Spilling my guts

I’m not at all sure about gut feeling. Perhaps this is because I’m not a very intuitive person: I don’t have feelings about things, can’t sense atmospheres and I’m not even sure that I’m a very good judge of character at first meeting. But this has never bothered me much as gut feeling isn’t something that I’ve rated terribly highly. My view (or perhaps my gut feeling…) is that our instincts are firmly grounded in logic, but conducted so fast that we don’t have access to the different logical steps in the process. There are good reasons for a feeling, it’s just that we can’t easily identify and analyse them. And as such, they are far more susceptible to the worst flaws of any other decision making style: prejudices, a bias towards the familiar, a failure to process all the information, a bias towards recent or surprising information etc etc.. As a career practitioner, I have spent some considerable time trying to bring clients back to the straight and narrow of rational decision making, and have always felt quite confident that I was doing them a great favour. I’ve been interested in their gut feelings, but have always tried to get them to analyse them and address the issues objectively.

But I’m gradually changing my views. Amundson wrote a great paper on the way that people actually make decisions, showing that 94% of us rely on the views of others in one form or other to make our career decisions. Now of course, just because we do make decisions this way, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best way to do it, but the evidence seems to be clear that people at least perceive that their decisions are better if they’ve consulted widely.

And now I’m reading a book called “Gut Feeling” by Gerd Gigerenzer. I’m not utterly convinced by his style – he’s very enthusiastic about a whole range of metaphors to clarify (or perhaps cloud) his explanations, and also seems to be rather too full of anecdotes (“I once had a good feeling about something and it turned out to be right” Astounding!). But in between these rhetorical devices, there is some really interesting evidence about how and why gut feelings work. The message (I’m only a third of the way through, so I’ll come back with more at a later date) seems to be that gut feelings are based on logic, but it’s logic that is specially calculated to work both quickly and effectively. For example, gut instinct might focus on one element, rather than taking everything into account, but it’s usually the single most important element, and so the decision made by gut instinct stands up well when compared to that made through thorough logic. Gut instinct, this book argues, is particularly helpful in making decisions where it’s not possible to thoroughly process all the information (like, for example, job choices perhaps?) and for decisions that will inevitably be around shades of grey, rather than those with a definitive right answer (like, for example, job choices).

I remain skeptical but am beginning to accept the slimmest possibility that I need to reconsider…