Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, suggests that our moral and political judgments are driven less by detached, conscious reasoning and more by intuitive processes. He famously uses the metaphor of an “elephant and rider”: the elephant represents our intuitive, automatic responses, while the rider is our capacity for reasoning. The critical insight is that the rider usually does not steer the elephant; it just tries to justify where the elephant is already going.
This challenges the classical notion that humans are primarily rational decision makers. Haidt’s evidence, drawn from moral psychology experiments, shows that people often arrive at moral conclusions quickly and then rationalize them afterward. For instance, when participants were asked about scenarios designed to provoke moral “dumbfounding,” where they felt something was wrong but could not articulate why, their discomfort revealed that intuition had already guided them before any reasoning caught up.
That insight raises the question: does rationality have any independent power, or is it always in service of intuition? Haidt does not dismiss reason entirely. Rather, he argues that reason plays a social and strategic role. We use it not to search for truth in isolation but to persuade others, defend ourselves, or coordinate with groups. In this way, rationality can refine intuition, but often within the boundaries intuition has already set.
So yes, intuition does guide rationality, but the relationship is not one directional. While our gut feelings often come first, rational reflection can challenge or even reshape these instincts when we are open minded and engaged with others. In practice, this means cultivating dialogue and intellectual humility, recognizing that our reasoning may be less about leading and more about collaborating with the elephant already moving beneath us.