So, it seems safe to say that at least some gut feelings are reliable and we ought to listen to those. Conscious deliberation is a slow and sometimes cumbersome process, and we need to be able act quickly in a lot of situations, especially when we are in danger. There may be good reasons for this feeling-but those reasons are hidden from consciousness.įrom an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we would have a mechanism whereby we unconsciously perceive and respond to stimuli in our enironment. They just feel an unusual sense of foreboding. For example, sometimes people can sense when they are in danger without knowing exactly why they believe this. Perhaps for some gut instincts, we are responding unconsciously to particular cues in our environment. The question is, when should we listen to our gut feelings and make decisions based on something we can’t explain? And when should we stop to think?Ī first approach to this question might be to consider whether gut feelings are in some sense rational, even if we can’t offer explicit reasons for them. Call it a hunch, an intuition, or an instinct-what they all have in common is that we don’t know why we feel the way we do, yet the feeling can be so compelling, it moves us to act. Sometimes we make decisions that we think long and hard about, but often we make decisions simply because it feels right. This week’s show is about gut feelings-and the art of decision-making.
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