Characterizations and portrayals of intuition in decision-making: A systematic review of management literature to inform engineering education

Abstract

Engineers' decisions drive the of design our ever-changing world. What engineers design, how they design, and who they include in the design process all involves decision-making. How those decisions are made ultimately impacts our quality of life. When making decisions, people (and therefore engineers!) utilize at least three distinct forms of reasoning: rational, intuitive, and emotive. Engineering education currently emphasizes rational approaches to decision-making. User-centered design experiences can expose students to the importance of developing empathy for the user throughout the design process, which can encourage emotive reasoning strategies. However, students' exposure to intuitive reasoning, which plays a role in all decision-making, is limited during their undergraduate engineering formation. In an effort to generate a baseline for how we can operationalize intuition in the context of engineering education, the purpose of our current research was to synthesize characterizations and portrayals of intuitive reasoning. We focused on literature from the field of management because intuition is considered in the context of complex, strategic decisions, which are reflective of the design decisions central to engineering. The specific research questions addressed in this study are 1) how does extant management literature characterize intuition?, and 2) how does extant management literature portray the value of intuition? To answer these research questions, the research team conducted a systematic literature review. The results of this effort provide a summary of the ways in which scholars have defined and portrayed the role of intuition with respect to complex decision-making. Based on this synthesis, we recommend that engineering educators develop innovative ways of teaching decision-making that does not remove the teaching of rational methods, but finds way to integrate intuitive reasoning. We provide brief recommendations for how we might begin to shift engineering education towards more realistic and inclusive ways of teaching decision-making.