You’re faced with a decision you have to make, perhaps one that has to be made quickly, do you trust your head or your “gut instinct”. As for gut instinct, where does that even come from?
Valerie Thompson has thought about these questions. She is a professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan
When faced with a decision and a choice to go with your head or your heart, or your head or your gut instinct, with one being cognitive, and the other being intuitive.
As for whether to go with your reason or intuition, professor Thompson has said it might depend on whether you need a quick answer or a correct one
However, in qualifying that, she says for some of us the gut instinct may not be a bad choice if its based on past analysis and accumulated experience.
She says the brain, marvelous as it is, has a limited capacity for thinking. When it comes to making decisions, she says there’s a bottleneck that occurs as we have a deluge of information coming in from the outside that we are processing, and simultaneously have the vast amount of data stored in long-term memory to choose from.
“You can hold more items of information and do less with them, or you can think a lot about one or two items,” she said. “So you trade off capacity versus power.”
Often gut decisions are “short-cuts” to decision making and can be made without great consequence such as buying products at the grocery store. Habit (familiarity) may affect some products you buy, while attractive packaging may convince you to buy others. They may not be the best decisions, but they are decisions that don’t require much thought, so we use them to simplify decision-making.
She also points out that people can train themselves by carefully analyzing the past decisions, and the outcomes. Chessmasters, she says are excellent at this, with their experience they can intuitively decide where to focus, and then take time to think about the best move and the consequences of that move.
For the rest of us, when making bigger decisions, such as buying a house or car, the gut feeling- “oh its lovely”- is not a good basis upon which to make your choice. Unless you have a long experience in buying houses or cars, this is a good situation where buying on instinct is probably not a good option, and taking time to think about factors and consequences is best.
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