Why is split second decision-making superior to deliberation? Gut Feelings delivers the science behind Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink

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. Intuition, it seems, is not some sort of mystical chemical reaction but a neurologically based behavior that evolved to ensure that we humans respond quickly when faced with a dilemma” (BusinessWeek).

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

... kind of loses steam half way through the book.
has some interesting thoughts/points that are intriguing, but could have been conveyed in half as much pages.

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 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.

Like his earlier and equally excellent book, Calculated Risk, Gut Feelings addresses some very common topics in an easy-to-read, solidly referenced manner that will make you feel good about life. His thesis is that humans have abilities that allow rapid and often accurate decisions to be made, often more accurate in making a choice than exhaustive analysis would be. What we all knew and could not dare to formulate in class was that most people could not explain how they made these decisions.

A first example is how an outfielder in baseball catches a fly ball, something I was never good at, even with above average spatial relations ability. Most cannot explain it, but Gigerenzer found out how. Next was the ability of many people who pick stocks by familiarity with the name of the company or brand. This can work as well as deep financial analysis.

Many aspects of behavior that successful people adopt without knowing why were explained, such as maintaining a useful relationship by employing the "rule of thumb" called tit for tat. If it fails on one try, then tit for two tats is to be tried. This is shown to be better than "turn the other cheek" because it prevents one (usually) from being a victim or allowing the other person to carry on being an aggressor.

There is a section on the difficulty of programming a computer or robot to do many of the things humans can do from very young ages, such as catch a fast-moving ball, drive a car, recognize a face after aging, more or less hair growth, etc. Legal documents, which so often seem to try to cover every eventuality, are shown to leave some ambiguity, the lawyer counting on some sense of reciprocity if there is a problem. Much later, one of my own old observations was developed: trust makes a society work. Hard to believe with so much criminality, lobbyists, dictators, etc. in play; but Gigerenzer shows that any organization with limited mutual trust among its members will have limited success or fail.

In dealing with majority rule in decision making, "...the seemingly irrational decision to follow the most ignorant member [of the group] increased the overall accuracy of the group." You must read how this can occur! Related is the difficulty of using complicated decision trees with many branches compared with a series of Yes or No choices based on clear measurable criteria. A main application of this is the decision an emergency room physician must make when a patient is brought in with chest pain: ordinary hospital bed or critical heart care unit. Not so simple with the threat of lawsuit if the former choice is made in error.

If an airliner with hundreds of people on board may be under control of terrorist hijackers and is headed toward a major city, should the air force protecting that city (or surface to air missiles) be used to shoot it down? One European government said no, and another one said yes. This is a fascinating topic to read about.

How transparency creates trust and secrecy the opposite, and, finally, how the Berlin Wall came down when it did make great reading.

Those of you who have read my other reviews know that I sometimes offer to provide long lists of errors, 50-60 being common in some books I have reviewed, and about 150 in one. Not so in Gut Feelings! Only one: "Three celestial bodies--such as earth, moon, and sun--move under no other influence than their mutual gravitation."(p90) Not so; the other planets all have an effect, especially Venus and Jupiter. When Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Earth are all on one side of the sun, the center of gravity of the solar system will be outside the body of the sun toward those planets, making them warmer than average.

Scientific backup for all positions is shown with fine referencing mostly to peer-reviewed papers in journals. Good index. This is one of those books that make me wish for more than 5 stars.