Instinct or Introspection?

Making decisions is often easy. One option will bring overwhelming joy whilst the other has nothing desirable about it whatsoever. But sometimes we can find ourselves simply unable to choose. Our automatic gut reaction is telling us one thing and our rational head is telling us something else. Many have previously lamented their choice of a healthier meal in a restaurant when initial instincts called out for the 1000+ calorie option. At the same time I am sure you’ve often been quietly pleased with yourself for having a right old think and eventually coming to an extremely good choice in retrospect. Knowing when to choose (and which to trust) between gut instincts or careful thought would be invaluable. I would like to say I could give you this invaluable information in the next 600-700 words, but I probably can’t. Although we can at least have a look at some research which should be a little helpful.

Our gut instincts serve us very well a lot of the time. Automatically deciding to remove a hand from a boiling hot pan, a momentary decision to run away very fast from a lion, the list goes on. But can we use them out of the jungle and away from danger? Can they be used to improve our choice of jam?
Jam; A highly controversial topic. Timothy Wilson and colleagues decided to use some to examine the relative merits of gut instinct reactions vs. careful thought and selection. The study was quite simple. The researchers provided participants with a number of jams and their task was to give the jams ratings so that they could be ranked. Little did participants know that the researchers had previously arranged for some ‘jam experts’ to rate the jams for their quality and taste.

Participants were split into two groups. One group was asked to analyse why they felt the way they did about the jams before making preference ratings (careful thought condition), whilst the other group of participants just made their preference ratings without engaging in consideration (automatic decision condition) of the jams pro’s and con’s. The big question is – who agreed with the experts more? The answer is the automatic decision condition. The activity of carefully thinking about the pros and cons and reasons why the jam was or wasn’t enjoyable greatly reduced participants ability to spot the good stuff from the bad. Other studies have found similar findings; thinking too much may even inhibit your ability to pick out art work for your home for example.

As you will have probably guessed it isn’t such a one sided affair. Gut reactions cannot always be trusted. Drunken texting is almost definitely testament to this. But alas, there is no research on this that I know of, so instead we will have a look at why we shouldn’t always trust gut reactions when pondering how an American football games will be and when worrying about missing a train. In two studies Morewedge et al. (2005) investigated how we can often rely upon gut reaction information when thinking about the future and how potentially undesirable consequences may stem from this. Previous research suggests that when thinking about the future we are reliant on our memories for similar events. However, when thinking about the past we often rely on stand out memories of experiences which aren’t always typical of the norm. This in turn can lead to making poor predictions about future experiences as you are basing it on a relatively small amount of biased information.

Thus, in one study researchers approached Harvard football fans outside their stadium shortly before a game. Some participants were asked to ‘describe a football game you’ve seen when Harvard won’ and others to ‘describe three games you’ve seen when Harvard won’ and then both groups were asked to predict how enjoyable they thought the game would be. The participants in the 2nd condition (reliant on several memories) made much more realistic predictions about how enjoyable the game would be in comparison to the participants in the 1st condition (reliant on one memory). Realistically every game isn’t going to be amazing and we sometimes forget this. When deciding whether or not to buy tickets for Saturday’s game we think back to a previous game, a really enjoyable one pops into our head (probably because it stands out more) and we are sold on the idea. We’ve based our behaviour on the first thing that springs to mind when we probably should have made more of an effort to consult our memories.

Similarly we can make this kind of error when thinking about bad things too. Missing a train is never fun but at the same time worst things have happened in life. Yet, as we are often reliant on stand out memories that spring to mind (that horrific time that a missed train resulted in you looking and smelling terrible for a job interview), we base our thoughts about the future on an extremely negative gut instinct. Thinking about other occasions in which we missed a train and the world didn’t come to an end makes things seem a lot more like they really will be; not that bad. In these instances a little more careful thought and consideration look like a really good idea.

Does this blog really clear up anything? I would suggest probably not. What we can be quietly confident about is: a) trust our gut instincts with jam and art and b) think a bit more when deciding whether or not to go to a football game or worry too much at the prospect of missing a train. What about careers, love or marmalade? The jury is still out, but perhaps a good rule of thumb is to use ones gut instincts with confidence but at the same time be ready to challenge them with introspection if they seem to be letting us down.

Implications

Avoid shopping for jam or art with a philosopher.

Expect a lot less from American football games and get ready to be pleasantly surprised by missing a train.

Gut instincts seem fine with jam, but what about when things get a little more serious? Be aware that there is a danger of over thinking and starting to add importance to factors that really aren’t that important, such as the number of x’s at the end a text message from a girl (or do they matter?).

I Can Make Me Feel Good

Feeling happy and being in a good mood is extremely enjoyable. The majority of us quite rightly base a lot of our decisions in life based on this principal. We probably choose to share our beds with our partners because being with them makes us happy (or at least we hope they it does. We avoid waiting in long queues and arguing because they quite often put us in bad moods. So how can I be happier? An awful lot of psychology research can have a tendency to point to our failings, mainly suggesting that humans are irrational and a bit weird. The good news is that there is also some research examining what makes people happy and unhappy and what influences our good and bad moods. Here we’ll have a look at a couple of things;

Memories and Gratitude.

Memories. We have an awful lot of them and frequently find ourselves recollecting both the good and bad times. The emergence of polariods, digital camera’s and then Facebook tagging has made this little hobby even easier. Such recollections are likely to have rather significant effects on our mood and as you might imagine, not everybody realises this. Gillihan et al. (2007) were interested in these possibilities and designed a very clever experiment to delve further. Researchers approached members of the public at a large train station in the US armed with 3 different questionnaires. Potential participants were told that the questionnaire would ask them about different experiences in life.

Each of the 3 questionnaires consisted of 19 questions that would prompt the recall of memories from participants’ lives. The ‘positive memories’ questionnaire consisted of a number of questions concerning positive memories; e.g. ‘What is the best present you have ever received?’ The ‘negative memories’ questionnaire consisted of a number of questions concerning negative memories; e.g. ‘When was the last time you had stomach flu?” and the third questionnaire, ‘neutral memories’ consisted of (as you may have guessed) neutral memories; e.g. ‘What time did you wake up this morning?’ At the end of every questionnaires participants were also asked to rate their current mood and what they thought the study was about. Before we get to the results, 326 people agreed to do this study with no payment or reward. Here we have either some lovely evidence of genuine kindness or slightly less optimistically we have evidence that 326 train commuters were extremely bored. Take your pick. As much as I want the former to be the true my money is on boredom.

Mood appeared to be significantly affected by memories participant recalled. Participants that had recalled positive memories were in a better mood than those that had recalled neutral memories. Recalling negative memories placed participants in a more negative mood than remembering neutral memories. The message is, or appears to be – if you are feeling down then can a good think about some nice memories make you feel better. An interesting thought is whether or not such activities as manic camera snapping and Facebook tagging are being driven by these mood enhancing effects of memory. On some kind of unconscious level do we make a huge effort to capture happy moments or at least pretend moments are happy (painted on smiles at the ready) because of how these memories can later be used to regulate our moods?

These results are interesting but it is unlikely that the recall of a memory is going to have a long lasting effect. So what else can be done? According to a study by Froh et al. (2007) the answer is to start showing a little more gratitude. The researchers assigned 211 youths to one of three conditions. The three groups were instructed to spend a little bit of time each week getting expressive by partaking in one of three writing exercises. One group were instructed to write about 5 things they were grateful for, another group wrote 5 of their everyday hassles and the final group wrote about any 5 things that had happened in the last week. To the good news; counting ones blessings had some rather positive effects up to 3 weeks later. Compared to the other groups the gratitude group experienced greater optimism about life, life satisfaction and less negative affect immediately afterwards and then again 3 weeks later.

Although doing this every week may seem a bit odd and hippy-ish my recommendation is to embrace this little bit of oddness. The cost of spending a little time each week writing is enjoyable in itself. Throw in enhanced satisfaction and optimism about life down the line and everybody is a winner.

Application

Think of the good times.