Gut Feelings

Reflection 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.

I have heard Gerd Gigerenzer lecture and read several of his books. If you want to use your gut feeling and your mind, this book tells you how.

In many ways Gigerenzer’s book provides a counterpoint to Kahneman.

Kahneman argues that humans often use mental shortcuts (“heuristics”) to make decisions in particularly complex situations but in doing so we fall prey to cognitive biases that lead to systematic errors in judgment. Gigerenzer counters by showing that billions of years of evolution have endowed our brains with the capacity to cut through the noise and arrive at decisions quickly especially where time is of the essence. Doing so often leads to outcomes that are no worse than other more time-consuming and deliberative methods.

Many of Gigerenzer’s arguments and findings… show more.