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How do we decide? From "Trust your head or your gut? How we decide depends on experience":
Whether we make everyday decisions based on our gut or our reason has little to do with what kind of a decision maker we are. Instead, the content of the decision plays a big role, as does whether we are knowledgeable in the particular subject. These were the results of a study by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the University of Basel.
As the study shows, we tend to decide on clothing, restaurants, and choice of partners intuitively, whereas our decisions in areas such as medicine, electronics, and holidays are apt to be knowledge-based. "For that reason it's inaccurate to speak of rational or intuitive decision makers, as is often done"... Instead, people prefer one or the other type of decision based on the topic in question. This is entirely independent of sex; the assumption that women are more likely than men to make gut decisions was not confirmed.
The full report appears in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition as "Domain-specific preferences for intuition and deliberation in decision making" with doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2015.07.
Meta: how will an editor decide whether or not to run this story?
Editor's Note: I decided to run it via reason, and a little intuition about what the community will want to read, and what won't get me too much gruff in the comments.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday October 30 2015, @09:52PM
There's a strong divide between what we should use to make decisions, and what we do use to make decisions.
In situations where there is sufficient time and data available, we should make use of our brains, gather data, run computations, and so forth. In a lot of cases, we can indeed reach the optimal solution through this process, because science has taught us a great deal about how the world works.
When there isn't enough time and/or data, we have to use our gut instincts to fill in the gaps. That's common.
But in practice, what humans actually tend to do is make decisions with their guts (actually, the non-rational portions of our brain) and gather data and other rational arguments to justify our already-arrived-at conclusions. Or as Michael Shermer points out, "Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.