult questions, like 'What’s 24 times 19,' will actually trigger your brain to alert System 2, and it will jump into action, investigate, get to the root of it. Sometimes, your gut feeling is nothing. It’s a false alarm; sometimes it’s misdirected. Maybe you went home because you thought your oven was left on, only to discover your phone was left on a kitchen counter. And sometimes, you’re about to delete dozens of servers and bring down S3 in US East 1 for hours, effectively faulting the Internet.

00:49:06 Articulate your feelings to someone else. Talk to a real person, in person or on video if you happen to be remote. Communicate your concern and ask for their opinion. Now, this can be tough to do; our industry isn’t known for respecting feelings. We measure each other on our intelligence and our technical precision. But remember, you are an expert. We have technical intuition as engineers. It’s the thing that enables senior engineers to debug something in half the time it would take someone with less experience. It’s code smell; it’s the squint test. It’s knowing that when you see that your third nested loop has gone wrong, our brains are fantastic observers. They collect and process unfathomable amounts of data.

00:51:08 Your intuition is not a feeling; it’s a powerful mechanism derived from thousands of years of evolution and enhanced by your years of experience as an engineer and as a human. We would be wise to trust ourselves and to respect the gut feelings of those around us. Thank you! My name is Emily Freeman.