Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
by Gerd Gigerenzer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gerd GigerenzerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-07-05
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Viking Adult
Book Reviews of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
Book Review: Reality in Behavioral Study
Summary: 5 Stars
Like his earlier and equally excellent book, Calculated Risk, Gut Feelings addresses some very common topics in an easy-to-read, solidly referenced manner that will make you feel good about life. His thesis is that humans have abilities that allow rapid and often accurate decisions to be made, often more accurate in making a choice than exhaustive analysis would be. What we all knew and could not dare to formulate in class was that most people could not explain how they made these decisions.
A first example is how an outfielder in baseball catches a fly ball, something I was never good at, even with above average spatial relations ability. Most cannot explain it, but Gigerenzer found out how. Next was the ability of many people who pick stocks by familiarity with the name of the company or brand. This can work as well as deep financial analysis.
Many aspects of behavior that successful people adopt without knowing why were explained, such as maintaining a useful relationship by employing the "rule of thumb" called tit for tat. If it fails on one try, then tit for two tats is to be tried. This is shown to be better than "turn the other cheek" because it prevents one (usually) from being a victim or allowing the other person to carry on being an aggressor.
There is a section on the difficulty of programming a computer or robot to do many of the things humans can do from very young ages, such as catch a fast-moving ball, drive a car, recognize a face after aging, more or less hair growth, etc. Legal documents, which so often seem to try to cover every eventuality, are shown to leave some ambiguity, the lawyer counting on some sense of reciprocity if there is a problem. Much later, one of my own old observations was developed: trust makes a society work. Hard to believe with so much criminality, lobbyists, dictators, etc. in play; but Gigerenzer shows that any organization with limited mutual trust among its members will have limited success or fail.
In dealing with majority rule in decision making, "...the seemingly irrational decision to follow the most ignorant member [of the group] increased the overall accuracy of the group." You must read how this can occur! Related is the difficulty of using complicated decision trees with many branches compared with a series of Yes or No choices based on clear measurable criteria. A main application of this is the decision an emergency room physician must make when a patient is brought in with chest pain: ordinary hospital bed or critical heart care unit. Not so simple with the threat of lawsuit if the former choice is made in error.
If an airliner with hundreds of people on board may be under control of terrorist hijackers and is headed toward a major city, should the air force protecting that city (or surface to air missiles) be used to shoot it down? One European government said no, and another one said yes. This is a fascinating topic to read about.
How transparency creates trust and secrecy the opposite, and, finally, how the Berlin Wall came down when it did make great reading.
Those of you who have read my other reviews know that I sometimes offer to provide long lists of errors, 50-60 being common in some books I have reviewed, and about 150 in one. Not so in Gut Feelings! Only one: "Three celestial bodies--such as earth, moon, and sun--move under no other influence than their mutual gravitation."(p90) Not so; the other planets all have an effect, especially Venus and Jupiter. When Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Earth are all on one side of the sun, the center of gravity of the solar system will be outside the body of the sun toward those planets, making them warmer than average.
Scientific backup for all positions is shown with fine referencing mostly to peer-reviewed papers in journals. Good index. This is one of those books that make me wish for more than 5 stars.
Summary of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
Why is split second decision-making superior to deliberation? Gut Feelings delivers the science behind Malcolm Gladwell?s BlinkReflection and reason are overrated, according to renowned psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. Much better qualified to help us make decisions is the cognitive, emotional, and social repertoire we call intuition?a suite of gut feelings that have evolved over the millennia specifically for making decisions. ?Gladwell drew heavily on Gigerenzer?s research. But Gigerenzer goes a step further by explaining just why our gut instincts are so often right. Intuition, it seems, is not some sort of mystical chemical reaction but a neurologically based behavior that evolved to ensure that we humans respond quickly when faced with a dilemma? (BusinessWeek).
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