We do most things instinctively. We don't think we do, but that's because we don't notice them. We do them ... by instinct. Some hard cognitive things are done by instinct. We do an immense amount of clever processing on raw visual and auditory signals that our eyes and ears receive, but effortlessly. It is simply not the case that our eye is like a camera, and the retina like a film (or, I suppose, a CCD, these days); it is a whole image processing system.
We make most decisions by instinct. We are utterly unaware of this and rationalise our decisions by putting forward rational reasons. But we are simply deluding ourselves. Our powers of intellect are just too feeble to attempt to make more than a tiny percentage of the day' decisions by anything other than instinct. Philosophy is all about thinking hard about things, but only to justify our gut reactions about them. (Phil Lovell pointed this out to me a very long time ago.)
Acting instinctively causes many problems when it comes to being fair, and being seen to be fair. We now have many laws framed as if we never behaved instinctively. Quite correctly, we cannot legally discriminate against people who we may instinctively recoil against. However this puts the law into conflict with our human behaviour.
The other crutch we use to avoid thinking things through is memory. This is actually much better than we imagine, although we have all experienced many examples of it letting us down. It is much easier to solve a problem by remembering how we solved a similar one than by working out the solution from first principles. It's hard to make a clear-cut distinction, but I assert that no examination ever set by a school or university examining board has ever absolutely required any kind of pure analytical thought.
In work we are guided by tradition, memory, habit and sheer momentum. It's not surprising that our workplaces are so ineffective at delivering results in spite of centuries of evolution.
