Gerd Gigerenzer - Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

We know more than we can tell.

Michael Polanyi

W e think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. We have intuitions about sports, friends, which toothpaste to buy, and other dangerous things. We fall in love, and we sense that the Dow Jones will go up. This book asks: Where do these feelings come from? How do we know?

Can following your gut feelings lead to some of the best decisions? It seems naive, even ludicrous, to think so. For decades, books on rational decision making, as well as consulting firms, have preached look before you leap and analyze before you act. Pay attention. Be reflective, deliberate, and analytic. Survey all alternatives, list all pros and cons, and carefully weigh their utilities by their probabilities, preferably with the aid of a fancy statistical software package. Yet this scheme does not describe how actual peopleincluding the authors of these booksreason. A professor from Columbia University was struggling over whether to accept an offer from a rival university or to stay. His colleague took him aside and said, Just maximize your expected utilityyou always write about doing this. Exasperated, the professor responded, Come on, this is serious.

From economists to psychologists to John Q. Public, most people readily accept that the ideal of perfect beings with boundless knowledge and eternal time is unrealistic. Yet, they argue, without these bounds, and with more logic, we would make superior choices: we may not consider every angle, but we should. This message is not what you are going to read in the following pages.

With this book, I invite you on a journey into a largely unknown land of rationality, populated by people just like us, who are partially ignorant, whose time is limited and whose future is uncertain. This land is not one many scholars write about. They prefer to describe a land where the sun of enlightenment shines down in beams of logic and probability, whereas the land we are visiting is shrouded in a mist of dim uncertainty. In my story, what seem to be limitations of the mind can actually be its strengths. How the mind adapts and economizes by relying on the unconscious, on rules of thumb, and on evolved capacities is what Gut Feelings is about. The laws in the real world are puzzlingly different from those in the logical, idealized world. More information, even more thinking, is not always better, and less can be more. Ready for a glimpse?

THE HEARTS CHOICE

A close friend of mine (call him Harry) once found himself with two girlfriends, both of whom he loved, desired, and admired. Two, however, were one too many. Confused by contradicting emotions and unable to make up his mind, he recalled what Benjamin Franklin had once advised a nephew in a similar situation:

April 8, 1779

If you doubt, set down all the Reasons, pro and con, in opposite Columns on a Sheet of Paper, and when you have considered them two or three Days, perform an Operation similar to that in some questions of Algebra; observe what Reasons or Motives in each Column are equal in weight, one to one, one to two, two to three, or the like, and when you have struck out from both Sides all the Equalities, you will see in which column remains the Balance. [] This kind of Moral Algebra I have often practiced in important and dubious Concerns, and tho it cannot be mathematically exact, I have found it extreamly useful. By the way, if you do not learn it, I apprehend you will never be married.

I am ever your affectionate Uncle,

B. FRANKLIN1

Harry was greatly relieved that a logical formula existed to solve his conflict. So he took his time, wrote down all the important reasons he could think of, weighed them carefully, and went through the calculation. When he saw the result, something unexpected happened. An inner voice told him that it wasnt right. And for the first time, Harry realized that his heart had already decidedagainst the calculation and in favor of the other girl. The calculus helped to find the solution, but not because of its logic. It brought an unconscious decision to his awareness, based on reasons obscure to him.

Thankful for the sudden solution but puzzled by the process, Harry asked himself how it was possible to make unconscious choices in contradiction to ones deliberate reasoning. He was not the first to learn that reasoning can conflict with what we call intuition. Social psychologist Timothy Wilson and his colleagues once offered posters to two groups of women as a thank you present for participating in an experiment.2 In one group, each woman simply picked her favorite poster out of a selection of five; in a second group, each was asked to describe her reasons for liking or disliking each poster before choosing one. Interestingly, the two groups tended to take different posters home. Four weeks later, they were all asked how much they enjoyed their present. Those who had given reasons were less satisfied and regretted their choice more than those who had not given any. Here and in similar experiments, deliberate thinking about reasons seems to lead to decisions that make us less happy, just as consciously thinking about how to ride a bike or put on a spontaneous smile is not always better than its automatic version. The unconscious parts of our mind can decide without usthe conscious selfknowing its reasons, or, as in Harrys case, without being aware that a decision has been made in the first place.