Should We “Trust Our Gut”?

The affect heuristic and how it impacts your decisions

Photo by Zoltan Tasi

Welcome!

We’ve all heard something along the lines of “When in doubt, trust your gut”, but is this good advice? The answer is “it depends”.

For the purposes of our discussion, the brain has two main decision pathways. The first is the fast/subconscious/experiential/emotional pathway and the second is the slow/conscious/analytical/logical pathway. (These are the more common terms used to describe these pathways.)

There is a bias in western educated culture to heavily favor analysis and logic in decision making; sometimes to the point of expecting all decisions to be ‘logical’. This pathway is also slow and prone to logical fallacies. It’s making decisions with imperfect, incomplete information and it sometimes ‘gets it wrong’.

Researchers estimate we make 35,000 decisions a day and our slow decision pathway can’t handle that load alone. We can’t properly function without offloading most of our decision making to our fast/subconscious/experiential/emotional pathway. By the way, it’s the fast pathway that decides which decision pathway to use.

Our fast decision pathway relies heavily on a simple good/bad emotional take that it has tied to images and situations. (Not a lot is known about this process, as neurobiological research is still in its early stages on this subject.) Psychology refers to this as the ‘affect heuristic’ and it influences several named biases.

In psychology, the affect heuristic is a mental shortcut that people use to make decisions that are heavily influenced by what they’re currently feeling. Essentially, your affect (a psychological term for emotional response) plays a critical role in the choices you make. …

Your feelings about the relative "goodness" or "badness" of a particular person, object, or activity influence the choices that you make about them.

Simply, a significant portion of our decision making is based on our subconscious labeling of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to different inputs in our decision making. We’ve seen this when someone is asked why they made the decision they did and they replied “I had a good feeling about them/it” or “I had a bad feeling about them/it”. In Western, educated societies where the desire to be seen making logical/analytical decisions. As part of our reputation preservation systems, this causes individuals to reflexively obscure the true decision making process by covering it with a rationalization or justification. (As explained in Steven Pinker’s elephant/rider analogy.) These justifications/rationalizations are, more times than not, stored in the brain’s memory system as a fact while not storing the emotional decision making element — we fool ourselves into believe we’re making logical decisions when they are actually emotionally driven.

This subconscious good/bad ‘tagging’ heavily affects our actions in society. It binds groups together by subconsciously tagging in-group members as ‘good’ and out-group member’s as ‘bad/not as good’. This aids group cohesion as well as driving irrational prejudice.

Societal Impacts

This effect is a powerful tool for influencing others. Someone/something being in the ‘good’ category gets favorable responses, while people and things in the ‘bad’ category get shunned/ignored. A related bias is that when we associate someone or something as likable then we assume they/it have a lower risk, which being disliked is associated with being of a higher risk.

In small groups, some individuals use gossip to strengthen their social position while weakening the influence of others (such as in the workplace or in a neighborhood).

Judicial System

Photo by Sebastian Pichler

The judicial system acknowledges the effect of the affect heuristic. Judges will disallow some evidence in a trial when they deem that the prejudicial factor outweighs its evidentiary benefit. Unrelated negative information can sway the juror’s fast/subconscious decision making against the individual; overriding the slow, conscious, logical decision making system that is supposed to be processing the evidence.

Marketing

“Good advertising does not just circulate information. It penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.”

~ Leo Burnett ~

Marketers have long recognized this effect. They work to associate good emotions with their company and products. Coca Cola used a jingle about teaching the “world to work in perfect harmony”. Super Bowl commercials heavily use babies, animals, and beloved celebrities to give their brand and products that warm fuzzy feeling that drives sales.

In the 2010s, marketers shifted to using social causes to generate the ‘good’ feeling that drives emotion-driven sales. The tactic worked remarkably well when their target demographic broadly agreed with their social cause. The tactic failed when their customer base had diverging opinions or when the social cause advertising was seen as disingenuous. In the 2020s, marketers are pulling back from their social cause ‘feel good’ advertisements and returning to traditional techniques for generating positive emotions about the brands or products.

Politics and News

“A journalist may think he or she is breaking a story, but the journalist is seldom aware of the hidden agenda behind it. Journalists are often used by cops, politicians, gangsters and film stars to propagate their agenda.”
~ Jigna Vora ~

Politics relies heavily on using emotions and good/bad dichotomies to influence voters; especially in the era of social media. Arguing policy, which engages the slow/analytical decision making pathway, doesn’t move voting behavior as much as engaging the fast/emotional decision making pathway. Anger and disgust are the two most powerful emotions for swaying opinions; which political campaigns rely heavily on.

As the news industry has become increasingly fragmented and news distribution has shifted to fast delivery via the internet, news agencies have shifted to emotional headlines and content. This drives the clicks that earns them the advertising revenue which keeps the lights on. As with politics, the anger and disgust emotions are the most powerful motivators for driving clicks. This has created a symbiotic relationship between politics and the news media which is considered by many to be a destructive force in society.

Hiring Practices

Businesses hiring practices are heavily influenced by this subconscious fast decision making process. Candidates are most likely to be hired if they have ‘good’ traits such as being tall and/or attractive. Interviewers favor candidates with whom they share commonalities such as whether they went to the same college, whether they grew up in the same area, whether they share the same activities, or whether they come from the same culture. When there are no commonalities, the unfamiliar triggers the ‘bad/negative’ vibes that lead to the candidate not making it to the next round of interviews.

Both Pathways Have Benefits and Risks

The above examples may lead you to believe that the fast/subconscious pathway is inferior and should be avoided. However the fast, efficient decision pathway makes decisions that are often ‘good enough’. More times than not, the good/bad tagging is based on an amalgam of past experiences that, while imperfect, lead to decisions that don’t harm the individual; while our slow/analytical pathway often doesn’t have the data necessary to make a better decision in the time available.

Dual process theory is a foundational theory in cognitive psychology. It suggests that humans have two distinct cognitive systems for decision-making. The first, System 1, is fast, effortless, automatic, and emotional, while the second, System 2, is slow, effortful, deliberate, and logical.

There is a common misconception that System 1, rooted in emotion, is maladaptive and always leads to poor decision-making, while System 2, rooted in reason, is superior in every way. However, as Daniel Kahneman pointed out in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, both systems have pros and cons. System 1 thinking is beneficial when there is no time to deliberate because we must make an immediate decision. This kind of automatic thinking allows us to make the instinctive choice to hit the brakes when someone cuts us off on the highway or to jump into action to perform the Heimlich maneuver on someone who is choking. In an emergency, there is no time to sit around and make a slow, effortful decision with System 2.

Finale

‘Trusting our gut’, works best when decisions have to be made immediately and the available information is limited or contradictory. ‘Thinking it through’ works best when the effects of the decision will have a significant impact and there is time to analyze the available data.

Trusting our gut fails most when a consequential decision has to made and there is time available to analyze the situation, but ‘going with your gut’ is taken because it is easier. It also fails when the decision process relies on invalid ‘bad’/‘good’ tags resulting from a bias.

I know one smart employer who uses common biases to his advantage when hiring. He will favor the candidate with the unconventional appearance or experience as they likely had hidden traits that allowed them to succeed despite their social disadvantage. He reports having strong success with this hiring philosophy.

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, for example, found that in the months following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, Americans were less likely to travel by plane and more likely to travel by car than they had been before the attacks. As a result, highway deaths increased substantially in the United States.

Why? Because even with the threat of terrorism factored in, the odds of dying in a car crash are substantially higher than the odds of dying in a plane crash. In fact, according to Gigerenzer’s analysis, the increase in highway deaths among people who chose to drive instead of fly in the months following 9/11 exceeded the number of victims in the actual attacks!

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Your friend,

DJ