The benefits of going with your gut

Every day, we make a multitude of decisions. Most are relatively unimportant, and have no clear right or wrong options — such as: Should I walk the dog before or after going to the gym? Should I shop for ingredients to make a pasta dish for dinner, or a curry?

For every one of these decisions, there are two possible approaches: carefully analysing the relative merits of the options, or making an intuitive 'gut' choice. And in new work in Emotion, Carina Remmers at HMU Health and Medical University Potsdam and colleagues report that going with the gut results in a bigger boost to our mood.

The team studied 256 participants, who were first given information about intuitive and analytical styles of decision-making. Then, over the course of 14 days, they used an app to report when they were about to make an everyday decision, be that something pertaining to leisure, diet, making a purchase, or friends. At this point, they were randomly told either to make the decision analytically, or to make it intuitively. The participants also rated their mood immediately before and after making their decision, and shared how easy, pleasing, and 'right' that decision felt.

Overall, the participants reported a total of 6,770 everyday-type decisions, 3,374 of which they had been told to make intuitively, and 3,405 analytically. The team's analysis revealed that simply making a decision — of either type — improved their mood. However, intuitive decisions led to bigger mood boosts. "This is the first empirical demonstration showing that using one's gut has beneficial effects in everyday life," the team writes.

There are a few reasons why this might be. Making any kind of decision resolves inner conflicts and reduces uncertainty, they note. But earlier work has also found that easy and fast mental processing feels good. Their analysis showed that though intuitive decisions didn't feel any more 'right' than analytical ones, they did feel easier, and this relative ease seemed to underpin the bigger mood boost. The team also found that the participants felt more satisfied with intuitive decisions, and liked them more.

Data gathered during the study period also revealed that mood improvements from decision-making persisted until the decision was implemented, and that intuitive decisions were more likely than analytical decisions to be implemented as planned. The team suggests that this might be because they were liked more — in other words, they were more in line with the participants' own preferences.

One notable limitation to the study is that despite the team's efforts to recruit a broad sample of participants, almost all ended up being female, and they were mostly young and of a similar socioeconomic status. They were also all healthy, and the team would now like to see a similar study conducted on people who struggle with decision-making, a feature of depression.  

"For individuals who tend to get stuck in rumination and abstract-analytical processing, it would be important to explore whether the mood-enhancing effect of making a decision is suppressed," the team writes. Research has also found that people with depression tend to trust their gut less, they note — and they suggest that if someone with depression is struggling to make decisions, and they're avoiding gut decisions in particular, this may lead to further declines in mood.

It's also worth noting that gut decisions aren't always the most objectively desirable decisions. Research has shown that this style of decision-making is more prone to inaccuracies and biases, potentially impairing our ability to make fair, reasonable decisions. In this study, the team wasn't concerned with the quality of the participants' decision-making. But for many of our everyday decisions — whether to go for pasta or curry for dinner, for example — biases might not really matter. Although there may be some downsides to gut vs analytical decisions, a bigger mood boost could be an important upside, the team argues. "We suggest that prompting people to use their gut in daily life may increase their wellbeing." 

Read the paper in full: 
Remmers, C., Topolinski, S., Knaevelsrud, C., Zander-Schellenberg, T., Unger, S., Anoschin, A., & Zimmermann, J. (2024). Go with your gut! The beneficial mood effects of intuitive decisions. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001385

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