A person makes up to 100,000 decisions every day. For comparison: a whole day has “only” 86,400 seconds. Of course, not every decision has the same significance. It is one thing to consider what to eat for lunch, and quite another to think about a new career path.
When making difficult decisions, such as those related to a career, everyone probably has their own method. Some write notes, others make lists of pros and cons, ask friends, family, or even a mentor for advice, and some simply rely on their feelings. This is where the conflict arises: whether to listen to intuition or reason? In other words – intuition or rational thinking.
Psychologists studied decisions made by reason and intuition
So which is “better” after all? This question was asked some time ago by Professor Joseph Mikels from DePaul University in Chicago. Together with his team, he decided to find out.
Psychologists needed four experiments for this. Participants had to choose a car from several options on a computer. Sometimes many car features were indicated, such as fuel consumption – this was a complex decision. In other cases, there were few features – this was a simple decision.
In the experiments, the features were positive or negative. Therefore, there was an objectively best choice – in this case, it was the car with 75% positive features. A similar methodology was applied in other examples. Participants also chose between apartments, vacation spots, doctors, and treatment methods.
Intuition and rationality work in completely different ways
These are two completely different paths to making a decision.
- Intuition delivers the result quickly, automatically, and is based on feelings. Therefore, before an important decision, we often feel the first direction in an instant. However, the longer we think about it, the more this first intuition may weaken.
- The rational system works much slower than intuition. However, it is controlled, thorough, and analytical. Feelings play a smaller role here.
Intuition wins
Ultimately, the result is clearly more favorable to intuition – at least when it comes to complex decisions.
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- Intuition is better than reasoned decision-making. In complex situations, 65% of participants chose the objectively best option when following their feelings. In the group that made decisions rationally, this was achieved by only 26%.
- Intuitive decisions subjectively seem better. Participants who made decisions based on their feelings were more satisfied than those who relied on reason.
- Intuitive decisions should not be overthought. The longer you think, the more the first intuition often starts to waver – often without reason. Participants who doubted their first feeling chose the objectively best option only 26% of the time. Among those who immediately trusted their feelings, it was 58%.
- Intuitive decisions are good in many areas. When choosing a vacation spot or apartment, intuitive decisions proved better than rational ones. It was a tie between reason and intuition when deciding which doctor or therapy was best.
How to make the best decision
Scientists admit that many questions remain unanswered. However, based on the data, they recommend listening to intuition and then not overanalyzing the decision.
Wirtschaftspsychologie-aktuell.de sums up the decision-making steps suggested by the researchers:
1. Is the decision complex? If yes, rely on your feeling.
2. Write down possible alternatives, preferably with their most important features. Then review them again and let the information “settle”.
3. Then ask yourself: which alternative gives me the best feeling?
4. Choose the option associated with a good feeling.
5. Do not start checking the decision with a list of pros and cons.
Finally, it is important to remember that some consequences are simply impossible to predict. Therefore, you should not judge yourself too harshly if a decision made at some point later seems to have been wrong. After all, at that time there were reasons why you chose that path. There is probably no universally bad decision – everything has its advantages and disadvantages.
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