New Land of Rationality —— 《Gut Feelings》

《Gut Feelings》provides a new angle towards 2 concepts proved by Nobel laureat Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman:

1. Human beings are fundamentally illogical;
2. Framing effect;

If you have ever read some popular psychological books, I'm quite sure you must have heard the famous Linda problem. From Amos and Daniel's perspective, it proves we human beings are easily committed logical fallacy, and in this case it is conjunction fallacy. However, Gerd Gigerenzer interprets it as intuitive understanding of language violating the conjunction rule. That is, People make intelligent unconscious inferences about what meanings of "probable" to make the description of Linda relevant, which indicate that natural language is more sophisticated than logic.

Further, Gerd gives some examples to show different meanings of "And" in different context:

• chronological relationship: Peggy and Paul married and Peggy became pregnant.
  
• casual relationship: Peggy became pregnant and Peggy and Paul married.
  
• logical "AND": Verona is in Italy and Valencia is in Spain.
  
• logical "OR": We invited friends and colleagues.
  

When I first encountered "Framing effect", I was amazed by human's irrationality, of course I was also convinced. It never occurs to me it can be challenged like that: "Framing can communicate information that is overlooked by mere logic. The framing of a request helps people extract surplus info concerning the dynamics or history of the situation and helps them to guess what it means. That doesn't necessarily mean that attending to framing is irrational."

Naturally, Gerd infers:"Logical norms are blind to content and culture, ignoring evolved capacities and environmental structure. Often what looks like a reasoning error from a purely logical perspective turns out to be a highly intelligence social judgment in the real world. Good intuitions go beyond the info given, and beyond logic." Agree or not, it's up to you, but you have to admit, such inferences are eye-opener.

Overall, this book is talking about unconscious intelligence, in other words, gut feeling, hunch, intuition, you name it. Gerd believes we human beings know more than we can tell, the real question we should ask is not if but when we can trust our guts. In order to explain how intuition works, he uses a analogy-the adaptive toolbox- to describe the mind:

• evolved capacities
• building blocks that make use of capacities
• rules of thumbs: composed of building blocks

He also provides a scheme:

• Gut feelings are what we experience. They appear quickly in consciousness, we do not fully understand why we have them, but we are prepared to act on them.
  
• Rules of thumb are responsible for producing gut feelings.
• Evolved capacities are the construction material for rules of thumb, including language, recognition memory, object tracking, imitation and emotions etc.
• Environmental structures are the key to how well or poorly a rule of thumb works. A gut feeling is not good or bad, rational or irrational per se. Its value is dependent on the context in which the rule of thumb is used.
  

Another interesting point he makes is the beneficial degree of ignorance or forgetting: The more information you have, the more time you need to reflect and decide, the less correct decision you might make. To some extent, it explains the odd situation that "more (time, thought, attention) is better" normally apply to inexperienced people, but not to experts with mastered skills. Just as Malcolm Gladwell pointed in his book: for experts, they can make a snap decision in a blink. Rules of thumb will help.

Well, welcome to new land of rationality!