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)
Wow. No one seems to have actually explained heuristics and specifically affect heuristic.
ELI5: so much is going on around us that our brain finds shortcuts to decide if something is important or not. So heuristics are these mental shortcuts so we can react fast without spending additional time and energy deciding things.
Early humans, see dark area and get a bad feeling in their gut. They can then walk the other way immediately possibly saving their life. This is much better than stopping and analyzing all sorts of things: the possibility of a saber tooth tiger being there, are we down wind, are there tracks, etc. So heuristics helped early humans survive and are passed on to us.
I highly recommend a book called *The Gift of Fear*. It deals with gut feelings, red flags, intuition, etc. All of that. He describes gut feelings (and I’m paraphrasing here) as your mind creating a reaction in your body based on previously learned information before you know why.
I know that this comment probably won’t even get read but I’m currently reading Social Intelligence, a book on psychology and neuroscience by Daniel Goleman and I’ve just read about a similar subject.
A series of tests were carried out whereby someone would tell a stranger an emotional personal experience and would have their body language mirror those emotions (e.g. looking sad). They then ran the same scenarios but had the storyteller display the opposite body language such as smiling or laughing.
The results were that people would not trust the second person as much as the first and put it down to a “gut feeling”. This was actually caused by part of the brain called the amygdala that flares up when something like this doesn’t add up and just feels odd.
Granted this example is only to do with human interaction rather than other “gut feelings”.
I’ve only just read about this so anyone with more knowledge on the subject please correct me if I’m wrong 🙂
There’s actually a nerve called the vagus nerve which is a direct connection between your digestive tract and your parasympathetic nervous system (which is related to regulating your heart/lungs in times of stress).
So the feeling in your gut is an evolutionary mechanism that shouldn’t be ignored in decision making. Check out Polyvagal Theory.
Explained to a five year old:
There are three mice. There’s a city mouse (city, like where your grandpa lives), a suburb mouse (suburb, like where your friend, Mike, lives), a the rural mouse (rural, like where your aunt lives).
The city and suburb mice are visiting their friend the rural mouse one year and they’re have a lot of fun on the rural mouse’s farm. One day, they decide to walk around the fields and when they get to the far side of the farm they see a forest.
The suburb mouse sees all the trees and exclaims, “lets go check out the the forest,” and is about to run ahead. Hearing this, the city mouse feels like they can’t speak and shivers in fear. And before the rural mouse can even think, they reach out and hold back the suburb mouse from running off.
Now each one had a gut instinct about the forest but they were all different instincts. Fun for the suburb mouse, fear for the city mouse, and caution for the rural mouse.
See, the city mouse grew up never having been in a forest but all the forests in all the scary movies they watched made forests a bad place to go, so somewhere in the back of the city mouse’s brain seeing all those trees and hearing the word “forest” and being so out of their normal element made their “gut” say “fear.”
The suburb mouse, well, they grew up near parks and yards and well kept lawns and many had trees and bushes and so most of their experience was playing hide and seek and just generally running around and having fun. So when they saw the forest their subconscious, their “gut,” immediately said “fun.”
Now the rural mouse had live here all their life. They weren’t afraid of the forest like the city mouse was, but their gut told them to hold back the suburb mouse and so without really realizing it that’s what the rural mouse did. The suburb mouse asks, “why not?” And the rural mouse thinks for a moment and says, “we’re not supposed to go into the forest without boots and long pants this time of year because of all the ticks.”
Now the rural mouse wasn’t thinking that when they grabbed the suburb mouse; but because for years the rural mouse’s parents always made sure everyone was wearing such protective clothing before going into the forest, no one was ever allowed to go their without the boots and long pants, that it was their gut instinct to stop anyone from going in if they didn’t follow the same rule. But it also might have been because when the rural mouse was a child his parents had to grab him from running into the forest until he learned the rules.
So your gut instinct is like your (subconscious) brain pulling ideas from all of the experiences you’ve had so far and applying them to a new situation. But you don’t know which experiences its going to pull from and apply or even if they’re the best experiences to match the situation. If you drop your toy into the bathtub your reaction might be to quickly reach in and grab it which would be good and possibly save your toy and you just get a wet hand. But you could have the same reaction if you dropped it in the toilet. Or in a blender.
If you notice your “gut” telling you something then you should listen but you should also ask yourself why your having those thoughts, where they’re coming from, and why is your brain linking those thoughts with what’s happening to you right now.
Because if the city mouse were to do that then they would be able to realize that their fear was based on movies and scary stories and that they might actually have fun in the forest. And if the suburb mouse did that (and didn’t have the rural mouse to hold them back) then they could realize that they haven’t been in that forest and there might be bears or snakes or ticks or old mine shafts or anything else to watch out for. And the rural mouse could realize that their response was a good one but that maybe their friends were to old to just grab like that and that just saying “wait,” would be enough of a reaction for the next time visiting friends want to run off into the forest.
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