Product Description

Why is split second decision-making superior to deliberation? Gut Feelings delivers the science behind Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink

Reflection and reason are overrated, according to renowned psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. Much better qualified to help us make decisions is the cognitive, emotional, and social repertoire we call intuition—a suite of gut feelings that have evolved over the millennia specifically for making decisions. “Gladwell drew heavily on Gigerenzer’s research. But Gigerenzer goes a step further by explaining just why our gut instincts are so often right. Intuition, it seems, is not some sort of mystical chemical reaction but a neurologically based behavior that evolved to ensure that we humans respond quickly when faced with a dilemma” (BusinessWeek).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #272191 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-05
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Gigerenzer's theories about the usefulness of mental shortcuts were a small but crucial element of Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink, and that attention has provided the psychologist, who is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the opportunity to recast his academic research for a general audience. The key concept—rules of thumb serve us as effectively as complex analytic processes, if not more so—is simple to grasp. Gigerenzer draws on his own research as well as that of other psychologists to show how even experts rely on intuition to shape their judgment, going so far as to ignore available data in order to make snap decisions. Sometimes, the solution to a complex problem can be boiled down to one easily recognized factor, he says, and the author uses case studies to show that the Take the Best approach often works. Gladwell has in turn influenced Gigerenzer's approach, including the use of catchy phrases like the zero-choice dinner and the fast and frugal tree, and though this isn't quite as snappy as Blink, well, what is? Closing chapters on moral intuition and social instincts stretch the central argument a bit thin, but like the rest will be easily absorbed by readers. Illus. (July 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From AudioFile
GUT FEELINGS is a fascinating analysis of how human beings make choices and judgments based on instincts. Author Gerd Gigerenzer explains where these gut feelings come from and talks about the role they play in our decisions about everything from business investments to choosing a mate. The text is peppered with plenty of anecdotes that keep it interesting and relevant. Dick Hill reads these examples with perfect inflection, and he reads the more scientific passages clearly and evenly, making complicated concepts easy to follow. This is a great narration because Hill remains unobtrusive, drawing the listenerÕs attention to the subject matter rather than his performance. With no apparent effort, he makes this book an entertaining and informative listen. K.F. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
Trust your hunches, for intuition does have an underlying rationale, according to this accessible account from a German scientist of human cognition. Permeated with everyday scenarios, such as picking stocks, schools, or spouses, the book adopts an evolutionary perspective of how people act on the basis of incomplete information (usually successfully). He sets the table with an example of a baseball player pursuing a fly ball, who relies not on conscious calculation but on an evolved "gaze heuristic" to make the catch. Definitions of such rules of thumb dot the text, which Gigerenzer embeds amid his presentations of studies that indicate, for example, that financial analysts don't predict markets any better than partially informed amateurs. Explaining this as an outcome of a "recognition heuristic," Gigerenzer argues that knowing a little rather than everything about something is sufficient to take action on it. He forges on into medicine, law, and moral behavior, succeeding in the process in converting a specialized topic into a conduit for greater self-awareness among his readers. Taylor, Gilbert

Customer Reviews

some interesting points, but...
... kind of loses steam half way through the book.
has some interesting thoughts/points that are intriguing, but could have been conveyed in half as much pages.

Entertaining stories, no insight
The subtitle of this book is "The Intelligence of the Unconscious", and the material on the flyleaf begins, "How does intuition work?" The book never answers this question. In the first chapter, the author says that intuition works by using rules of thumb. He doesn't give evidence for this assertion, nor does he really explain how we develop these rules of thumb. I am left with the question "Where do the rules of thumb come from?" The rest of the book is devoted to specific rules of thumb that he recommends (although if he needs to recommend them it is not clear to me how they are related to intuition) and to topics peripherally related to intuition. Most of them have been done better by others.
Gerd Gigerentzer appears to be a highly respected researcher who has done important work in the field of intuition, and I hoped for a lay exposition of his "breakthrough research". Perhaps he just tried to dumb it down too much, but there is no meat here to cover the bones.
If you have never read anything about the psychology of decision-making and have never heard stock examples like the story of Linda the Bank Teller, you may enjoy this book. You may even learn a little, but not enough to merit your time or money.

Just Okay
This is pretty interesting Stuff. It is more like a series of magazine articles than a unified book, but it is an interesting idea, and in a way, an empowering book. One that says Trust yourself, and backs it up with good reasons.

It does seem to me that it would be easy to misread this book and say that everyone can just play their hunches all the time. And I can't shake the sense that the persons who are best at this are already skilled. He notes a study for example that found highly skilled athletes were actually better if they just went out there and did their sport without analyzing it and replaying the videotape and thinking about every at bat for example. So does that mean just your instincts, or practice more?

I will sya the book conveys complicated statistical information in a lively fashion without losing the reader in crushing numbers. However, once the initial, provocative thesis is established, the book becomes repetitive. It is only 230 pages, and by the second half I had a real feeling of been there, done that.