Implementing Intuitive Decisions

Deliberative decision strategies have historically been considered the surest path to sound decisions, but recent evidence suggests that intuitive strategies may be equally effective. By relying upon an affect heuristic, people use their feelings as a guide to decisions about choice options rather than weighing the individual pros and cons (Slovic et al. 2002). Such feeling-based choice has been shown to improve decision quality, leading people to more accurately choose among hypothetical cars and vacations (Mikels et al. 2011) and to more accurately predict real-world outcomes like stock prices and the weather (Pham, Lee, and Stephen 2012). However, an open question remains as to how feeling-based decisions are translated into action. Because intuition boosts choice satisfaction (Mikels et al. 2011), which in turn enhances effortful action (Locke and Latham 1990), we predicted that people would work harder toward decisions reached using gut feelings versus deliberation.