You are walking hungrily through the grocery aisle. A particular box of cereal looks tasty. Should you buy it? It feels "right" to get it, and you hear the encouraging voices in your head: "Just do it" "Have it your way!" But should you? If you are health conscious, it may be best to pause.
Consider the source of that gut feeling. Did it come from watching television food ads? We know that food advertisements shape our intuitions about what is good to eat, normalizing certain types of eating that are uncommon in other countries and eras where disorders and diseases related to eating are rare. Intuitions trained by food ads promoting high sugar, fat and salt are poor intuitions because they present incorrect facts about what is good to eat. So, although the urge to buy the cereal feels "right" ("truthiness" strikes again), the urge was not forged in a healthful environment and should be examined.
On the other hand, if your intuitions come from extensive reading about and experiences with healthy food and you are in the health food aisle looking at a cereal that is whole-grain, low in sugar, with nuts, chances are your intuitions are good ones for health promotion.
So before you use your gut feelings as a guide, you need to know whether or not that they are well trained. The environment in which one learns something influences the beliefs and actions one considers effective. So if you learn about nutrition from television ads, you have learned your intuitions about good eating in a "wicked" environment (Hogarth, 2001; Reber, 1993), mischaracterizing what is good. In contrast, traditional ways of eating, as Michael Pollan has pointed out, provide nutritional combinations. Learning what to eat in the kitchen of your great-grandmother would have been a "kind" environment. That is, your intuitions could be relied upon to provide a guide for healthful eating.
So what is happening here? You respond to events often with gut feelings or intuitions, some good ones, some not so good. Your "intuitive mind" is comprised of multiple non-conscious, parallel-processing brain systems that learn effortlessly from experience . For example, if I asked you when you last saw your mother, you would know the answer even though you did not make any conscious effort to memorize this information. When was the last time you had your favorite ice cream? Same thing.
On the other hand, you also have the ability to reason about your choices. This is the deliberative and conscious part of your brain that uses logic. You use this "conscious mind" when you are deciding how to pay the bills or when you are learning the steps of a new skill, like how to drive. The conscious mind can help you think about the legitimacy of your intuitions and gut feelings.
After considerable practice, the intuitive mind takes over driving a car and most similar routines. It works quickly and effortlessly for areas where you have lots of practice. Organisms that make speedy decisions are more likely to outlive their slower rivals. Speedy good decisions are ones based on extensive experience. If you are unfamiliar with the situation, then your intuitions are more likely to mislead you. Then it's time to bring in some thoughtfulness.
Wise people reflect on their reasoning and intuition. They don't succumb to "truthiness" when they can help it. Wise people have developed good intuitions and use good reasoning. One form of good reasoning is illustrated by the scientific method: generating and testing hypotheses, replicating them, finding converging evidence, maintaining a skeptical eye. The conscious mind can help you develop good intuitions by selecting environments that will teach you good intuitions, like avoiding food ads (a wicked environment) and eating with your great-grandmother (kind environment). In morality it means selecting environments or situations that development your sensitivities to the needs of others and avoiding situations that encourage you to be self-centered or hard-hearted.
If we think of our friend, Stephen Colbert, and his approach to decisions, he succumbs more often than not to truthiness. He has not made the necessary effort to be educated about a problem before making a judgment. He has not examined his intuitions or reasoning for soundness or logic. He almost seems stuck in a naïve self-oriented moral view. We examine that next.
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References
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Avon.
Hogarth, R. M. (2001). Educating Intuition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reber, A.S. (1993). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge: An essay on the cognitive unconscious. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stanovich, K.E. & West, R.F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 645-726.
