These different approaches to decision-making – deliberate and intuitive – align with two modes of information-processing described in psychology. The first, more deliberate mode operates rather slowly, linearly and consciously. It operates, for example, when you try to solve ‘18 x 24’ or when you think about the pros and cons of spending your next holiday in Thailand. The results can usually be justified explicitly. For example, after carefully weighing which car to purchase, you could tell someone your reasons for choosing to buy this particular model and not that one. (View Highlight)
The other, intuitive information-processing mode operates quickly and associatively. Its outcomes are experienced as gut feelings, hunches or intuitions. They can feel like knowing something without knowing how you know. They are strongly connected to affect and metacognitive feelings, such as feelings of rightness and confidence. When you make a gut decision at a restaurant, you have simply made a choice because it felt right – like the decisions I made this morning. (View Highlight)
My recent research findings suggest that people are often well-advised to decide intuitively, in terms of how it makes them feel. There is emerging evidence that the act of deciding – and, in particular, making gut decisions – is emotionally rewarding. (View Highlight)
My interest in this possibility arose partly from my work as a psychotherapist. I have observed that people who come to therapy suffering from depression often report difficulties with making decisions. Patients also commonly report that they have lost trust in their intuition. ‘I have lost my inner compass,’ someone might say, or: ‘I used to rely on my gut, but that feeling is gone.’ My research colleagues and I have found mixed evidence on whether patients with depression have impairments in the processes that underlie intuition. Some findings suggested that people are less intuitive when they are anxious. My interest in intuition and wellbeing has since led me to explore the relationship between them more broadly. (View Highlight)
A key hypothesis is that making decisions in daily life – especially intuitive decisions – makes people feel good. Why might this be the case? First of all, making a decision should make someone feel better because, by deciding, one regains cognitive resources for other tasks. Making a decision should also typically bring a person closer to their personal goals and help them to fulfil their needs. Intuition is especially important for this because it integrates a lot of information (such as bodily signals, emotional cues and environmental information) simultaneously into a coherent whole. In doing so, it might help someone come to a choice that is in line with needs they are not even aware of in a given moment. The satisfaction of a need usually makes people feel good. Finally, intuitive decisions are made more fluently than deliberate ones, and people tend to like what comes about fluently (and dislike what feels effortful and less easy). (View Highlight)
Again, we found that people generally felt better right after decisions – and that this mood increase was stronger after intuitive decisions, compared with deliberate decisions. This positive mood change after intuitive decisions even lasted until the implementation of that decision. Furthermore, people rated intuitive decisions as more satisfying and more in line with their preferences, and they were more likely to be implemented (eg, actually going to the gym after work, if that’s what was decided). We examined one of the expected mechanisms behind the positive mood changes – the ease of making decisions – and found that the more easily a decision was made, the better one’s mood afterwards. And intuitive decisions were made more easily than deliberate ones. (View Highlight)
In many cases, gut feelings will accurately tell someone what is good for them in daily life because intuitions develop over time, based on the vast number of experiences that one has had. The more experience you have in a particular area, and the better the learning conditions were in which you developed your intuitions, the wiser it is to trust your gut. This could apply to decisions of the sort you’ve made many times before, and where the stakes of ‘getting it right’ are low: day-to-day choices about which meal to select, what movie to watch, or which shirt to buy might lead to a stronger mood boost if you make them intuitively rather than deliberately. At least, this is what our recent study results suggest. (View Highlight)
To take a more complex example, if you have a vague feeling that your partner or friend might not be feeling well after a short phone call, you might be wise to follow your intuition, and go to see them. It is likely that many cues led to this intuition, from their tone of voice to the subtle pauses in between sentences, cues that are meaningful to you because of your extensive experience with this person. If you follow your gut feeling in this situation, there is little downside, and you will probably feel better than if you first carefully weighed the costs and benefits of following up. (View Highlight)
The other side of this, of course, is that intuitive decisions may not always be the most adaptive ones. This might be the case, for instance, when you have little clue about what the best decision is because you lack relevant experience. This might happen when you start a job in a new field, or if you have to respond to someone’s behaviour in an unfamiliar cultural context. While an intuitive decision in a situation where you lack experience might feel good momentarily, you may end up being better off if you think deliberately about different options and compare your initial gut reaction with what your ‘head’ is telling you. (View Highlight)
In these and countless other circumstances, intuitions can have a major impact on what people think and do. They have a great potential, not least because the underlying unconscious processes are linked to our preferences and past learning experiences. In many everyday situations, following a gut feeling will make you feel good in the moment, and sometimes it will also carry little risk. Please, in those instances, go with your gut. But in some other cases, our personal preferences may not be ideal for guiding a decision, or we have had experiences that taught our gut the wrong lesson. Sometimes it’s better to think things through rather than rely on intuition. Fortunately, as we face these various situations, we have both options at our disposal. (View Highlight)
