Why 'Go With Your Gut' Approach Works

From the archive: first published October 2, 2011.

Faced with a hard decision — which car to buy, where to live, which job to take — the folk wisdom says to sleep on it rather than grind through the pros and cons. Psychologists say the folk wisdom has a point.

In a landmark 2006 study published in Science, psychologists Ap Dijksterhuis, Maarten Bos, Loran Nordgren and Rick van Baaren gave participants a complex choice: pick the best car from four options, each described by a long list of attributes. One group deliberated consciously; another was distracted with anagrams and then asked to decide immediately; a third chose on the spot. The distracted group — the ones who couldn't consciously think about the problem — chose the objectively best car more often than the deliberate thinkers.

The researchers called it the "deliberation-without-attention" effect, and it became the core of unconscious thought theory: the idea that for complex decisions with many variables, unconscious processing outperforms conscious deliberation, because conscious attention has a narrow bottleneck while the unconscious can weigh many attributes in parallel. Conscious thinking, by contrast, was better at simple decisions with few variables. A follow-up study even found that people who deliberated little about complex purchases were more satisfied with them afterwards.

Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development added another piece: gut feelings are not mystical — they are fast, unconscious heuristics shaped by experience. A gut instinct is often the brain recognizing a pattern it has seen before, faster than words can follow.

The honest footnote: the deliberation-without-attention effect has faced replication troubles. Other labs struggled to reproduce the original results, and critics argue the unconscious is powerful but not the supercomputer the first papers implied. So the nuanced version of the advice: for simple decisions, think carefully; for complex ones with too many attributes to juggle, gather the facts, then let the answer come — and trust that the brain keeps working after you've stopped watching it.

Editor's note: this article was completely rebuilt during our editorial review. The original version contained generic technology commentary unrelated to the title; the text above is an original summary of the published decision-science research.