Gut Feelings The Intelligence of the Unconscious

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).

Gerd Gigerenzer is the director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He has won numerous prizes, including the 1992 AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research and the 2002 German Science Book of the Year Prize. He has been professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and the John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Law, University of Virginia.