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Your question is one I've been exploring since the New Year. One thing to consider is that the gut is a collection of relationships and groupings based on experiences and cognitive processes. This is great for some circumstances. I don't need to take a tally of all the stats to ensure I'm making the most educated choice (based on reviews, calories, health safety, longitudinal studies, etc.) of which sandwich to buy at the deli. On the flipside, our gut can betray us. One of the chapters of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink talks about a story of New York Cops whose instant reaction caused the wrongful death of a innocent because their heuristics that formed assumption after assumption were just flat out imprecise. Signs that should've flagged them to check their assumptions actually only reinforced their view. From their perspective they truly believed their conduct was in line with what they expected. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman provides numerous gambles where our intuition guides us to make suboptimal or imprecise choices due to loss-aversion, endowment theory, et al. I have to go but I don't have a perfect answer for you. But I will provide a Kindle two highlights that I highlighted in a book I'm reading called Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: > Our decision-making capacities are not simply “wired in,” following some evolutionary design. Choosing wisely is a learned skill, which, like any other skill, can be improved with experience. An analogy can be drawn with swimming. When most of us enter the water for the first time, we do so with a set of muscular skills that we use to keep ourselves from drowning. We also have one important bias: We want to keep our heads above water. That bias leads us to assume a vertical position, which is one of the few possible ways to drown. Even if we know better, in moments of panic or confusion we attempt to keep our heads wholly free of the water, despite the obvious effort involved compared with that of lying flat in a “jellyfish float.” The first step in helping people learn to swim, therefore, is to make them feel comfortable with their head under water. Anybody who has managed to overcome the head-up bias can survive for hours by simply lying face forward on the water with arms and legs dangling—and lifting the head only when it is necessary to breathe (provided, of course, the waves are not too strong or the water too cold). Ordinary skills can thus be modified to cope effectively with the situation by removing a pernicious bias. > The greatest obstacle to using external aids, such as the ones we will illustrate in this chapter, is the difficulty of convincing ourselves that we should take precautions against ourselves as Ulysses did. The idea that a self-imposed external constraint on action can actually enhance our freedom by releasing us from predictable and undesirable internal constraints is not an obvious one. It is hard to be Ulysses. The idea that such internal constraints can be cognitive, as well as emotional, is even less palatable. Thus, to allow our judgment to be constrained by the “mere numbers” or pictures or external aids offered by computer printouts is anathema to many people. In fact, there is even evidence that when such aids are offered, many experts attempt intuitively to improve upon these aids’ predictions—and then they do worse than they would have had they “mindlessly” adhered to them. Estimating likelihood does in fact involve mere numbers, but as Paul Meehl (1986) pointed out, “When you come out of a supermarket, you don’t eyeball a heap of purchases and say to the clerk, ‘Well, it looks to me as if it’s about $17.00 worth; what do you think?’ No, you add it up” (p. 372). Adding, keeping track, and writing down the rules of probabilistic inference explicitly are of great help in overcoming the systematic errors introduced by representative thinking, availability, anchor-and-adjust, and other biases. If we do so, we might even be able to learn a little bit from experience. |