Customer Reviews

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Gut Feelings" is a work aimed at a more general audience. Gerd Gigerenzer has written a number of academic works on the subject of this book; these would not be as readily accessible to a larger audience.

Since I find his scientific works most intriguing, I think that this specific book is apt to be most interesting for readers. It deals with a subject relevant to the recent best seller "The Black Swan." It makes for a nice comparison to read both volumes. Both authors speak to the poor record, for example, of stock analysts in predicting what stocks do well and what do not do well. However, their analyses march in different directions.

The dusk jacket notes the central focus of the work: "How does intuition work? What lies behind our moral behavior if not reflection and reasoning? How can simple `rules of thumb' help amateurs beat the stock market, outfielders catch a fly ball, parents choose a school, or lovers choose a mate?"

The main argument of the author is that the evolutionary process has led humans to develop "rules of thumb" or "heuristics" that tend to lead to efficient decision making processes. Does statistical analysis give better results than heuristics? Not necessarily, says the author.

What are these "shortcuts"? For instance, what if you are in a decision making situation and you need to respond to someone who may cause you problems or cooperate with you? The evidence suggests the value of a specific game with rules. As Gigerenzer puts it (page 62):

"(1) Cooperate first, (2) keep a memory of size one, and (3) imitate your partner's last behavior."

In plain English: If you are in competition with someone, at first cooperate. If they cooperate, you would continue cooperating. If they double cross you (don't cooperate), retaliate. Over time, according to a variety of studies, this works better than always double crossing people or always cooperating.

Other heuristics: "Take the first." That is, if your first cue suggests one decision over another, go with it, even if you are ignoring other information. If there is no advantage on the first cue, go to a second one. If one option is better, go with it. In short, satisfice; select the first option that seems to work. Others are discussed as well.

The book seems to digress a bit when it gets to moral behavior and social instincts.

Nonetheless, a thought-provoking work that is accessible to interested readers. Well worth looking at.

I once saw some slow motion film of some world-class cricketers. Some of the best batsmen closed their eyes in the face of a ball hurtling towards them at over 100 miles per hour. Yet they still hit the ball with remarkable accuracy. There are similar puzzles in baseball. You can describe the trajectory of the ball with all kinds of clever mathematics, but the clever outfielder knows little about such arcane mysteries. He watches the flight of the ball and automatically keeps the angle between his eyes and the ball constant.

A neuroscientist consulting with a major car manufacturer showed them a way to develop a very simple proximity sensor based on the nervous system of a locust. When locusts swarm, they somehow avoid bumping into each other. It turns out that the circuit involves only four neurons. But saves the locusts - and weekend motorists - an ocean of hurt.

The cricketer, the baseball player and the locust represent three examples of ways in which the nervous system uses simple rules to allow us to functions in complex situations. If we had to use all of our brainpower to solve every problem we would never get out of bed.

Gerd Gigerenzer is a well-known and influential figure in neuroscience: he directs the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. He is a superb presenter who is much in demand at major international conferences and he has won numerous awards including the American Association for the Advancement of Science Prize for Behavioral Science Research. He is also the author of the seminal work: Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World (Evolution and Cognition Series).

In this book he discusses the way in which simple rules form the basis of much of what goes on beneath the level of conscious awareness and may also form the basis of intuition.

I slightly disagree with this last point: what Gerd is really talking about is instinct rather than intuition.

The publicity surrounding this new book makes much of Gerd's role in providing some of the science and theoretical underpinning of Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book and perennial favorite: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. On this occasion the marketers have got it right.

Gerd Gigerenzer illustrates his book with many fascinating examples that show the accuracy of instinct. He also makes an important and often-overlooked point: instinctual decisions are not impulsive: they have their own brain-based rationale. The rules and principles that guide instinct are unsophisticated but surprisingly accurate. This is why people can often make good choices on topics outside their area of expertise. I have seen this with top level scientists and marketers, who can look at something about which they know very little, but still come up with remarkably perceptive answers. There has also been much recent discussion about the success of private investors who pick their own stocks and shares, when compared with professionals. He argues that what we feel in our gut is informed by a brain that relies upon thousands of years of experience.

Since this book went to press, more empirical data has come out that suggests that he is right when he says that reason may no be the best decision-making tool at our disposal. That most certainly does not mean that we should trade in our brains for our feelings. It may indeed be that complex decisions are best made using unconscious processes, but we still need to use reason to see if we have come up with the right answer!

Gerd writes extremely well, and his style is fluent and engaging. Particularly commendable is someone whose first language is not English. Many of the examples that he chooses have immediate applications in our own lives.

Very highly recommended.

Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

This is a solid book, based on a very interesting insight: that in a lot of cases, more information doesn't lead to better decisions, but worse ones. As it turns out, the additional information only serves to obscure our view of the most important factor in the decision. This isn't just true for fallible human brains, but also when all the data is plugged into a computer for a big, nasty regression equation.

Cool, huh?

So why not five stars?

Because the book peaks in the first two chapters as Gerd Gigerenzer (truly one of the all-time great author names) very clearly explains his insight to you using the fascinating concept of how humans catch a fly ball. (Hint: it isn't by doing all sorts of subconscious calculations about speed and trajectory)

From there on out, it's just one example after another of the same concept. By chapter four, when new examples get introduced, you're already projecting out exactly how people traditionally view it and how Gigerenzer's research shows things actually work. The good news is that shows Gigerenzer is a good teacher; the bad news is that the book is clearly too long.

So I'd highly recommend this first two or three chapters of this book to learn about Gigerenzer's very interesting, counter-intuitive and well-explained insight. As soon as you feel like you get the idea, though, I'd move on to your next book - you won't be missing any new ideas.

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 have fixed in our minds that most light comes from above. Therefore, when we view circles drawn on a flat sheet, top-shaded circles appear as indentations, bottom-shaded circles 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 intuition, 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.

There are many books like this these days. That talk about neurology, or psychology or even economics and business and intersect it with how we think and behave. Many of them talk about the same experiment and regurgitate the same conclusions, but as a bonus "Gut Feelings" ties many concepts together, this book presents these data in a way that is better. It's hard to explain that without spending a long time on this review, so I'm going to give a simple example that got me thinking which is why I liked this book so well.

It was about how a baseball player catches a fly ball and it opens up a discussion, or thoughts, on just what we think we are. A baseball player was criticized by his coach to catch fly balls better by running over as fast as possible to where he thinks the ball is going to land and then look up and catch the ball. This is what I think of as the God's eye view of the world. Human beings are build in God's image, and so we have these computer like brains that can solve differential equations that are almost magical, and we need to take advantage of them.

There is no telling how much damage has been done to people by this viewpoint, but the baseball player is one example. It turns out that when he followed his coaches expert advice he catches fewer balls. Huh? The coach ... the authority, hmmm ... very few of us really know what is going on inside us as we are live our lives, and this book slaps you in the face over and over about over-thinking, and trying to be a computer, and offers simpler methods to use instead. We catch balls by a simple heuristic (hope I spelled that right), by using our "gut". We fixate on the ball and try to keep the ball at a constant angle to us in the air and intersect that angle as the balls closes in. A simple elegant linear solution that evolution provided our simple brains to use. There are so many good examples of this kind of simple elegant direct thinking about thinking that I heartily recommend this book. In fact I intend to read more of the author's works.

This is pretty interesting Stuff. It is more like a series of magazine articles than a unified book, but it is an interesting idea, and in a way, an empowering book. One that says Trust yourself, and backs it up with good reasons.

It does seem to me that it would be easy to misread this book and say that everyone can just play their hunches all the time. And I can't shake the sense that the persons who are best at this are already skilled. He notes a study for example that found highly skilled athletes were actually better if they just went out there and did their sport without analyzing it and replaying the videotape and thinking about every at bat for example. So does that mean just your instincts, or practice more?

I will sya the book conveys complicated statistical information in a lively fashion without losing the reader in crushing numbers. However, once the initial, provocative thesis is established, the book becomes repetitive. It is only 230 pages, and by the second half I had a real feeling of been there, done that.

The subtitle of this book is "The Intelligence of the Unconscious", and the material on the flyleaf begins, "How does intuition work?" The book never answers this question. In the first chapter, the author says that intuition works by using rules of thumb. He doesn't give evidence for this assertion, nor does he really explain how we develop these rules of thumb. I am left with the question "Where do the rules of thumb come from?" The rest of the book is devoted to specific rules of thumb that he recommends (although if he needs to recommend them it is not clear to me how they are related to intuition) and to topics peripherally related to intuition. Most of them have been done better by others.

Gerd Gigerentzer appears to be a highly respected researcher who has done important work in the field of intuition, and I hoped for a lay exposition of his "breakthrough research". Perhaps he just tried to dumb it down too much, but there is no meat here to cover the bones.

If you have never read anything about the psychology of decision-making and have never heard stock examples like the story of Linda the Bank Teller, you may enjoy this book. You may even learn a little, but not enough to merit your time or money.

This interesting book---more a series of essays---travels some well established ground: more choices may please but short circuit decision making(the optimal number is 7); predicting is just as accurate if not more so with one key fact than lots of facts(the brain uses rules of thumb to get things right); when in doubt the brain goes with what it knows,and gets fooled(put a well known brand label on a peanut butter jar, but stick in lousy peanut butter and people love the taste). But the good stuff is on moral choices---we do not reason ourselves to a moral decision but are driven there by circumstance. He talks about the embedded shortcut that leads otherwise moral men to be part of a firing squad( don't break ranks, stick with your buddies); the default principle(if people are given a selected default, such as you must opt in for being an organ donor, they will go with the flow, and not take the time to decide); judges in England make bail decisions not on lots of factors, as they are oath bound to do, but on one factor (has the DA asked for bail or conditional bail)and the judges end up making decisions based not on due process but on whether they will get second guessed. A good book which would merit a 5 if there was some real world applications and not just interesting theory.

when reading Gladwell's Blink, I kept hoping that by the end of the book something about how my brain worked would be revealed. Well, I got a sense that the Blink-like decisions I made on a daily basis are more common than I thought and with a wider scope (racism etc). What was incredibly disappointing about Blink was that I walked away with no more insight. yes some examples were articulated, but this in some ways was not really the promise of the book. the promise of walking away with something concrete is fulfilled in Gut feelings, which is almost like a response to Blink; the author is saying to Gladwell "this is how its done, young jedi!". Get this book if you want to know why you fight with your spouse or why you get along with them. get this book if you want to understand how to improve yourself by having more insight into how your brain is wired. get this book and his other book on Risk, and you will become a better person. not a cheap promise.

One of the major unexplained gaps in the science of economics is the assumption that consumers are rational. Based on the assumption of rationality economics papers are littered with differential equations and other forbidding mathematics which describe how consumers make choices. But in the real world consumers don't solve differential equations in order to decide whether or not to buy a cup of coffee. This is a sticky problem. The standard rebuttal is to point out that the flight of a baseball can also be described with all sorts of forbidding differential equations. The fact that baseball players don't solve the differential equations which describe the flight of the ball doesn't mean that they can't catch! Baseball players must subconsciously approximate this mathematical process.

Gigerenzer points out that the standard rebuttal is wrong. A baseball player couldn't hope to gather and process all the information about the flight of a ball in real time, even approximately. Instead they use what he calls the gaze heuristic: 'fix your eyes on the ball and adjust your running speed so that your angle of vision to the ball remains constant.' The interesting thing about the gaze heuristic is that it ignores virtually all of the information about the ball's flight and focuses on just one piece of information: your angle of vision relative to the ball. But that single piece of information is enough to reliably let people catch a ball.

That in a nutshell is the concept of bounded rationality. Once you factor in the cost of gathering and processing information it becomes extremely irrational to make decisions by solving differential equations. Heuristics (AKA rules of thumb) are the way to go. They give you a lot more bang for your information-processing buck. Here is the truly radical part of Gigerenzer's book. If you were to simply claim that heuristics allow people to make decisions that are almost as good on vastly less information then I doubt many modern social scientists would disagree. But in fact Gigerenzer shows that heuristics can outperform the information-greedy favorites of the social sciences like multiple regression analysis and neural networks with back propagation.

Another really nice thing about this book is that Gigerenzer is a very good writer with a very light touch. You will not find the heavy and ponderous writing that you normally expect from scholars. This book is an easy and fast read that belongs on the shelf of everyone interested in politics and the social sciences. You may also want to consider The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences (you can easily and profitably skip over the math).