Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

It was great in the first few chapters. I learned some very interesting ideas (which I will summarize at the end of this review), but then it got too scientific and philosophical and I totally lost interest and goodwill once the author started attributing everything to so-called "evolution" and even started suggesting improvements to "shortcomings" in the creation of the human eye at some point.<br /><br />Nevertheless, the following are my main takeaways from the book: <br /><br />Recognition Heuristic: relying on what you know best and what you're familiar with to make a choice. That's why corporations invest in uninformative ads so they can build brand recognition.<br /><br />Unconscious Intelligence: that's why I can know if a sentence is grammatically incorrect without knowing the rules that apply!<br /><br />A gut feeling ("a hunch") is a feeling that:<br />1. Appears fairly quickly to the conscious <br />2. Have no reasonable underlying justification<br />3. Is strong enough to act upon<br /><br />When investing your money in multiple assets like stocks and real estate, the 1/N rule (divide equally) is the most simple and optimal than all other complex methodologies. Page 27<br /><br />Page 30: Interesting: have you heard of the "zero-choice diner". The menu has only 1 item that they prepare very well and lots of people love it and come thief quite often. Better than menus that resemble encyclopedias! People apparently love choice but less choice often leads to more conversion. <br /><br />Page 33: OMG! That's why when I start thinking about my actions when driving I tend to drive poorer or lose confidence in my driving, whereas if I just drive without thinking I drive as good as always. Turns out that experts at any given task perform worse when they try to employ their conscious when executing the task, but they perform better when distracted, thereby leaving their unconscious to do all the work. Beginners are however the exact opposite. Therefore if you wanna have a chance of defeating someone who is a master in say sport ask him to tell you how he "swings his hand so accurately" or something, forcing him to consciously recall the steps he takes thereby increase his chances for failure! <br /><br />Page 42: This misguided author attributes human creation to "evolution" and then says the design of the eye could have been better only if!<br /><br />Page 42: when given insufficient information, our brains make things up based on our assumptions about the world. This explains why people in vet parts of real stories if they don't remember exactly the entire story. <br /><br />Page 43: "unconscious inferences" weave together data from the senses using prior knowledge about the world.<br /><br />Page 47.Gut feelings may appear simplistic, <br />but their underlying intelligence lies in selecting the right rule of <br />thumb for the right situation.<br /><br />Page 105. Framing is a useful tool for saying something in different ways depending on the desired outcome. Like this operation has 90% success rate or there is a 10% chance you will die from this operation. The first is more appealing because it suggests optimism.      

I started to read Gut Feeling when I was half way through Thinking, Fast and Slow. These two books were developed around the same theme: human intuition. While Thinking, Fast and Slow exposes the dark side of intuition, Gut Feeling reveals the bright side: how intuition can facilitate our decision making.<br /><br />The notion of “rules of thumb” is the leitmotif of the book. It goes like this: we make decisions following unexplainable rules that engraved in our consciousness. These rules are usually extremely simply, yet most of us cannot articulate the formulation or rationale of them. Author of this book argues, when making decisions that involving a myriad of information and highly unpredictable outcome, people who use the simple rules are more likely to get favorable outcome than people who over-analyse. He dubs this simple decision making “fast and frugal”.<br /><br />The traditional analytic method tells us to list all the criteria that matter, score every criterion then add the score up and pick the option with the highest score. But in real life context, we often encounter circumstances when we have to decide without knowing what we should analyze. Take an example from the book to explain: a father is picking a school from two for his son and he wants to pick a school that makes his son less likely to drop out. With the absence of drop-out rate from both schools, what should this father do? Should he tabulate every criterion of schools, even thought he has no idea which ones have effects on drop out rate? The author introduces “sequential reasoning” to solve this kind of problem. Instead of endlessly tabulating criteria, he asks us just to focus on the big criterion, in this case, things that have conspicuous relation with drop out rate, like say attendance rate. Compare two schools’ attendance rate, if one school has a substantially higher attendance rate, say 15% higher than the other one, stop and pick the higher one. If the discrepancy is not wide enough, you scroll down the list and compare the second most essential criterion until you find the wide enough discrepancy. In addition to being drastically less nerve-wrecking, this method of decision making has been proven to have a higher successful rate to reach favorable result than that of the traditional method.<br /><br />Knowing how to make a “snap” judgement facilitate your decision making process, and knowing people make snap judgements all the time make you understand human behaviors and how to “manipulate” social change. The notion that most of the people follow “rules of thumb”, even making crucial decision, is very powerful. This notion can explain why companies will throw huge sum of money on commercials: because consumers follow the rule “buy the brand they recognize. This notion can also explain why German soldiers in Nazi era carried out the order of executing the Jew even thought those soldiers were repulsed by the order and had the chance to opt out: because they followed the rule “don’t break rank”. The best illustration of this powerful force comes from organ donation system. In France, roughly 90% of the population is potential organ donors whereas the percentage in the US is 20%. You may wonder it is cultural or religious reason to cause this discrepancy, but in fact, the major culprit is the system. The organ donation system in France and most the European countries is an opt-out system: every person agrees to be a donor by default and can opt out the system by filling out a form. The system in the US operates vice verse. The majority of people didn’t put much of thoughts on the philosophical and moral codes on the idea of organ donation; they only followed a simple rule “the default option is better”. Yet this tiny design difference between two system result in whether ten of thousands of people’ lives can be saved. The author argues, to apply this intuitive tendency of people into social and moral context, we can reduce unwanted events by making people less likely to chose decisions of which can lead to those events.<br /><br />To say “think less” is useful doesn't mean the author is championing ignorance in this book, and he acknowledges that gut feeling doesn’t always work. However, he argues, in the age of rationality, when we rationally analyse everything, we inadvertently restrict our imagination undercut our capability and underestimate what we can achieve. He says, at the end of the book, if we don’t know what we cannot do, we may bring wishful thinking come true.

GUT FEELINGS: THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. I just enjoyed re-reading Gerd Gigerenzer's book "Gut Feelings". The reason I wanted to re-read it is to compare what Gigerenzer says about social instincts to what Matthew Lieberman has explored and written about in his recently published book "Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect". Lieberman seems to take up where Gigerenzer left off on the subject, fills in and expands further details of neurological studies (including his own) on the subject of human social instincts and our need for social networks driving our evolution and behaviors, as well as being at the core of our human nature. I highly suggest reading these two well written and important books together.<br /><br />Gigerenzer has made a major contribution in presenting the idea of our social instincts and depicting human nature as caring for each other due to the instinctual social need for belonging and protecting both family and community. It is this more positive view of humankind that Gigerenzer should be applauded for, as it flies in the face of traditional psychological thought by giants such as Freud who viewed humankind as driven by more "selfish" motivations. While it was a brief introduction to the idea, Gigerenzer's last chapter in this book opened a new door for understanding human nature in a more hopeful view. <br /><br />While this book is not about actual somatic gut feelings or the feelings in the gut area of the body, it does explore in depth the subconscious decisions that inform our choices and for that it is an important read. My own life's work has been in the area of exploring gut feeling through somatic reflection with people and how that informs a healthy decision-making process. However, I did appreciate learning more about the mental functions that Gigerenzer so clearly writes about and I enjoyed reading his many examples and stories the second time as much as the first.<br /><br />If you are interested in psychology--cognitive, evolutionary, or even more somatic studies--I think you will enjoy reading this book and find that it adds an important insight to your overall understanding of what it means to be human and the process of living and evolving in our fundamental "human condition".<br /><br />Martha Love,<br />Author of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/13239152.What_s_Behind_Your_Belly_Button__A_Psychological_Perspective_of_the_Intelligence_of_Human_Nature_and_Gut_Instinct" title="What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct by Martha Char Love" rel="noopener">What's Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct</a> and<br /><a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/27195788.Increasing_Intuitional_Intelligence_How_the_Awareness_of_Instinctual_Gut_Feelings_Fosters_Human_Learning__Intuition__and_Longevity" title="Increasing Intuitional Intelligence How the Awareness of Instinctual Gut Feelings Fosters Human Learning, Intuition, and Longevity by Martha Char Love" rel="noopener">Increasing Intuitional Intelligence: How the Awareness of Instinctual Gut Feelings Fosters Human Learning, Intuition, and Longevity</a>

I just didn't find myself very compelled by this book. Unfortunately, the material covered in this book is covered by a lot of books these days, and the way this book does so is not very compelling. The writing itself was bland, and the book didn't necessarily delve into these things in a way that made you understand it better than many of the much better books covering the material.<br />

After hearing this book described as the "science behind Malcolm Gladwell's <i>Blink</i>," I thought that it might be inaccessible and filled with jargon. Instead, I found that Gigerenzer directs his entertaining and controversial book to the average reader. <br /><br />His scientific study of intuition in decision-making is fascinating. Throughout the book he defends simple, unconscious thought processes (what we would call intuition), which are usually ignored in favor of complex formulas. For example, many scientists—and average people—believe that looking at and carefully weighing twenty factors will lead to a better decision than relying on only one or two factors. But as Gigerenzer illustrates, a basic evolutionary rule of thumb, like “one good reason is enough” often leads to better predictions than an involved multiple regression! <br /><br />Every chapter had something to surprise me. Besides offering an easy-to-read version of his scientific evidence, Gigenrenzer also provides some real world applications of his theories. I’d still like to read <i>Blink</i> and see how Gladwell draws upon or expands on Gigerenzer’s ideas.<br />

Basically, the theme of the book is that thinking in patterns of relations in domains of partial knowledge can be more effective than thinking sequentially through logical associations of all that is known. Toward the end of the book this message started feeling repetitive, so I felt that I was learning less as I read more. Condensed, it would make a great piece in Readers Digest.

We seldom have full information, and we seldom have enough time to deliberate. Pure reason, in other words, is impractical in a bustling world. But we must decide, every hour, matters that affect us. So we exercise our gut feelings.<br /><br />What is intuition, and where do we get it? Its very nature makes it elusive. Gigerenzer's contribution is to try to answer these hard questions.<br /><br />The archetype is the fielder chasing a fly ball. A logical solution would require an intricate calculation of speed, distance, motion, and trajectory. No time. So the fielder applies an instinctive rule that he has learned from having chased thousands of fly balls: "keep the ball at a constant bearing from yourself". (Mariners, by the way, apply the rule consciously: a moving ship at constant bearing will hit you.) It works.<br /><br />Such rules of thumb work in millions of other applications, from the mundane ("pick the stocks of companies you recognize") to the potentially deadly (heart attack or heartburn? Five simple one-at-a-time questions will yield a more reliable answer than a 50-variable formula that tries to account for everything).<br /><br />Intuition is simply the mind filling in blanks. It has learned to do this from a combination of evolution and experience. For example, thousand of years of evolution have fixed in our minds that most light comes from above. Therefore, when we view circles drawn on a flat sheet, top-shaded circles appear as indentations, bottom-shaded circles appear as pop-outs.<br /><br />Experience has taught us that brands we recognize are better quality than brands we don't. That rule is imperfect. Advertisers have learned to exploit it. But we don't have the time or ability to do scientific research on objective quality, so we indulge the (perhaps unconscious) assumption that such research by others filters down to us in the form of brand recognition. It works better than guessing.<br /><br />My main criticism of the book is that it exalts intution and disparages reason too much. The point the reader should take away is that intuition should be relied on in preference to logic only when there is not time enough or information enough to reach a truly reasoned judgment; or when the decision is inherently uncertain, as whom to marry.<br /><br />Amateur investors with moderate knowledge will beat professional fund managers by exercising their hunches. But Warren Buffet will beat all of them by putting in the labor to be sure he REALLY knows what he is doing. Gigerenzer understands this, and alludes to it in the book, but the point is obscurely made.<br /><br />For the good of society, reason must always trump intuition in the long run. Most of the lousiest episodes in history are the result of applied intuition, from the impaling of Christians, to the burning of witches, to the bleeding of the diseased. Racial prejudice is an intuitive rule-of-thumb in action. Gigerenzer surely recognizes this, too. He points out that reason works better than intution in hindsight. But today's hindsight can be tomorrow's foresight, and I wish that point had been more emphasized.

O autor explica muito bem como o pensamento simples e intuitivo pode ser usado para resolver os mais diversos problemas e situações, inclusive prever quais serão as melhores alternativas. A intuição é tão precisa quanto opiniões de especialistas em economia, medicina e direito. Os argumentos são fundados em estudos científicos que muitas vezes provam o senso comum. Acho que a maior crítica que fazem ao pensamento intuitivo, e que Gigerenzer rebate sempre no livro, é que uma análise profunda e racional deve ser levada em conta, mas a proposta do livro não é acabar com ele, mas identificar situações em que a simplificação pode gerar melhores resultados em menor tempo. Ótimo livro para quem gosta de pensar e ser contestado.

This is an intriguing work on human decision making. The argument is that evolution has given us an adaptive toolkit of decision making tools. Based on experience over eons, shortcuts for making decisions came about. And, accroding to the author, studies suggest that these can be more effective than statistical analysis. For instan ce, "Take the Best." In maing decisions, you simply accept the first choice that looks like it will work. That's it!<br /><br />Well written and relatively short. Quite useful indeed.

I think the author under-emphasized the importance of education, experience and knowledge in developing the "informed gut".