Go with your gut

When faced with a complex decision, as intelligent Princeton students, most of our immediate impulses would be to retreat to a quiet room and think consciously about the solution for as long as possible. I remember creating endless spreadsheets and Googling frantically for hours when choosing a major, convinced that relentless cogitation would lead me to the answer.

This kind of decision-making behavior is based on an assumption ingrained in us from birth — one that has dominated Western economic and political thought for hundreds of years — that our ability to reason deliberately is the highest form of activity of the human mind. But this assumption, to put it bluntly, is hugely flawed.

Ongoing research in psychology and neuroscience, as cited in “The Social Animal” by David Brooks for example, suggests a story far different from the one told about man as Homo economicus. The unconscious mind may be more powerful than the conscious one — not just as a deep cavern of primal, unpredictable emotions, but as a finely tuned processor and synthesizer of information. It may be a bridge builder and calculator with a much higher capacity than our active reasoning processes, which are very limited. (Working memory can only hold, on average, a maximum of seven items at a time.)

So the old adage “go with your gut” might soon need to be taken seriously not just around the dinner table, but also in economics courses. I’m convinced I could have saved myself a whole lot of anxiety about my major choice if I had gone with my gut earlier on in the process and trusted my unconscious to lead me to the right choice. By overloading my conscious capacity with too much information, I was coming no closer to resolving the problem.

Unconscious thought theory is an exciting line of investigation into the thinking processes of the human mind, and while still contentious, reveals some key flaws in our understanding of how humans make decisions. In 2006, Dutch researchers showed that conscious thought can actually lead to worse choices on complex issues. For example, when choosing which car to buy when each participant had 10 different characteristics, one group was told to think actively about their decision, while the other was presented with the same information, then distracted with some other task, unable to think consciously about the cars. At the end of the time period, those who were distracted and allowed their unconscious mind to do the work not only made more correct decisions about the best car, but also felt happier about it.

Obviously, a small number of studies are by no means concrete proof that we should all be spending more time distracted. Other experiments have found conflicting results, so this is not at all a resolved question — I’m not condoning procrastination on Facebook in the middle of a problem set. I have yet to research the matter, but common sense suggests to me that the types of activities we do while our unconscious mind is churning would affect its abilities, and that perhaps the best thing to do when faced with a hard decision is nothing at all, or even sleeping, which is theorized by many scientists to be a time when our brains make all kinds of crucial connections.

It also seems likely that all the training we do of our active reasoning processes in schools and at college contributes to the networks and abilities of our subconscious. I doubt any scientist is suggesting that we can just sit around lazily and let our unconscious do all the work. However, there is an incredibly complex and potentially powerful interplay at work between the conscious and subconscious, between reasoning and emotions that if understood more clearly, could revolutionize the way we view our own thinking and working habits. Perhaps, when making complicated life decisions, like which summer internship to take, we should all set limits on the amount of information-gathering and active grappling we do (a challenging task, given our generation’s impulse to scour Wikipedia and Google endlessly) and just sit back and allow ourselves to listen to what our gut — our unconscious mind — is telling us.

It’s clear that some big questions remain unanswered, but we should all pay close attention to the research as it unfolds. How exactly does the unconscious work? What kinds of activities can we do to optimize the functioning of our unconscious mind? What kinds of thinking are appropriate for different kinds of decision-making? Should we be redefining the word “think”? The verdict is far from in, but it’s certainly something worth pondering (or not).