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How does one navigate a world of seemingly infinite alternatives? For thousands of years, the answer has seemed obvious: when faced with a difficult dilemma, we should carefully assess our options and spend a few moments consciously deliberating the information. Then, we should choose the toothpaste that best fits our preferences. This is how we maximize utility and get the most bang for the buck. We are rational agents – we should make decisions in a rational manner.

But what if rationality backfires? What if we make better decisions when we trust our gut instincts? While there is an extensive literature on the potential wisdom of human emotion, it’s only in the last few years that researchers have demonstrated that the emotional system (aka Type 1 thinking) might excel at complex decisions, or those involving lots of variables. If true, this would suggest that the unconscious is better suited for difficult cognitive tasks than the conscious brain, that the very thought process we’ve long disregarded as irrational and impulsive might actually be “smarter” than reasoned deliberation. This is largely because the unconscious is able to handle a surfeit of information, digesting the facts without getting overwhelmed. (Human reason, in contrast, has a very strict bottleneck and can only process about four bits of data at any given moment.)

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The most widely cited demonstration of this theory is a 2006 Science paper led by Ap Dijksterhuis. (I wrote about the research in How We Decide.)

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Dijksterhuis found that people given time to think in a rational manner – they could carefully contemplate each alternative – now chose the ideal car less than 25 percent of the time. In other words, they performed worse than random chance. However, subjects who were distracted for a few minutes found the best car nearly 60 percent of the time.

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While the Dijksterhuis work generated plenty of buzz, it failed several tests of replication. This led many researchers to suggest that the supposed benefit of unconscious thought were an experimental accident, or perhaps a side-effect of incubation. [...] However, a new paper, published this month in Emotion by scientists then at Cornell University, provided the best test yet of the possible advantages of using our emotions to make complex decisions.

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Once again, the “detail-focused” group excelled at making simple decisions. Thinking in a rational manner made them nearly 20 percent more effective at identifying the best car alternative when there were only sixteen total pieces of information. However, those focused on feelings proved far better at finding the best car in the complex condition. While deliberate thinkers barely beat random chance, those listening to their feelings identified the ideal option nearly 70 percent of the time. Similar results were found when the volunteers were quizzed about subjective choice quality, as those relying on their emotions tended to be much more satisfied with their car selection. [...] the advantages of emotional decision-making could be undone by a subsequent bout of deliberation, which suggests that we shouldn’t doubt a particularly strong instinct, at least when the considering lots of information. They also demonstrated that this phenomenon isn’t unique to cars: our feelings are also better at picking the best apartments and vacation spots.

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Thanks to this new research, however, it’s becoming increasingly clear that our emotions have a logic all their own, that our instincts are often rooted in the processing powers of the unconscious brain. The massive computational capacity of the Type I system – its ability to process thousands of bits of data in parallel – ensures that we can analyze all the relevant information when assessing alternatives. As a result, we’re able to make sense of the plethora of options in the toothpaste aisle, assigning each alternative an affective tag: the best option is quickly associated with the most positive emotion. We know more than we know – that’s what our feelings are trying to tell us.

Link: wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/how-should-we-make-hard-decisions/