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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

How do we decide? From "Trust your head or your gut? How we decide depends on experience" [mpib-berlin.mpg.de]:

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" [doi.org] with doi:10.1016/j.jarmac.2015.07.

Meta: how will an editor decide whether or not to run this story?

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