Leaders, as all people, make their decisions in an instant based on their gut instincts.
Our intuition is nothing less than pattern recognition in our highly efficient emotional brain--making quick and effortless judgments and taking action. We form positive or negative impressions in a mere "blink" or "thin slice" of time as described in Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller, blink (Little Brown, 2005), which promotes decision concepts around what Gladwell refers to as the adaptive unconscious: "Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."
However, we can be blindsighted by costly intuitive errors when our quick pattern recognition leads us astray. Our unconscious, implicit and emotional attitudes---which typically manifest wariness toward those unfamiliar to us or those who resemble people with whom we have negative past associations---may not agree with our analytical brain. Intuition is powerful, often wise, but sometimes perilous, and especially so when we overfeel and underthink.
Our limbic brain (the emotional brain) works in concert and sometimes at odds with the neocortical brain (that directs the abstract mind--the cognitive functions of language, problem-solving, physics, mathematics). We know much about the neocortex's power to weave and unravel abstractions. Mirror neurons (the cells of nerve tissue) are connected to the brain's emotion region, the limbic system, and re-create the experience of others intentions and feelings within ourselves.
Leaders know, and science has discovered, emotionality's deeper purpose: the timeworn mechanisms of emotion allow two human beings to receive the contents of each other's minds. Emotion is the messenger of love; it is the vehicle that carries every signal from one brimming heart to another.
Intuition is fast, automatic, unreasoned thought and feeling that harvests our experience and guides our lives. The shadow of intuition is the fear factor:
We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear. With our old emotional brain living in a new world, we are disposed to fear confinement and heights, snakes and spiders, and humans outside our tribe.
We fear what we cannot control. Behind the wheel of our car, but not in airplane seat 17B, we feel in control.
We fear what is immediate. Smoking's lethality and the threats of rising seas and extreme weather are in the distant future. The airplane take-off is now.
We fear threats readily available in memory. If a surface-to-air missile brings down a single American airliner, the result will be traumatic for the airline industry. Intuitive fears will hijack the rational mind.
Cognitive science reveals a two-track mind, featuring a deliberate, analytical brain and an automatic, intuitive/emotional brain. Through life experience, we gain intuitive expertise and learn associations/patterns that surface as feelings. As studies of implicit prejudice and misplaced fears illustrate, unchecked gut feelings can lead us astray.
Source: The Powers and Perils of Intuition by David G. Myers in Scientific American Mind, June/July 2007