“We Need To Leave… Now”: 40 Heart-Pounding Moments When Gut Instinct Meant Everything

We wanted to learn more about how intuition and the so-called gut feeling work, so we got in touch with Associate Professor of Psychology at Williams College, Jeremy D. Cone, who explained that it’s essentially our brain working in automatic mode.

“Daniel Kahneman calls the kind of thinking involved in an intuition ‘System 1’ thinking. It's essentially your brain in automatic mode – a type of thinking that happens very rapidly and with very little conscious effort or control. The products of System 1 are a set of feelings that then serve as the inputs for more conscious decision-making and choice,” he explained.

“System 1 operates on the basis of associations learned in memory through past experiences. So, you can think of gut feelings as these sort of rapid flashes of positivity or negativity that develop through experiences we've had in the past, and have learned to associate with good or bad outcomes.”

Talking about how important it is to pay attention to our gut feeling, Cone noted that there is quite a lot of discussion and debate about this. “Rational thought has long been thought to be the gold standard for making good choices, but there have been many proponents of the idea that intuition can offer valuable insights – some have even suggested it can sometimes outperform rational judgment, at least under certain circumstances.”

“Researchers like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have suggested that intuitions can sometimes lead to good outcomes,” the expert continued. “But because they are not a fully rational analysis and they are instead of a kind of cognitive shortcut honed by past experience, they very often lead us astray. In their Heuristic and Biases tradition of research, they documented lots of ways in which people are biased or irrational in their judgments as a result of trusting their intuitions.

“On the other hand, other researchers such as Gary Klein, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Robin Hogarth have argued that intuitions that are honed by relevant experience with accurate feedback about whether your choices were good or bad can lead to good outcomes.

“So, a lot of this comes down to whether your intuitions were ‘trained’ in an environment in which it was possible for you to learn that they led to good or bad outcomes, and then it also comes down to whether the decision you face right now is one that is relevant and related to the kinds of experiences you've had in the past where the intuition was trained,” Cone explained.

According to Cone, there are some good reasons to believe that our intuition differs when it comes to positive and negative situations. “One idea that has received some traction is that once a negative gut feeling has developed, it can become much more resistant to counter-evidence than a positive one, partly because the negativity you feel causes avoidance behavior that prevents you from ever being disabused of the intuition,” he said.

“If you have a feeling that something usually turns out well, you seek it out more often, and you get feedback that tells you whether you were right. On the other hand, if you start to develop a hunch that a particular way of choosing tends to turn out badly, you stop choosing that way; you avoid it. But because of this, you never again get a chance to see that you're wrong or if circumstances have changed. You're robbed of feedback that could challenge your intuition.”

“Another important idea is that people might generalize their negative gut feelings more widely than their positive gut feelings,” the expert continued, talking about how our intuition differs in a positive and a negative situation. “If you develop an intuition that something is bad, you tend to also feel like things that are similar to it are also bad, even if you haven't actually experienced those things before. That seems to happen much less for positive feelings, which don't spread to other similar things nearly as readily.

“So, once you get burned by something, it causes avoidance behaviors that lead you to avoid not just the thing that burned you but also lots of other similar things, and this prevents you from getting feedback about whether your intuition is accurate. That causes those gut feelings to persist even if you might be wrong.”