Right now I am working on the cover design for my next book. The designer gave me five different concepts to choose from.
Immediately, my gut reacted. One cover stood out to me as clearly better than the rest.
Still, I wanted to sanity-check myself. So I asked a few dozen people to share their gut reaction to the covers.
No one agreed.
Next, I hired someone to do an objective, analytical review of the designs against a clear set of criteria. I am still waiting for those results.
That experience got me reflecting on something bigger. The power of gut reactions versus decisions shaped by reflection and analysis.
Years ago, my friend Susanne and I were playing a trivia game. She was quite good at it. But after getting a couple of answers wrong in a row, she groaned and said, “Every time I have a gut answer and change it, the gut answer turns out to be right.”
That comment stuck with me.
Malcolm Gladwell famously argued in Blink that we often make our best decisions in the blink of an eye. Was Susanne right? Or was her mind selectively remembering only the painful moments?
So we ran a small experiment.
We used trivia questions where the answer was a specific year. For example, the year President Ford survived two assassination attempts was 1975. Or the year Pete Rose set a National League consecutive game hitting streak record of 44, which was 1978.
I read Susanne ten events. For each one, she immediately gave a gut answer, which I wrote down. Then she took some time to reason it through and gave a final, more analytical answer.
Which do you think was better?
Out of ten questions, one gut answer was closer than the final answer, and only by a single year. Four answers were unchanged, meaning her gut and her final answer were the same. And five times, when she changed her initial response, her final answer was closer to the truth, often by several years. 50% of the time, her analytical answer was better than her gut answer.
This is not statistically valid, of course. But it does reveal something important.
We remember the times when we override a gut reaction and get it wrong. We rarely remember the times when analysis saves us from a bad gut reaction.
Humans get emotionally attached to their first impressions.
I have seen the same pattern show up in gambling. I like blackjack because it is a pure game of probability. There is no memory (unless you count cards) and no karma, just math.
Yet people bring all kinds of superstition and emotion to the table.
One night I was playing with my friend Gary. There were five of us at the table. Four experienced players and one beginner. The beginner made such odd decisions that we nicknamed him “Stinkie.”
He would take a card when he absolutely should not, and would stand when almost any other player would hit. Unsurprisingly, he lost a lot of money.
The interesting part was Gary’s reaction. He became convinced that Stinkie was ruining his game.
When Stinkie took a card Gary wanted and Gary lost the hand, it felt personal. When Stinkie stayed and the dealer benefited, costing everyone at the table, tempers flared.
I found it fascinating.
From a probabilistic perspective, Stinkie had no impact on my expected winnings. Yet everyone vividly remembered the hands where his behavior hurt them. No one noticed the hands where his “bad” decisions actually helped them.
Gary remained convinced he had lost money because of Stinkie. So I built a simulation.
We ran hundreds of hands of blackjack and tracked whether the beginner’s actions, making the wrong decision, affected another player.
After 200 hands, about 50% of the time, the beginner had no impact at all. About 25% of the time, he hurt the other player. And about 25% of the time, he helped the other player, winning when they otherwise would have lost.
The math was clear. The memory was not.
We are wired to fixate on losses and ignore gains.
I later heard about a study with college students taking multiple-choice exams. The test was designed so researchers could track when students changed answers.
Afterward, students were asked whether they believed their first answer was usually right, or whether changing answers helped them.
Nearly everyone believed their gut answers were correct more often, and that changing answers led to mistakes. But the data showed the opposite. Final answers were correct far more often than initial gut responses.
So what does all of this have to do with my book cover?
We often treat our gut reactions as sacred, assuming they reflect some deep inner wisdom. Sometimes they do. Sometimes we see things others cannot.
But just as often, our gut is reacting, not deciding.
The real danger is not trusting your gut. It is trusting your memory of when your gut was right, while quietly forgetting all the times it was wrong.
The best decisions are rarely gut or analysis alone. They come from letting the gut speak, then giving the mind time to listen, test, and refine.
That is exactly what I am trying to do with this cover.