Some decisions that we make right now are for consumption experiences right now. At the supermarket checkout line, you might pick up a candy bar, buy it, and then eat it. However, many of our decisions are meant to have lasting implications. When we get married, we assume that the partner we have chosen is our beloved forever. A sofa we purchase now may sit in our house for 10 or more years. When we buy a car, we assume that we will enjoy that car for the 5+ years that we own it.
So, our predictions for what we will like in the future had better have some accuracy.
Many of us have the intuition that important decisions require serious deliberation. Indeed, that intuition is the source of many conflicts in romance movies. The main characters fall helplessly in love, and those around them tell them to think more carefully. After all, important decisions shouldn't be based on mere feelings without reason. Of course, in the Hollywood movie, love always wins, and the characters who preached reasoned deliberation are left to watch the happy couple from the sidelines.
So, who is right? Is it better to go with your basic instinct, or is it more important to deliberate carefully over important decisions?
A paper by Loran Nordgren and Ap Dijksterhuis in the June, 2009 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that maybe the people who don't deliberate too much do a better job of predicting their future preferences.
They had people express their preferences for many kinds of items including artwork, complex Chinese ideograms (i.e., words) and even jellybeans. Some people were told to deliberate carefully about their decision, while others were told to make quick decisions. Later, they had people express their preferences a second time.
People who were asked to think carefully about their preferences were quite inconsistent in what they liked. They might express a high preference for a painting at one time, and a much lower preference for that painting at a second time. In contrast, people who were asked to make quick decisions were more consistent in their preferences over time. If they felt a particular painting was attractive the first time they saw it, chances are they would think it was attractive the second time as well.
This result fits with other work by Tim Wilson and his colleagues suggesting that people are worse at judging their future preferences when they have to give reasons for their choices than when they do not.
An important part of the paper by Nordgren and Dijksterhuis, though, is that when the choices were very simple to make, people were consistent in their preference judgments whether they deliberated or not.
This set of findings suggests that for complex decisions, it is better to go with your gut feeling than to reason carefully about your choice. There are two problems within deliberating too much about your choices. First, deliberations tend to be done using your "inner speech," and so you can only use qualities of choice options that you have a vocabulary to talk about. Second, deliberations tend to focus on a smaller amount of information than gut feelings. So, for complex items, it is better to consider a large amount of information as well as properties that you cannot talk about.
So, the writers of Hollywood romantic comedies are right, I guess. The happy couple should go with their gut instinct. And while they're at it, when they pick that sofa for the living room, they should grab the one that feels right.
