Back on track...

So I think I've got over my momentary lapse, my brief flirtation with the gut instinct. I'm back on track with my beloved and dependable rational logic.

I've been reading about all the biases that our gut instinct is prone to, and the experiments are in some way no surprise at all, and in another, really quite shocking.

One big issue, as far as researching career information is concerned, is tha halo effect, motivated reasoning and the idea of post-hoc rationalisation. These theories (I'm not entirely sure if they're slightly different concepts, or just different ways of looking at the same thing), all concern the idea that our gut instinct makes an early decision and then persuades us to look for rational explanations for it. We make an instinctinve decision, for example, that advertising is a job that we would like to do, and then when we're researching the career area, we are selective about the information that we attend to, highlighting perhaps the creativity of the role and dynamic environment, and ignoring the competitive entry, and long hours that you would have to work. This, together with our biased self-characterisation (which makes us rate ourselves more highly on characteristics that we've been told are desirable) leaves us with a very inaccurate picture of how suited we are to this particular job.

Gut instinct is also very, very susceptible to priming and suggestion. One experiment that highlights what a profound effect suggestion can have, asked some participants to wait in a room that had a computer in the corner with a screensaver that had a dollar sign on it, and compared their subsequent behaviour with a control group whose computer had no screensaver. The participants who had seen the dollar sign exhibited more individualistic behaviour that the control group - placing their chairs further away from others, and picking up fewer items to help a stranger who had dropped a pencil case, than those from the control group.

Another experiment showed that participants who had been asked to read some words that might be associated with age (such as "wrinkled", "faded") walked more slowly down a corridor after the experiments than participants who had been asked to read other words.

The list of experiments goes on and on. Another one asked participants to lie, either via email or on the phone, and then asked them to rate the desirability of various grocery products. Participants who had been asked to lie by email reported that they thought that soap was a more desirable product, and those who had lied by phone, prefered mouthwash.

The implications for career decisions aren't quite clear to me yet, but clearly with such clear, widespread and unconscious effects, our gut instinct is clearly not to be trusted. At least, not always, and not with such important issues as our career planning. Of course it is never quite as clear cut as writers would like you to think. There are problems with conscious logic, in particular, within the careers arena, with our brains ability to process the vast amounts of data involved in making a career decision (more on that another time...).

But for me, for now at least, I'm sticking with my view that, like democracy, relying on conscious, rational, analytical processesing is the least worst option.