Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
by Gerd Gigerenzer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gerd GigerenzerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-07-05
ISBN: 0670038636
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Viking Adult
Book Reviews of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
Book Review: A little knowledge is a good thing, but a whole lot is best
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 has embedded in our minds that most light comes from above. Therefore, when we view circles drawn on a flat sheet, top-shaded circles will appear as indentations, bottom-shaded circles will appear as pop-outs.
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.
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.
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.
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 intution, 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.
Summary of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
An engaging explanation of the science behind Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling BlinkGerd Gigerenzer is one of the researchers of behavioral intuition responsible for the science behind Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink. Gladwell showed us how snap decisions often yield better results than careful analysis. Now, Gigerenzer explains why our intuition is such a powerful decision-making tool. Drawing on a decade of research at the Max Plank Institute, Gigerenzer demonstrates that our gut feelings are actually the result of unconscious mental processes-processes that apply rules of thumb that we've derived from our environment and prior experiences. The value of these unconscious rules lies precisely in their difference from rational analysis-they take into account only the most useful bits of information rather than attempting to evaluate all possible factors. By examining various decisions we make-how we choose a spouse, a stock, a medical procedure, or the answer to a million-dollar game show question-Gigerenzer shows how gut feelings not only lead to good practical decisions, but also underlie the moral choices that make our society function.
In the tradition of Blink and Freakonomics, Gut Feelings is an exploration of the myriad influences and factors (nature and nurture) that affect how the mind works, grounded in cutting-edge research and conveyed through compelling real-life examples.
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