Second-guessing yourself leads to worse decisions, scientists find
Why you should ALWAYS trust your gut: Second-guessing yourself leads to worse decisions, scientists find
- Researchers looked at betting habits of 150 sports gamblers to come to finding
- Found those who stuck to their initial prediction were correct 20% more often
- Study ‘can be applied to any situation where people make guesses about future’
People who second-guess themselves tend to make worse decisions than those who trust their gut, research suggests.
Scientists analysed the betting habits of 150 online gamblers and found those who stuck to their guns were correct 20 per cent more often than people who changed their mind.
Punters who pondered over their wager for days before changing it were considerably less accurate than those who changed their mind in a few minutes.
The researchers say their findings would apply in any situation where people have to make educated guesses about the future.
They speculate that over-analysing situations fogs the mind and stops people from thinking clearly.
People who second-guess themselves tend to make worse decisions than those who trust their gut, research suggests (stock)
The study was led by a trio of British economists from the University of Reading and University of East Anglia.
They drew on data from the Superbru Premier League Predictor Game – an online betting website where players guess the scores in English top tier football games.
A total of 57,000 individual predictions spanning 380 football games in the Barclays Premier League during the 2017/18 season were analysed.
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WHAT ARE ‘GUT FEELINGS’?
Gut feelings are mysterious signals from our gastrointestinal tract that impact our emotions and decisions.
The GI tract is more than 100 times larger than the surface of the skin, and it sends more signals to the brain than any other organ system in the body.
It talks to the brain via the vagus or ‘wandering’ nerve, a super highway of nervous signalling that snakes up the body from organ to organ.
The nerve carries top-down messages from the brain to the body as well as bottom-up messages commonly described as ‘gut feelings’.
While it’s clear there’s a lot of communication between the brain and gut, scientists have struggled to determine how much these feelings affect our decision making.
Recent research suggests the signals are part of an elaborate protective system that prompts us to slow down and evaluate a situation, or avoid it completely.
Users made initial score predictions days, or even weeks, in advance and were able to revise them up until the match started.
The researchers presumed that revised scores would be more accurate than unchanged ones.
This is because gamblers normally change their mind after news of an injury to a star player, or as the result of further research about the teams.
But analysis showed those who changed their prediction got the score right just 7.7 per cent of the time.
By comparison, punters who stuck to their gut instinct were correct 9.3 per cent of the time.
This means that revised predictions were about 17 per cent less accurate than those that remained unchanged.
The researchers note that revisions to original predictions were infrequent, with players only changing their mind one in 25 times.
Dr Carl Singleton and Dr James Reade, both professors of economics at Reading, and Alasdair Brown, a financial economist at UEA, also highlighted limitations to the study.
They said gamblers, often ambitious and eager to see an action-packed matches, tended not to predict scoreless draws.
The study found that a 0-0 outcome was only predicted 1.5 per cent of the time, when it actually occurs in 8.4 per cent of matches.
This suggests a general forecaster bias toward scoring as opposed to non-scoring – or, in other words, toward things happening rather than not.
The findings are published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics.
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