"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
It is widely acknowledged that making decisions often involves the consideration of both "rational" and "intuitive" inputs. This program of research will examine how people decide the amount of weight to assign rational considerations and intuitive impulses when making decisions. The work will focus particularly closely on those situations in which people experience a conflict between intuition and reason and must choose whether to follow their "head" or their "gut." Much of the work will examine whether people pursue a "matching" procedure in deciding whether to follow one or the other. That is, it is hypothesized that people compare the features of a given choice problem (Can the outcome be evaluated quantitatively? Will the outcome unfold in a series of discrete steps?) with the features they associate with reason (precise, sequential) and with intuition (fuzzy, wholistic), and then choose to decide intuitively or rationally according to which input provides the closest match. The proposed research will also examine how the bodily associations people have to intuition (gut) and reason (head) influence their evaluations of intuitive and rational arguments, and, ultimately, the decisions they make.
By understanding the processes that govern how people utilize rational and intuitive inputs in making decisions, this research promises to further our understanding of (1) what constitutes intuition and reason, (2) why and when intuitive arguments can trump rational considerations, (3) how decision environments can be structured to increase the impact of either rational or intuitive inputs, and (3) how people can be aided in making more rewarding choices.
