How much information do you need? Interaction of intuitive processing with expertise

Abstract

Intuition is usually seen as fast, automatic, high processing capacity, yet only few studies focused directly on the connection with the amount of information search. In this paper we present two studies examining two different domains (financial and recruiting) and employing different manipulations (time stress and instruction). The main aim of both studies was to examine whether preference for intuition (as cognitive style) would lead to less information search with respect to expert and non-expert population, with experience as moderator affecting intuitive people more in terms of searching for less information. Generally, our results indicate that situational manipulations, such as inducing time stress or giving instruction to think intuitively, affect information search more than preferred cognitive style and that it is necessary to examine intuition in context-specific tasks as the experience plays a crucial role in the searching information when making decisions.