Deliberation is not always the best option

Humans have developed over millions of years of evolution to respond to certain situations without thinking too hard. If your ancestors _______ movement in the undergrowth, they would run first and ask questions later. At the same time, the _______ to analyse and to plan is part of what distinguishes people from other animals.

The question of when to trust your gut(直觉)and when to test your _______—whether to think fast or slow, in the language of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist—_______ in the office as much as it does in the savannah(大草原).

Deliberative thinking is the feature of a well-managed workplace. Strategic changes and budget discussions are built on rounds of meetings, memos, formulas and presentations. Processes are increasingly designed to _______ instinctive responses. From blind screening of job applicants to using “red-teaming” techniques to pick apart a firm’s plans, precision _______ instinct.

Yet instinct also has its place. Some decisions are more connected to emotional responses and inherently(固有的)less _______ to analysis. Does a marketing campaign capture the _______ of your company, say, or would this person work well with other people in a team? In _______ customer-service situations, intuition is often a better guide to how to behave than a script.

Gut instincts can also be ________. Plenty of research has shown that intuition becomes more unfailing with experience. In one well-known experiment, conducted in 2012, volunteers were asked to ________ whether a selection of designer handbags were fake or real. Some were instructed to operate on instinct and others to deliberate over their decision. Intuition worked better for those who owned at least three designer handbags; indeed, it ________ analysis. The more expert you become, the better your instincts tend to be.

________, the real reason to embrace fast thinking is that it is, well, fast. Instinctive decision-making is often the only way to get through the day. Researchers at Cornell University once estimated that people make over 200 decisions a day about food alone. The workplace is ________ but a succession of choices, a few big and many small: what to ________, when to intervene, whom to avoid in the lifts and, now, where to work each day.