Mind vs. Guts decisions - using your head. (LINK)
May 13th 2008 23:21
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A fundamental insight of modern psychology is that our judgements are the product of not one mind, but two. There is the conscious mind, of course — the mind that ponders these words and understands how irrational it is to abandon planes for cars in the name of safety. The conscious mind perceives itself to be in sole control, but this is a cognitive illusion.
Most of the work done by the brain occurs beneath the level of consciousness and this unconscious mind is heavily involved in making judgements. The conclusions that issue from this mind do not emerge as articulate thoughts, however. We experience them instead as feelings and intuitions — something just seems right, for reasons we cannot express.
What most distinguishes the two minds is speed. The conscious mind — which I call "Head" — plods along. It takes time and effort to think. But the unconscious mind — or "Gut" — is as quick as a gunshot.
Gut is able to make snap judgements because it does not review all available evidence. Instead, it uses what cognitive psychologists call "heuristics," which are really just rules of thumb. There's the "availability heuristic," for example: the easier it is to think of an example of something, the more common that thing is. Nice and simple. It may not always produce correct conclusions, but it generally worked in the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, when the basic structures of our brains were evolving, which is why it is hard-wired in our brains today.
Gut's speed means it gets first crack in the formation of conclusions. "One of psychology's fundamental insights," writes Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, "is that judgements are generally the products of non-conscious systems that operate quickly, on the basis of scant evidence, and in a routine manner, and then pass their hurried approximations to consciousness, which slowly and deliberately adjusts them".
That's an ideal description of how we make judgements. In practice, Head routinely sits back and lets Gut's conclusions go unchallenged. "People are not accustomed to thinking hard," writes Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, "and are often content to trust a plausible judgement that quickly comes to mind".
And that can be dangerous.
The above comes from The Age, Fairfax digital, link above
So this is something you need to think about when making decisions, even those related to me.
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