what is actually happening psychologically/physiologically when you have a “gut feeling” about something?
In: Biology
As a psychologist, the answer is we don’t really know – almost everyone in this thread is just making stuff up.
We don’t have direct access to our metacognitive thinking; we often convince ourselves we know why we came to a particular conclusion or took a specific action, but we are simply making a guess. We can subtly cue someone the answer to a problem, and they will convince themselves they thought of it all on their own. We can prime people to respond in a certain way, and they are completely oblivious to that manipulation – even denying it outright when confronted by it later. Similarly, these ‘guesses’ are often influenced by social norms, or we draw false causal links between things because it makes sense to us.
This doesn’t mean we can’t ever know why we do something, or why we believe something, it just means that we can’t directly access those cognitive processes, so we try and infer it from other cues. Everyone here randomly pulling out anecdotes about their subconscious, or trying to draw links between some event and a subsequent feeling, are just guessing. Sometimes they might be correct (“I’m sad because they broke up with me” will probably be a correct intuition), but it’s still just trying to draw links between what we perceive or feel, because we simply don’t have access to those cognitions.
When we have a ‘gut feeling’, we are potentially making a false link between a stimulus we can sense (apprehension, stomach tightness, some other emotion or feeling), and a cognition/belief that we came to some other way – but just can’t consciously access.
[Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological review, 84(3), 231.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229060046_Telling_More_Than_We_Can_Know_Verbal_Reports_on_Mental_Processes)
Latest Answers