Can You Trust Your Gut Feeling?
Turns out there's more to good decision-making than listening to your gut.
Table of Contents
[This is Part 2 of a four-part series on Everyday Deception]
Ever had a “really good feeling” about something only to realize how off you were? Like hiring Greg in accounting. Or seeing that person you’d sworn to ignore. Why do bad decisions often feel so right? Is it the excellent cup of coffee you’re sipping while interviewing someone? An unexpected compliment that makes you think “the world ain’t so bad”?
And what about the times you get it right?
When you ignore a hunch only to discover why you had all along along, it feels like divine revelation tucked away in the crevices of your intestines. Strange place for a superpower—but hey, as long as it works. The question is, does it really?
The Brain, The Gut, and The Heart
Ah… the good ol’ gut where food and fact metabolize. Everyone knows the way to my some folks’ heart is through their stomach. But what exactly are “gut feelings” or intuition or a sixth sense? Well, depends on who you ask.
To the spiritually inclined, it might be knowledge of a higher self. To evolutionary biologists, it might be unconscious information processing, a vital element of human cognition. To others, gut feeling might just be “a scientifically ill-defined and misleading expression.” And yet, science is filled with hunches and hypotheses that need testing out. You might even say great scientists tend to have good intuitions.
• Intuition
There’s a reason why the gut is often referred to as “a second brain” and a quick Google search will lead you to a list of smart people big on it, including Albert Einstein. In an interview with The Saturday Evening Post in 1929, Einstein explained what he meant by following his gut in science:
Who the hell am I to debate Einstein? But you’ve got to admit… when your intuition’s right, it’s right. But when it’s wrong, goddamn, is it wrong. So why do some people have better intuition than others? According to “The godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton—whose unpopular hunch about neural networks ultimately transformed the AI landscape—people with “good intuition” are more selective in the information they accept, which comes with its own risks:
“So here’s a way to get bad intuitions: believe everything you’re told. That’s fatal. I think here’s what some people do. They have a whole framework for understanding reality, and when someone tells ’em something, they try and sort of figure out how that fits into their framework and if it doesn’t, they just reject it. And that’s a very good strategy. People who try and incorporate whatever they’re told end up with a framework that’s sort of very fuzzy and sort of can believe everything, and that’s useless. So I think actually having a strong view of the world and trying to manipulate incoming facts to fit in with your view… obviously it can lead you into deep religious belief and fatal flaws and so on, like my belief in Boltzmann machines… But I think that’s the way to go. If you’ve got good intuitions you can trust, you should trust them. If you’ve got bad intuitions, it doesn’t matter what you do, so you might as well trust them.”
After winning the Nobel Prize, Hinton had this to say to young researchers:
“If you have an idea that seems right but everyone else thinks it’s wrong, don’t give up on it until you’ve figured out why it’s wrong.”
And what about the naysayers? “Ignore them,” he says. “I’m very good at ignoring what other people say.”
• Social influences
Source: Nick Seluk, The Awkward Yeti
Of course, this is a gamble we often take in the world of creativity and entrepreneurship. Like those college-dropouts who invent shiny things… or that wackadoo who quit their full-time job to write these articles for you. (Be one my OG subscribers? 😬)
So where does that leave us with intuitions about people—specifically who to trust? If the gut is the second brain, what does that say about the heart? Wasn’t the original tug-of-war between love and reason, not brain and belly?
That’s what a team of researchers at Royal Holloway investigated in 2023.
According to the study, heart signals to the brain shape our gut feelings and decision-making in social settings. But not in this mystical all-knowing way some people like to believe. The research revealed that our first impressions become more or less susceptible to other people’s opinions depending on where in the cardiac cycle we form the first impression. Just when you think you can trust the little red fucker…
Can you trust your mind?
Some psychologists suggest that deception is largely “a matter of self-reporting” as our mind sifts through large data sets of information to select what to focus on. In the context of research, a strong sifting strategy might align with Hinton’s idea of good intuitions. But when it comes to personal relationships and social life, this could get messy as hell.
For instance, if your trust was betrayed as a child, and then again as an adult, you may put up a wall and refrain from trusting anyone ever again. The complete absence of an audience outside of yourself may protect you from outside deception but make you even more susceptible to self-deception and create space for self-fulfilling prophecies…
This is why people who experience severe anxiety concerning their personal wellbeing and a lack of control over life circumstances are more likely to fall for conspiracy theories.
I know this because it happened to me and it totally changed the way I viewed the world. When I first watched Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Shutter Island 15 years ago, I was convinced that the protagonist was right about everything—the conspiracies about mind control, Rachel Solando, the “trapped” patients. All of it. I relied completely and utterly on an unreliable narrator.
When I watch it now, after facing uncomfortable truths in my own personal life, it’s hard to feel anything other than profound empathy and sadness for a man who’s lost everything in an inherently violent world, including quite possibly his grasp on reality. The film’s ambiguous ending makes it even more disturbing. Is he walking toward the edge of madness or choosing what is essentially suicide? Either way, it’s clear that society ultimately failed to fix a problem it helped create.
But hey, who knows, maybe I’ll feel differently 15 years from now. It’s scary how quickly pain and fear can descend into madness.
Creating awe and intrigue
One of the reasons it’s so difficult to tell if someone’s being honest or “putting on an act” is the way they use distance in creating and sustaining first impressions.
For public figures, distance is typically used to construct a desired image with the help of publicists, communications strategists, and a reputation management team. That’s why they’re generally adept at switching between the frontstage and backstage, using PR-friendly methods around a public audience. But the bigger you get, the greater the scrutiny… so what happens when there’s an inevitable slip? How is trust gained and maintained in the all-seeing eye of the media?
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• Gods on TV
When you’re in the public eye, the dangers of revealing too much—or behaving inconsistently between public and private—are easily minimized by avoiding excessive press coverage. Sociologist Erving Goffman used the term “mystification” to describe this coordinated social distance between the subject and object.
Here’s how it works. If you maintain a low profile or cultivate a private reputation as a public figure, you (consciously or unconsciously) construct an idealized public identity that is far more believable to an image-obsessed audience that will “itself often co-operate by acting in a respectful fashion, in awed regard for the sacred integrity imputed to the performer.” Think of artists who avoid the spotlight to guard their privacy—or introverts who avoid mingling with large groups—only to create more mystery, desirability and a kind of elusive magnetism born of their limited access.
When idols go backstage, to a place you can’t follow, you don’t question their sincerity—you simply pray they’ll emerge again.
This is similar to the mystification practiced in everyday life whereby “restrictions placed upon contact provide a way in which awe can be generated and sustained in the audience.” It’s where we get the idea of “mysterious and sexy”—i.e., the erotic appeal of the unknown mixed with our projection of a fantasy. In real life, as in cinema, the audience is pivotal in the co-creation of fiction. You aren’t a passive observer in the theater of life. Your willingness to believe makes you an indispensable part of the magic. That goes for politicians, movie stars… even CEOs.
Stars aren’t born. They are made and worshipped at the altar of consensus. Which is why million-dollar efforts are constantly being made to keep audiences distracted, docile, and unable to think for themselves. It’s the art of distraction.
• Gods in the workplace
In workplace settings, the same “restrictions placed upon contact” are used to maintain a pecking order and exert dominance. Think of a middle-manager’s inability to communicate directly with higher-ups, participate in executive meetings, or attend VIP luncheons.
Large pyramid-shaped panopticon organizations are structured as such to create an air of mystique around an ever-watching Board and CEO accessible only to handful of chief executives. This is distance by design. The aloofness and mystique of those at “the top” (and the consequential desire to meet their gaze) keeps the rest of the staff locked in subordinate positions fit for compliance.
When you’re graced with the presence of “a star” you’re conditioned to make the most of the opportunity. Make a good impression on the CEO. Prepare good questions. Do an elevator pitch.
But take a peek behind the curtain and you’ll find that The Great and Powerful Oz is just as insecure as the rest of us. We’re all wannabe magicians exalted by someone’s sincere belief in our trick. Like religion, celebrity demands faith.
All that to say, mystification is not only associated with a physical boundary that separates us (like a film screen, phone screen, or even a cubicle), but also with the fundamentals of social interaction in day-to-day life. Goffman reminds us: “As countless folk tales and initiation rites show, often the real secret behind the mystery is that there really is no mystery; the real problem is to prevent the audience from learning this too.”
Of course, the mystification process isn’t fool-proof. One of many downsides is the audience’s disregard for a “real” person behind their curated image, which may range from intimidating to “god-like.” It’s a particularly common experience for professional actors whose breakout roles begin to dictate public perceptions about their off-screen identity.
That’s exactly what happened to Lena Heady following her frighteningly convincing portrayal of Cersei Lannister on HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones. After a series of awkward fan interactions, Headey took advantage of her appearance on Late Night with Conan O’ Brien to bashfully, but successfully, draw a line between herself and the character she portrayed by sharing a slightly introverted side on camera. In such instances, actors may use role distance as an effective survival mechanism whereby acknowledgement of the act becomes “a means of insulating their inner selves from contact with the audience.”
To an extent, we all obscure who we are though we may do it to meet completely different ends than scammers, con-artists, and shady billionaires. Understanding this is key because not only do we routinely deceive each other, we also routinely deceive ourselves. More on this in the next post.
Watching and being watched
“Well, he acts like he has genuine emotions. Of course, he’s programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him. But as to whether he has real feelings is something I don’t think anyone can truthfully answer.” (2001: A Space Odyssey)
At the end of the day, anyone or anything intent on fooling you will likely succeed if they understand you better than you understand them. Scammers, con-artists, and bad actors obviously know this—but so do marketers, ad agencies, public speakers, and politicians—and in the age of AI, you can add computers and chatbots to the list.
We take for granted how much of our behavior is already available as study material for tech companies, from what titillates us (screen time), to what we wonder (search engines), to what we spend on (digital wallets), to which of our physical features we detest the most (filters). For computer scientist and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, AI has already learned how to deceive humans from observing how we manipulate each other. We see this play out in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey based on the book by Arthur C. Clarke. Nothing gets past supercomputer HAL 9000 who sees and hears everything, leaving the protagonist in the dark about its sentience.
The question is whether an AI capable of this kind of deception could simultaneously work in the interests of human beings. For Hinton, it’s simply a matter of perspective.
Whether your trust is built up over a period of years or a matter of minutes, sophisticated deception makes it nearly impossible to see the full picture if you don’t know the deceiver as well as they know you. Moreover, extreme proximity may relinquish your ability to see what’s happening in plain sight. That’s why well-coordinated scams that target groups rather than an individual can feel so personal, even when it’s less about you and more about the deceiver’s end-goal: absolute control.
Stay tuned for PART 3 of my four-part series on Everyday Deception. Next up I dive into “The Art of Deceptive Communication” exploring lies, negotiation, and pretense in and outside the office. If you’re following the news and grew up watching WWE, you don’t wanna miss out on this one…
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🎬 Cool stuff referenced in this piece: The Wizard of Oz by Victor Fleming, Einstein in The Saturday Evening Post, Shutter Island by Martin Scorsese, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life by Robert Trivers, The Traitors US, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, Severance created by Dan Erickson, Game of Thrones created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss based on the book by George R. R. Martin, 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, Interview with Geoffrey Hinton by The MIT Technology Review. Enjoy!
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