Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People think they ought to make some decisions on the basis of deliberative analysis, and others on the basis of intuitive, gut feelings. What accounts for this variation in people’s preferences for intuition versus deliberation? We propose that intuition might be prescribed for some decisions because people’s folk theory of decision-making accords a special role to authenticity, where authenticity is uniquely associated with intuitive choice. Two pre-registered experiments find evidence in favor of this claim. In Experiment 1 (N=631), we find that decisions made on the basis of intuition (vs. deliberation) are more likely to be judged authentic, especially in domains where authenticity is plausibly valued. In Experiment 2 (N=177), we find that people are more likely to prescribe intuition as a basis for choice when the value of authenticity is heightened experimentally. These effects hold beyond previously recognized influences, such as computational costs, presumed efficacy, objectivity, complexity, and expertise.