Dan Goldstein, assistant professor of marketing at London Business School, is a decision researcher who moonlights as a comic. "It's not that improvisers are intuitively funny—no matter who they are," he says. "It's this thing of doing drill after drill, and after you've mastered those drills, you've internalized them. You can apply them quickly, and with a cool head."
Morality Comes from the Gut; Ex(planations) Post Facto
We think of moral decisions as the raw material of great drama—as warring internal desires or puzzles to solve via logical arguments. But most people actually determine whether an action is right or wrong automatically, finds Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of
The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt likens moral intuitions to aesthetic judgments: We instantly know whether we think something is beautiful, but we don't necessarily know why. "The rational mind is like a press secretary that spins reasons for our intuitive moral decisions," he says.
The "press secretary" is all about advancing our own interests, prosecuting those we don't like and defending ourselves. Haidt theorizes that we have evolved this way because of the competitive advantage attached to being able to navigate society's dense web of gossip. Because what people think you do is just as important as what you do, it pays to be able to explain your behaviors in a rosy light. That makes the internal machinery inherently self-deceiving. You may have no qualms about cheating on your taxes, but you'll probably think twice after speaking with friends about it (if you dare even bring it up).
That's why Haidt does not advocate going with your gut when contemplating a moral decision. "The general advice I would give is to check with others to see what they think." We can see the splinter in our neighbor's eye, after all, but not the plank in our own.
A Strong Hunch can be the Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship
We've all heard stories of couples who "just knew" the moment they met that something serious was going to develop between them. (David Myers, professor of psychology at Hope College and the author of Intuition, had that feeling about a young woman as a teenager; they've been married for more than 40 years now.) The heart has reasons which reason does not know, said the philosopher Blaise Pascal. But maybe the "heart" is governed by the unconscious emotional pattern matching that produces intuitions.
Bechara describes the phenomenon as an overall feeling that someone would be "good for you," perhaps even irrespective of passion. "It's tapping into your unconscious and triggering prior emotional experiences. We need to trust that this is a survival system that has evolved to our benefit," he says.
As choosing a mate is rife with unknowns, it's not best arrived at by number crunching. Gigerenzer tells the story of how Ben Franklin advised his nephew, torn between two sweethearts, to list each woman's qualities, place a numeric value on the importance of those qualities, and total each column. But when a friend of Gigerenzer did just that and calculated the winner, his heart sank. That's how the friend knew he really wanted the other woman.
Big Purchases Benefit from Intuition, but not Stock Picks
Our brains have a number of innate capacities, but they grow out of ancestral, not modern, problems, says Terry Burnham, author of Mean Markets and Lizard Brains. The types of dilemmas we are good at solving intuitively are ones in which the old machinery lines up well to produce positive contemporary outcomes. Investing is not among these.
Any gut feeling you may have about where to put your money is probably very similar to many others' gut feelings (say, going with a stock that has been on the upswing for a while). It's simply not investment-savvy to pick the same stocks as everyone else—you will not stand to gain.
Burnham advises that you set up a system to ensure that your prefrontal cortex, and not your gut, is firmly in charge of financial decisions. You need to analyze investment strategies and information about different companies. Just as Burnham refuses to get the key to the mini bar in hotel rooms lest he give in to a late-night junk-food craving, he "locks in" his money by making sure he can't change his allocations without an adviser's authorization. That way, he won't move his money around on a whim.
Intuition, however, is a reliable source of purchasing decisions, at least for big-ticket items. The only goal of investing money is to make a profit; cold calculations count. Material possessions, on the other hand, have a subjective value—you want products to bring some ease, comfort, or happiness.
When it comes to complex acquisitions such as homes and cars, consumer satisfaction is greater among buyers who decide with their gut. The experience of living in a house is ultimately an emotional and unpredictable one; so throw away your spreadsheet and rely on your "old brain" to assess whether or not you'll get more pleasure than pain out of the purchase. Resume rational deliberation for the little stuff; research shows it is superior to intuition for picking items such as oven mitts and shampoo.
It's comforting to know you can lean on your unconscious when facing big life questions. And, even better, you've got a mind that can both listen to the gut and keep it in line.
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