06 Sep 2009, Posted by christie in Psych Lite,featured, 37 Comments

Gut feelings

Have you ever just known which choice you want to make even though there was a long list of rational reasons why that should not be your choice? I read Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious lately and found it fascinating. I’m very aware that my unconscious mind knows exactly what I want to do sometimes, even when my conscious mind is busy making lists of reasons to do something totally different!

Gut Feelings was written by Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and offers many examples of times we absolutely use our “gut feelings” to make a decision – often because there is simply no time to sit and calculate using all the facts.  A gut feeling is not a matter of being psychic.   It’s the product of your brain quickly, often unconsciously using a heuristic (rule of thumb) to arrive at a decision using little evidence. In the book he gives a lot of examples where less evidence can lead to better decisions, because there may be one piece of evidence that is so much more important than the others or your unconscious knows that it is more important based on your own experience/environment/instincts, even if it doesn’t appear to have more weight when listed on a sheet of paper.   He says that these heuristics we have come from our “evolved capacities.”   We’ve evolved to be able to track objects through the air, for instance, or to notice slight deviations from the norm, even if it’s only our unconscious mind that notices.  Gigerenzer says that intuition is not a crazy departure from the right way to make decisions; it’s how we make decisions all the time.

One example he gives in the book is when a baseball player is trying to catch a fly ball.  How does he know where it’s going to land?  Players don’t have time to calculate the ball’s trajectory, estimating its velocity, angle, and spin, plus air resistance and wind speed.  Instead, he unconsciously uses a rule of thumb called the “gaze heuristic” to govern his speed as he runs for the ball: He fixes his eyes on the ball, starts running, and adjusts his speed so that the angle between him and the ball remains constant.  If he keeps his eye on the ball, the heuristic takes him directly to where the ball will come down.

It’s hard for me to know when it’s good to go with a gut feeling and when it’s good to think it out rationally, and of course our personality type will influence which way we lean.  If I’m offered a job in another city, do I list the pros and cons on a sheet of paper, or do I know which way to decide based on something deep in my brain?   Actually, I may start with the sheet of paper then find out how that is making me feel.   Am I “rooting” for one side to win?       Often I’ll wake up with the answer.  It might not be the correct answer as far as successful outcome, but it’s the answer to which way my emotions really want me to go.   Likewise, when selecting a car, I’ll first look rationally at reviews of reliability and safety, then once I’m down to a few automakers I’ll pick the model and color that I instantly know is mine when I see it.     I actually had one friend who told me that he always listened to his stomach about these things. He was not just using another word for gut; he meant that when he starts following the wrong course in life, such as an engagement to the wrong girl or accepting the wrong job, his stomach feels horrible and full of dread! Maybe that’s where the term “gut feeling” came from…

Gut feelings can steer us terribly wrong, of course.   As a species, if we know of something that just killed hundreds of us, we run away from that instantly.  That’s an instinct that helps species to survive!   But sometimes we may have the instinct to run up a hill from fire, or to avoid airplanes after a crash (driving on the highway instead), and that gets us into even more danger.  When we know that our gut feeling is the result of panic, we may have to stop and force ourselves to decide logically what we should do. 

Are you one who goes with your “gut,” or do you use your conscious brain and logic to make your big decisions for you? 

Photo credit: alicejamieson