There's a time to trust your gut and a time to ignore it
Photo: Debrocke/ClassicStock/Getty Images Recently, a bout of garden-variety existentialism led to me asking too many people for advice about my relationship.
“Something unconscious looked through a lot of information in your memory,” says Hastie. “But there’s a little analytic part of it, too, because you had to interpret my question.” Meaning, I used my brain and my gut. Though most of our decisions are made using some combination of these two processes, there is a way to distinguish them. “The general principle is, the more conscious it is, the more reportable it is, the more analytic it is,” says Hastie.
As an anxious person, I have had my so-called instincts lead me astray on countless occasions. My gut, for example, has convinced me a small, benign bump in my skin is a tumor, that my subway train is being held for reasons much more sinister than we’re being told, that my plane is going to crash because it’s raining and I saw this in a movie once. These are all things I have truly felt, in my bones, to be true. And yet not one of these instincts became fact.
But all that thinking and careful decision-making is exhausting, and a little boring, and so unromantic, which is probably part of the reason why “think with your gut” is trotted out so frequently. We want to believe in a power higher than our own brains, something within us that makes better choices for us than our rational minds ever could — particularly when it comes to bigger decisions like picking a partner, or buying a house, or having children .
It’s important to remember that just because you have an instinct doesn’t mean it’s good. “Certainly, we can all think of lots of situations where we were [thinking with our gut], which was a really bad idea,” says Thaler.
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