Should You Go With Your Gut?

About the only time our gut impulse can outperform our reason is if we have developed some kind of truly informed intuition.

Question: Is it better to make decisions rationally or go with
your gut?Sheena Iyengar:  We are often in society
told to make decisions in one of two ways.  We're either told "Use your
gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you," or
we're told to use reason--some very deliberative methodical process of
pros and cons and really thinking it through.  Most of the time you
should use reason, there is no doubt about that because gut often makes
us susceptible to lots of different biases, particularly if what you're
deciding is something that you really, that expertise can be brought to
bear on it, there is a way in which you can align the odds, so then you
should really use reason.  About the only time our gut can truly
outperform our reason is if we truly have developed a kind of informed
intuition. So that means the chess master or someone who has really
thought about it and given themselves feedback on a particular activity
for at least 10,000 hours or more.  About the only question that we
would say and this is a big one in our lives that we would say you don't
just use pure reason to decide the answer to is anything that affects
your happiness, because then gut and reason answer very different
questions. So gut tells you "How do I feel about this right now?"  It
doesn't tell me how I feel about it tomorrow or even a few minutes from
now.  It just tells me how I'm feeling right now.  Reason tells me, when
I do the pros and cons analysis, how I should feel about it right now
and how I should feel about it in 10 years from now and so that the
only...  So for decisions about happiness you essentially need at least
both and probably even more than that, you probably also need to do
analysis that doesn't involve yourself to get at the answer of what will
make you happy in 10 years. 

Question: Is it better to make decisions rationally or go with
your gut?Sheena Iyengar:  We are often in society
told to make decisions in one of two ways.  We're either told "Use your
gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you," or
we're told to use reason--some very deliberative methodical process of
pros and cons and really thinking it through.  Most of the time you
should use reason, there is no doubt about that because gut often makes
us susceptible to lots of different biases, particularly if what you're
deciding is something that you really, that expertise can be brought to
bear on it, there is a way in which you can align the odds, so then you
should really use reason.  About the only time our gut can truly
outperform our reason is if we truly have developed a kind of informed
intuition. So that means the chess master or someone who has really
thought about it and given themselves feedback on a particular activity
for at least 10,000 hours or more.  About the only question that we
would say and this is a big one in our lives that we would say you don't
just use pure reason to decide the answer to is anything that affects
your happiness, because then gut and reason answer very different
questions. So gut tells you "How do I feel about this right now?"  It
doesn't tell me how I feel about it tomorrow or even a few minutes from
now.  It just tells me how I'm feeling right now.  Reason tells me, when
I do the pros and cons analysis, how I should feel about it right now
and how I should feel about it in 10 years from now and so that the
only...  So for decisions about happiness you essentially need at least
both and probably even more than that, you probably also need to do
analysis that doesn't involve yourself to get at the answer of what will
make you happy in 10 years.