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    Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
    Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
    Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
    Audiobook7 hours

    Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

    Written by Gerd Gigerenzer

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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 Planck Institute for Human Development, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 10, 2007
    ISBN9781400175055
    Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

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    Reviews for Gut Feelings

    3.5/5

    105 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is an interesting but occasionally hard-to-follow book. I feel the author could exempt some of the redundant examples and keep the book shorter, more to the point. I enjoyed learning from this book that thinking or knowing too much can sometimes lead to negative results when compared to acting based on less knowledge.
    • 1/5
      The book lost me at the part where it recommended that a woman just be nice to her husband and ignores if he gets drunk and beats her up, if it only happens one time.
    • 3/5
      In all candor, the book was a bit too "wonky" for me. It's not that one must be an expert in neuroscience to glean some fascinating insights. But I do think the work could have been made more accessible if it included additional anecdotal material. It gets a bit dense and even feels somewhat redundant as a reader hits the midway point. Still, the author serves up some interesting perspectives.
    • 5/5
      MUCH better than Gladwell's "Blink". "Blink" reads like a series of interesting case studies, but by the end of that book you still have no clue about how intuition truly works. Gigerenzer, who is a scientist and has done much of the original research in this field (unlike Gladwell who is a science writer that tries to capture the public's imagination), relates in very clear and precise terms HOW some forms of intuition are thought to work at this time.
    • 4/5
      A really good introduction into modern research on psychological heuristics. The book is based on three main ideas: 1) many of our decisions are based on fast and frugal rules of thumb (as opposed to exhaustive calculations); 2) these rules are successful because they confer evolutionary advantage (and for this same reason, they are not consciously accessible, i.e. they present themselves as 'gut feelings'); 3) their predictive power comes from the fact that by being simple they avoid overfitting the data. I found this book much better written than the average popular science book. In addition to being very clearly written and containing very well chosen entertaining examples, it surprised me with a couple of some really interesting analyses. The first one is an analysis of the one dimensional voter (chapter 8) where Gigerenzer shows experimentally how a) Left-Right linear ordering immediately induces a complete ordering of preferences b) issues that seem orthogonal to Left-Right distinctions very readily get mapped on the same axis by the amount of support that an issue receives from a candidate who already has a location on that axis. The second one is the analysis of 'split-brain' organizations, i.e. organizations that employ very robust heuristics for their decisions ('let's not get sued!') but then confabulate a completely independent set of principles to explain/justify their decisions.
    • 4/5
      Particularly valuable for the critique of Kahnemann and Tversky's low opinion of intuitive judgements, eg 'Linda is a bankteller' vs 'Linda is a bankteller and active in the femist movement' - it is often judged that, given a typical description of 'Linda', the latter is more likely. This is not logical, if the 'and' is taken as a logical AND. But it clearly isn't taken this way in normal language. The question 'probable' is taken to mean 'plausible'. This is in fact totally rational. Also valuable for the description and application of the recognition heuristic and much else.