Customer comments on this selection.
 some interesting points, but...
... kind of loses steam half way through the book.
has some interesting thoughts/points that are intriguing, but could have been conveyed in half as much pages.
 Entertaining stories, no insight
The subtitle of this book is "The Intelligence of the Unconscious", and the material on the flyleaf begins, "How does intuition work?" The book never answers this question. In the first chapter, the author says that intuition works by using rules of thumb. He doesn't give evidence for this assertion, nor does he really explain how we develop these rules of thumb. I am left with the question "Where do the rules of thumb come from?" The rest of the book is devoted to specific rules of thumb that he recommends (although if he needs to recommend them it is not clear to me how they are related to intuition) and to topics peripherally related to intuition. Most of them have been done better by others.
Gerd Gigerentzer appears to be a highly respected researcher who has done important work in the field of intuition, and I hoped for a lay exposition of his "breakthrough research". Perhaps he just tried to dumb it down too much, but there is no meat here to cover the bones.
If you have never read anything about the psychology of decision-making and have never heard stock examples like the story of Linda the Bank Teller, you may enjoy this book. You may even learn a little, but not enough to merit your time or money.
Just Okay
This is pretty interesting Stuff. It is more like a series of magazine articles than a unified book, but it is an interesting idea, and in a way, an empowering book. One that says Trust yourself, and backs it up with good reasons.
It does seem to me that it would be easy to misread this book and say that everyone can just play their hunches all the time. And I can't shake the sense that the persons who are best at this are already skilled. He notes a study for example that found highly skilled athletes were actually better if they just went out there and did their sport without analyzing it and replaying the videotape and thinking about every at bat for example. So does that mean just your instincts, or practice more?
I will sya the book conveys complicated statistical information in a lively fashion without losing the reader in crushing numbers. However, once the initial, provocative thesis is established, the book becomes repetitive. It is only 230 pages, and by the second half I had a real feeling of been there, done that.
 Reality in Behavioral Study
Like his earlier and equally excellent book, Calculated Risk, Gut Feelings addresses some very common topics in an easy-to-read, solidly referenced manner that will make you feel good about life. His thesis is that humans have abilities that allow rapid and often accurate decisions to be made, often more accurate in making a choice than exhaustive analysis would be. What we all knew and could not dare to formulate in class was that most people could not explain how they made these decisions.
A first example is how an outfielder in baseball catches a fly ball, something I was never good at, even with above average spatial relations ability. Most cannot explain it, but Gigerenzer found out how. Next was the ability of many people who pick stocks by familiarity with the name of the company or brand. This can work as well as deep financial analysis.
Many aspects of behavior that successful people adopt without knowing why were explained, such as maintaining a useful relationship by employing the "rule of thumb" called tit for tat. If it fails on one try, then tit for two tats is to be tried. This is shown to be better than "turn the other cheek" because it prevents one (usually) from being a victim or allowing the other person to carry on being an aggressor.
There is a section on the difficulty of programming a computer or robot to do many of the things humans can do from very young ages, such as catch a fast-moving ball, drive a car, recognize a face after aging, more or less hair growth, etc. Legal documents, which so often seem to try to cover every eventuality, are shown to leave some ambiguity, the lawyer counting on some sense of reciprocity if there is a problem. Much later, one of my own old observations was developed: trust makes a society work. Hard to believe with so much criminality, lobbyists, dictators, etc. in play; but Gigerenzer shows that any organization with limited mutual trust among its members will have limited success or fail.
In dealing with majority rule in decision making, "...the seemingly irrational decision to follow the most ignorant member [of the group] increased the overall accuracy of the group." You must read how this can occur! Related is the difficulty of using complicated decision trees with many branches compared with a series of Yes or No choices based on clear measurable criteria. A main application of this is the decision an emergency room physician must make when a patient is brought in with chest pain: ordinary hospital bed or critical heart care unit. Not so simple with the threat of lawsuit if the former choice is made in error.
If an airliner with hundreds of people on board may be under control of terrorist hijackers and is headed toward a major city, should the air force protecting that city (or surface to air missiles) be used to shoot it down? One European government said no, and another one said yes. This is a fascinating topic to read about.
How transparency creates trust and secrecy the opposite, and, finally, how the Berlin Wall came down when it did make great reading.
Those of you who have read my other reviews know that I sometimes offer to provide long lists of errors, 50-60 being common in some books I have reviewed, and about 150 in one. Not so in Gut Feelings! Only one: "Three celestial bodies--such as earth, moon, and sun--move under no other influence than their mutual gravitation."(p90) Not so; the other planets all have an effect, especially Venus and Jupiter. When Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Earth are all on one side of the sun, the center of gravity of the solar system will be outside the body of the sun toward those planets, making them warmer than average.
Scientific backup for all positions is shown with fine referencing mostly to peer-reviewed papers in journals. Good index. This is one of those books that make me wish for more than 5 stars.
 Evolutionary Shortcomings in Human Behavior and Decision Making
Often, regardless of urgency, not only simple but very serious and critical decisions ranging from marriage, job orientation, investing, trusting a medical diagnosis or a total stranger are not 100% a product of an unbiased logical process.
An inner voice, a feeling based on the unexplored neurobiology of the human nature is responsible for the final word of approval.
This book consists of an excellent paradigm on how to be aware of and effectively disengage from speculations or emotional personality traits influencing decisions in the short or long term horizon.
It serves perhaps as a word of caution on how to adapt in order to avoid being manipulated from evolving idiosyncratic, social or cultural stereotypes.
It also provides a measure of inappropriateness for strategies of improbable viability that are based on naïve individual attempts to exert constant control over the level of external stimuli that trigger fight or fly responses.
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