Evolutionary Shortcomings in Human Behavior and Decision Making

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	• Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious Gerd Gigerenzer Viking Adult, 2007 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Gut Feelings/Blink

Haven't had a chance to read the whole book yet, just starting, but it looks like something everyone should be interested in, am paying a lot more attention to my instincts/subconscious now and feel the book is well worth your time.

Great read

Amazing! An academic who writes clear and simple prose about a complex subject. What a treat!

Robert Wachal, Professor Emeritus

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Reality in Behavioral Study

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.

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Making sense of the social brain

Why are amateurs better than professionals at picking stocks? Why are 99.9 percent of French citizens registered as organ donors but only 28 percent of Americans? How did a simple rumor bring down the Berlin Wall?

Gigerenzer focuses primarily on the advantages intuition and instinct bestow on us, using "rules of thumb" to guide behavior. Whether we're trying to catch a baseball, make a killing on the stock market, or choose a spouse, instinct is more useful than analytic thinking.

A professor of psychology and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Gigerenzer divides his book in two sections, "Unconscious Intelligence" and "Gut Feelings in Action." The first includes a discussion of how intuition works, why less is more, and the importance of forgetting. He discusses sharing, doing unto others as they do unto you, and why too much logic can spoil a good decision.

When a group of Americans and a group of Germans were asked which city had the most population, Detroit or Milwaukee, the Germans overwhelmingly beat the Americans. Why? Because the Germans had never heard of Milwaukee so they went with the city they had heard of. This same "rule of thumb" is why amateurs so often beat analysts when it comes to stock picking and why brand names work.

As for the organ donor question - in France people have to opt out of the program, in the U.S. people have to opt in. If there is a default, people defer to it, no matter how simple it is to go another way.

The second section shows how rules of thumb work in areas like health care (less is more), politics (name recognition, one good reason is enough), romance, and morality.

Sometimes, Gigerenzer shows, gut feelings let us down, as in mob mentality, when people are reluctant to detach from the group. But the power of wishful thinking brought down the Berlin Wall when rumor and desire combined to convince a vast swarm that the wall was open - therefore it was.

Conversational, well organized, and backed with lots of experiments and studies, Gigerenzer's book is an enjoyable, thought-provoking, practical view of human nature at work.

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Evolutionary Shortcomings in Human Behavior and Decision Making

Often, regardless of urgency, not only simple but very serious and critical decisions ranging from marriage, job orientation, investing, trusting a medical diagnosis or a total stranger are not 100% a product of an unbiased logical process.
An inner voice, a feeling based on the unexplored neurobiology of the human nature is responsible for the final word of approval.
This book consists of an excellent paradigm on how to be aware of and effectively disengage from speculations or emotional personality traits influencing decisions in the short or long term horizon.
It serves perhaps as a word of caution on how to adapt in order to avoid being manipulated from evolving idiosyncratic, social or cultural stereotypes.
It also provides a measure of inappropriateness for strategies of improbable viability that are based on naïve individual attempts to exert constant control over the level of external stimuli that trigger fight or fly responses.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

An engaging explanation of the science behind Malcolm Gladwell?s bestselling Blink

Gerd Gigerenzer is one of the researchers of behavioral intuition responsible for the science behind Malcolm Gladwell?s bestseller Blink. Gladwell showed us how snap decisions often yield better results than careful analysis. Now, Gigerenzer explains why our intuition is such a powerful decision-making tool. Drawing on a decade of research at the Max Plank Institute, Gigerenzer demonstrates that our gut feelings are actually the result of unconscious mental processes?processes that apply rules of thumb that we?ve derived from our environment and prior experiences. The value of these unconscious rules lies precisely in their difference from rational analysis?they take into account only the most useful bits of information rather than attempting to evaluate all possible factors. By examining various decisions we make?how we choose a spouse, a stock, a medical procedure, or the answer to a million-dollar game show question?Gigerenzer shows how gut feelings not only lead to good practical decisions, but also underlie the moral choices that make our society function.

In the tradition of Blink and Freakonomics, Gut Feelings is an exploration of the myriad influences and factors (nature and nurture) that affect how the mind works, grounded in cutting-edge research and conveyed through compelling real-life examples.

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