Why Does Munger Oppose Relying on Intuition for Decision-Making?

Charlie Munger strongly opposes relying on intuition for decision-making primarily because of his profound insight into the inherent, systematic flaws of human cognition. He believes that so-called "intuition" or "gut feeling," in most cases, is not some mysterious sixth sense, but rather untested, fast thinking hijacked by various cognitive biases.

Munger's entire intellectual framework, especially his famous "Psychology of Human Misjudgment," is a systematic exposition of this viewpoint. His opposition to intuition rests on several key pillars:

1. Intuition is a Breeding Ground for Cognitive Biases

Munger spent decades identifying 25 "Psychology of Human Misjudgment" tendencies. These mental shortcuts, formed during human evolution, might have aided survival in ancient times. However, in the complex modern world of finance and business, they often lead to disastrous errors.

So-called "intuition" is frequently the manifestation of these biases at work:

Liking/Loving & Disliking/Hating Tendency: Your "intuition" tells you a company is great, perhaps simply because you like its product or CEO, rather than based on objective analysis of its financials and business model. The reverse is also true.
Availability-Misweighing Tendency: You "intuitively" believe an industry has bright prospects, possibly just because the media has recently reported its success stories extensively, while ignoring the multitude of failures.
First-Conclusion Bias: Once you form an initial judgment based on "intuition," your brain unconsciously seeks evidence supporting it while ignoring contradictory evidence. This makes correcting the initial intuitive error extremely difficult.
Social-Proof Tendency: During market frenzies, your "intuition" tells you "everyone is doing it, so it must be right," leading you to follow the crowd into overvalued assets. This is the product of group pressure, not independent thought.
Overconfidence Tendency: Especially after some success, people's "intuition" becomes excessively confident, making them believe they can easily predict the future, thus taking on risks far exceeding their capabilities.

For Munger, relying on intuition means letting these cognitive biases run rampant, which is fatal in a field like investing that demands extreme rationality and objectivity.

2. Munger's Prescribed Antidote: The Latticework of Mental Models

Munger believes the only effective weapon against intuition and cognitive biases is a robust, multidisciplinary "Latticework of Mental Models."

The Danger of a Single Perspective: Relying on intuition essentially means viewing a problem through one or a few familiar, rigid perspectives. As the adage goes: "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."
The Power of Multi-Model Analysis: The Latticework requires drawing wisdom from the essential theories of different disciplines (psychology, physics, biology, economics, history, etc.) to capture reality's complexity using a "net." For example, when analyzing a company, you shouldn't just use accounting models to examine financial statements; you should also use psychological models to analyze its management and culture, economic models to assess its moat, and physics models (like breakpoint theory) to identify potential risks.

This process is counterintuitive. It demands slow, deliberate, rigorous, and systematic thinking (what Daniel Kahneman calls "System 2 thinking"), not intuitive, fast, emotional "System 1 thinking."

3. The Peculiarity of Investing: A "Hostile" Learning Environment

Psychological research shows intuition can be effective in certain fields. For instance, experienced firefighters, chess players, or pilots often have remarkably accurate intuition. This is because they operate in "kind" learning environments:

Rules are clear and stable.
There are ample opportunities for repeated practice.
Feedback is immediate and accurate.

However, the investment arena is a classic "hostile" learning environment:

Rules are unclear and constantly changing.
Feedback is delayed and noisy. Buying a stock today might take years to yield a clear outcome.
Luck and skill are hard to distinguish. A successful investment could stem from genuine insight or pure luck.

In such an environment, relying on "intuition" to distill experience easily mistakes luck for skill and randomness for pattern, forming erroneous and harmful "investment intuition."

4. Munger's Toolkit: Checklists and Inversion

To force himself and others out of intuition's traps, Munger strongly advocates using mechanistic tools:

Checklists: Just as pilots must perform pre-flight checks, Munger believes investors should use a checklist before making decisions. This ensures systematically reviewing all critical aspects (financials, valuation, moat, management, competitive landscape, cognitive biases, etc.), preventing fatal flaws from being overlooked due to "intuition."
Invert, Always Invert: Intuition often leads us to ask, "How can I succeed?" Munger demands we invert the question: "What would cause this to fail completely?" This inversion focuses us on risks and uncovers potential problems masked by optimistic intuition.

Conclusion

In summary, Munger's opposition to relying on intuition isn't a denial of all human rapid judgment capabilities. It stems from a profound realism and a clear-eyed recognition of human cognitive fragility. He believes that in high-stakes, high-complexity decision-making domains like investing, "intuition" is often synonymous with "ignorance" and "bias."

His entire advocated wisdom system—the Latticework of Mental Models, checklists, and inversion—aims to construct a rational, robust decision-making framework to combat and replace that flawed, highly unreliable "intuition." His goal isn't fleeting "flashes of brilliance," but achieving long-term, sustainable success by avoiding stupidity.