Why You Shouldn't Always Trust Your Gut | The First Instinct Fallacy
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
- You've probably been told at some point or another to "trust your gut", but is that actually good advice?
Hosted by: Anthony Brown
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What about when teachers make students go crazy by having 5 answers in a row "C". So evil 😂
I hate those tests!
I had a psych teacher in high school who gave an entire quiz where the answer to every question was C. She was sadistic
I liked making my exams go A > B > C > D > E > D > C > B > A > B > C > D > E > D > C > B > A > B > C > D > E and so on.
I just go, "Huh. In theory this means I'm more likely to be right on the questions I guessed on since I always pick C for them!" Then conclude that the teachers taste in letters may be similar to mine
@@Varizen87 I tried to make a Kahoot for a club I'm an officer in while my OCD was worse than usual because of stress and did something like that, except it was more convoluted and involved grouping all the questions by phrasing into nine groups of three and making sure each letter only occurred once in each group. I went back and changed it before it got used because it seemed like it'd be too easy for people to figure out the pattern.
I feel like many people will pay attention to these situations on tests and get better grades because of this video, myself included.
Thank you SciShow!
I remember studying for the SAT (years and years ago), learning that in a series of similar questions they always arranged them based on how likely students were to get them right. As a result, the obvious answer to an early question in a series was probably right; an obvious answer to one of the last questions is often misleading.
Knowing when to trust your gut and when it pays to put in the time to double check helps in a lot of contexts.
I frequently have to do safety inductions for work. They rarely supply me with new information but the correct multiple-choice answer is invariably the question with the most words in it.
If it’s about food I always trust my guts
I'd rather leave my lungs to digesting
Taco Bell would disagree...
My strategy was to answer any questions I knew, put a mark next to the ones I didn't know, move on without answering it, and then go through the test again when I was finished to see if I had learned a clue from another question, or if not then I just put my best guess. Worked out very well -- you didn't have to erase because you never initially guessed.
There's always only one answer: I should've studied more...
The first study is strange to me because I'd assume that of course the answers that were changed went from wrong to right, because a person is probably more likely to switch their answer if they're confident about it.
Mmm, I feel like the two studies might have been presented a little too similarly in this video. My first instinct (ha) was to think that they had just run the same study and gotten the opposite results, when (again, as I understand it) the actual study itself looked at a different thing. I feel like highlighting that difference a little more might make it a little clearer.
From what I understand: First study looked at answers that were changed and found that the largest portion of changes were for the better. The second study looked at the amount of times people were THINKING about changing their answer, and in that case it was mostly the correct choice to not change your answer. So essentially one looked at the "after" state of changing the answer, and the other looked at the "before" state. If I misunderstood that, please let me know, because otherwise the two datasets just seem really confusing to me.
Also, if the first test was trying to look at validity of gut answers, it’s flawed. Just looking at questions where there was an erasure will include all the ones where the taker went back and realized with more certainty what the correct answer was. (Had more time at the end, read the question wrong, remembered something, found a clue in a later question, etc). Including those questions is going to skew the number of correct changed answers.
The group of questions where answers were changed no doubt includes some where people went with their gut and then changed the answer (the thing being studied), but not only those.
Here is a test tip. Never waste time changing answers when you have unanswered questions
Most tests unanswered questions dont count against you which makes sense how can you test someone on what they dont know
@@cosmicrider5898 the hell kind of tests are you taking? I have never seen that be the case
In some tests, you get 0 points for unanswered questions, but then you get -1 points for wrongly answered questions - in that case, you really should think about each answer and take the easy ones first
@@Tunemoussen When my profs did that, it was only for a section of the test, and the section total couldn't go negative.
@@Tunemoussen I'm not aware of any test that rewards blank answers
I've got a solution! Get rid of multiple choice questions.
Use questions were you have to answer in your own words, to show that you have understood the underlying concepts.
That's the default on IB exams. It actually made multiple choice questions more difficult (which I suspect was by design).
Oh, I wish you could do that . . . My experience as a graduate assistant, however, is that multiple guess questions are very useful in large classroom settings. When you have lots of students and have to get through grading quickly, multiple choice questions are great. Moreover, if multiple choice questions are written will, they will discriminate well between those who guessed well and those who really know the material.
As for showing your understanding by restating the material in your own words: too many problems. On one hand, restating the material may only show your ability to paraphrase. On the other hand, such questions are much more difficult to grade: they require the person reading the exam be able to suss out the student's intent on each and every paper. That can really cut into the professor's (or their graduate assistants') time for things like lesson planning, writing, class preparation, research, or (oh, yeah! What graduate students are supposed to do!) studying.
That said, I remember grading papers in a criminology course online and finding a student who had different fonts and text sizes in their paper. It made me suspicious, so I took a few of their sentences and searched Google for them. They came up in EXACTLY the same fonts and text sizes. I found their sources, and the entire portions the student had "borrowed". The student never cited their sources or indicated that the material had been used without proper attribution. Can you say, "That's the textbook definition of plagiarism!"
Yeah, I thought you could . . . .
@@johndemeritt3460 "they will discriminate well between those who guessed well and those who really know the material."
This sentence ... Mate. I am German. In case this was sarcasm, I do not understand, please elaborate. Isn't a test made to distinguish those who know the material from those who don't? There shouldn't be a 1/5 chance to accidently get it right.
About the point on grading and it being way more time consuming when teachers have to think while grading, I agree with you entirely.
But concerning the last point. Yeah first of all online classes with "tests" at the end are laughable.
Also the guy who didn't even change his font, didn't know what he was doing ^^
Always copy everything you wanna plagiarise from the internet into a text document beforehand and make sure its all the same font, size and colour.
And yet whoever I go back in a exam and doubt my self I do worse.
On tests - study ahead of time. Meeting a person you've been talking to online, for the first time - have a safe exit planned ahead of time, and then trust your gut if you notice any questionable actions. Survival instincts are different from guessing on tests.
As someone who has worked in University level education, I can tell you this: the point of telling someone to go with their gut is not now and has never been to help them figure out the best answer. It's to get the student to hurry up and choose SOMETHING because 1.) Any answer is better than a blank answer, and 2.) There are students who will sit there and wait out the entire test period to pick something when they have no idea to begin with. When you design a test to take 1 hour in a 2 hour test session, you're always gonna have 2 or 3 who take the whole 2 hours. You're functionally being held by them. I mean... That's part of the job. Fine. But do you really want to be forced to stay some place because a student is paralyzed by indecision? If they just put down SOMETHING, they can come back and revisit it later, or at the very least, having SOMETHING down reduces some degree of anxiety.
I kept a small track of this in some of my early classes in college, and found that switching helped less, so I answer questions I know first and then go back rather than trying to answer and lose track of which ones I'm second-guessing
Remember: Goin' with your gut may not always be _right_ , but life in general teaches us it's more than getting the _answer_ "right" the first time. It's about learning to accept pains and _mistakes_ , so we can better improve our first guesses in thee long run, via thorough, experiential awareness. This is all to state the obvious, too: Life is more than living in judgement and correction, conditioning states of the ego-mind.
The first study mentioned reviewing answers that were chosen, written, erased, and corrected. I'm curious if the percentages change for gut instincts followed or ignored _prior_ to writing in the first answer. Unless I missed something, we don't know if those erased answers were someone going back to follow their first gut reaction or going back to change _away_ from their first gut reaction.
P.S. Great video as always, Anthony!
I think these types of studies are very important. The amount of standardized testing in America in elementary, middle school, and high school is a little overboard (especially if you're trying to get into a good college, private school, U.S. military branch, etc.). I think having better controls on stopping people from cheating, giving them more opportunities and time to study, and allowing them to reasonably change their answers after-the-fact will only help students and test-takers. I don't know if any of that is already happening in the background but people definitely don't talk about it enough.
My gut has been making smelly gas. There's something wrong with it. Gotta take some heavy metal salts:)
3:30 bruh 59% is not “almost two thirds.” If want a neat fraction use 3/5. 2/3 is almost as wrong as 1/2.
yo give me that 59/100 get out of here with these ~3% errors
How about: Right->Wrong->Right or Wrong->Right->Wrong
That will hide what the first gut choice was. ☹️
changing from wrong to right include actual correction and random guest, changing from wrong to wrong and changing from right to wrong are both likely to be random guest.
I have a pretty good test strategy: study, study, study. And if you're unsure of an answer, leave it for the end. Answer everything you can where you're confident, then cycle back to the ones that require deeper reasoning. Before I applied nthis strategy I would run out of time on questions I wasn't sure of while still having many questions ahead which I could solve easily
This reminds me when my teacher had me and my classmates do a quiz and then after everyone was done we all had to pick an answer that we didn't choose the first time. I forget why the teacher did this but I just remember being very upset that all of my changed answers were wrong.
Thanks for another great video, guys!
A related topic that might be interesting to cover is how similar advice is often given about emotional decisions. I definitely absorbed the idea growing up that you should listen to your emotions, and even got this advice from a licensed MFT once. Trying to follow this became so confusing that it actually resulted in some very bad, consequential decisions! Emotions are tricky and fleeting, I’ve come to the conclusion that time and mulling things over logically are wayyy better most of the time. So I think it’s an important myth to debunk!
Agreed! It's important to *understand* your emotions, but a big part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), for example, is understanding how your emotions can distort your view of things and knowing how to balance that out when necessary.
Multiple choice exams don't help students, they just help examiners. It's super easy to put a transparent marking sheet over a multiple choice paper.
Assuming you lose points for not answering a question: answer the questions you know, answer the questions you think you know, work on the questions you are unsure of, and in the last portion of time, use the same letter to answer all the remaining questions.
How does listening to ones gut differ on tests than when interacting with people?
I want to know this one, too.
That is a great question.
I would think it might be that when interacting with people you are learning. You are learning about what they say, think and act like and you could consciously or subconsciously be judging them during the interaction. If they say something weird you might get a gut feeling that something's wrong because you are actively trying to understand them. When taking a test you aren't really learning anything, you are just trying to recall information you should already have learned. If you didn't understand the information in class or study it afterwards then you wouldn't have any correct information to recall. Your gut feeling then would really just be a guess. So interacting with people would be like taking a test but with your notes also in front of you. Also I think interacting with people is a lot more complicated, there isn't always a right or wrong answer. If you have a gut feeling the person you just met is bad you can interact with them to learn more and learn that you were wrong on your initial judgement. Then you could end up hearing about something bad they did and that your initial judgment was right. Tests aren't usually as complicated, there are right answers and wrong answers based usually on factual information that isn't going to change even if you learn more about the subject.
I used to skip questions when I second guessed myself, or put a placeholder, and then revisit it once i had gotten to the end. If its a timed test, no sense in sitting on a question your unsure of, if it limits your time to answer questions you do know.
The *Monty Hall problem* comes to mind: you should always change your answers to basically double your chances of winning.
That statistic only applies in that specific situation, where each choice has equal probability and one of the choices is removed after your initial decision. If you're doing a multiple choice test and you rule out all but two choices right away, you basically have a 50% chance.
@@sarahp6512 One is a statistical phenomenon and the other is a psychological fluke but they do look similar.
But wait, I remember I usually scored really bad on my Mandarin test and there was this big test. My teacher adviced me to not change my answer if I'm unsure. I did just that, scored the highest marks I ever had (37/40).
Would've it might be because students tend to NOT change their answer when they're unsure? Hence, the data showing most changed answers are from wrong to right?
Wait, I thought it was better to follow your gut. It does explain my failed tests!
Well, using regularly flashcards for vocabulary learning, I've learnt to trust my gut instinct as it is most of the time right and any changes are like 80-90% of the time incorrect. I think it may be different in a test though, where questions may require a deeper thought, especially if some logic is involved. Different people may also have more or less trustworthy gut instincts I suppose.
It would be interesting to learn where the whole "trust your gut" idea comes from in the first place 🤔
How to make the CORRECT choice EVERY TIME?
Know the answer! 😂
Another wonderfully informative video
This applies to so many things in life as well
Coming in clutch for exam season. Props to you.
This seems like a flawed conclusion because it only analyses a pool of data from switches that actually occurred, rather than a complete pool of data that includes situations where people considered switching and then chose not to. Analysing only the situations where switches occurred means you are are only looking at cases where people are pretty sure their first answer is wrong, so you'd expect this category to have a higher proportion of incorrect to correct switches. I don't think this study has any meaningful help to offer people in situations where it is a toss-up.
Exactly! I'm really surprised they did not pick up on this
Exactly
🕵️♀️👩⚕️🧙🏿♀️ It's important to identify between if it's anxiety, trauma based or insight, knowledge based. This has often helped us to decide to go with or ignore. GL 😁👍
Trusting my gut is all I have sometimes in a test. Now you've taken that away too.
More likely that later questions illuminate earlier errors either directly or via memory triggers.
I love this guy, tbh he's my fav other than Hank I think. Nice work guy!
My gut is a liar
Unless the candidate has some idea of the correct solution that lead to choosing of that first answer, a random guess means that statistically , the mere act of changing the answer to any other will increase the chances of that change being wrong-to-right than either of the other two cases. Add in switching from A or D to B or (perhaps particularly) to C (based on previous scishow videos), further increases the odds.
Perhaps a more interesting experiment may be to test students of different majors and see if the propensity for this behavioral fallacy remains consistent (with knowledge).
How is the initial study a reason to believe people shouldn't trust their first instinct? I have a few problems with this study:
1) Were the only questions that had eraser marks questions that students had second thoughts on? How do we know that the students didn't have second thoughts on ALL the questions, trusting their first instinct on most of them and not changing their answer and getting most of them right?
2) They are looking among a population of college students, many of them needed to have performed well on multiple choice tests like the SAT or ACT to get accepted, so likely their judgement in changing their answers has a higher likelihood to succeed than the general population. How do we know that the success of the second choice only applies to this select population than the general population?
I generally agree that committing to a choice will bias one to that choice rightly or wrongly, but there's nothing here that would indicate to me that there's something inherently wrong with people's first instinct.
How perfect, I'm getting ready for my personal trainer cert exam! Super super nervous!
I had a feeling this was the case.
Maybe peoples believe that changing an answer would most likely make it worse is the reason they so rarely change their answers. So if people would trust their instinct less they would change more right answers to wrong instead of only the ones they are reasonably sure about.
Also odds are if you choose wrong first then that takes 1 out of the choice and increases your odds
In New Zealand students get to do "mock exams" before the actual exams, both are marked.
Great video
Leroy Jethro Gibbs will like to have a word with who ever came up with this study
So for answers that are just an HONEST GUESS on your part, leave them at that cause the probability that this is correct is higher than if you return to abstractly change it. Got it.
I am a teacher, and this is why I don't put multiple choice questions in my tests.
Amazing test taking tips I always looked for the most wrong answer then weigh my answers against eachother
Well, if you're re-read the question and realized your first response was wrong... obviously change the answer! Why wouldn't you? If you're still not _sure_ whether you're right or wrong... clearly you don't actually _know_ the answer and so you're just guessing and in that case it doesn't really matter what you do, a guess is a guess.
That being the case, the erased-answers study would find a mix of "wrong to right" answers that were either just a matter of luck or were from the test taker realizing they had answered incorrectly and fixing it. The latter is clearly going to result in a lot of wrongs answers becoming right. The latter is going to balance out with the "right to wrong" and "wrong to wrong" changes (weighted, of course, by total answers available and chances of randomly selecting the right answer).
As such, I can't see it being much use in determining the "trust your gut" reliability because you'd need to be able to weed out and remove the answers that were changed not based on guessing but on certainty/clarification.
Ok, so this is only true for test-like scenarios and similar tasks that need the same kind of cognitive abilities. So what is still unclear here, whether it is depending on the task, if a gut feeling works or not. And I assume that might be the case. This should be depending on how "gut feeling" and instinct works.
Also the First Instinct Fallacy might be closely related to this test scenario, that is this kind of multiple choice tests. Usual tests in a good educational environment, may it be schools or universities, are not multiple choice but more complex like "Describe the..." or "Calculate the...". For these kinds of tasks the instinct has a completely different role. Also these kinds of tasks are closer related to real life tasks and not only relevant for certain kinds of tests.
This sounds similar to the Monty Hall problem. I wonder if there's some kind of connection?
So in the initial study they only took into account the answers that are changed, not the whole data. So that means there maybe many students who went with their gut, chose the correct answer initially. Can we trust this data? The overall study might've made the right conclusion, but I've doubts regarding the initial study's data.
With the first study though, they don’t know whether answers that were not switched were done on gut instinct and not changed at all?
What if the results of those first studies you mentioned were influenced by the preexisting perception? If you think trusting your gut is more likely to get the right answer, it'll take something more significant to get you to change an answer. I know you mentioned it later in the video, but I would bet most (half or over) of my changed answers on various multiple choice tests were to a correct one because something later in the test gave me a clue or reminded me of the earlier question, but without that kind of impetus, changing my answer would usually be a matter of changing from one guess to another.
I am curious idf it matters that more people cumulatively change from right to wrong and wrong to wrong, so for a majority of the answers changing the answer resulted in. either still the wrong answer or not the right one? Or how does that work?
Nothing is IMPOSSIBLE the word itself says I M POSSIBLE
-Shazistic
Ah, good. How to take a test. It's great these things can be logicked out rather than gauge a student's understanding of the subject.
Wait, are you saying I should...? Wait, do I...?
4:16 yeah ppl always forgot the most important thing
Reminds me of Monty Hall paradox
I don't know if is just my country but here you don't get any time to go over anything again. I never got why. I am very good at math and problem solving but I don't remember formulas that well but just remember the logic of them. That means I am slow on tests and get a worse grade than on homework
No one went right to right, interesting🤔
I don't know who deserves a r/whoooosh here but one of you does.
@@agelessorca r/whooooosh
Changing my name to My Gut
One reason why the first answer may be wrong is you read the question wrong.
Why do i have a very very clear memory of the exact OPPOSITE being said in another scishow video... ?
You have a really nice voice
The weird thing is that all my first gut feeling is right 9/10 times. So I usually now turn my answers back to the first one. Since it always proves that my gut always was rights.
And outside of tests I need my gut, it predicts weather, who I can trust, and I can continue quite sometime who this
My first instinct is that trusting your first instinct is wrong.
Isn’t this just the Monty Hall problem
Nope. In the MH problem, you're given extra information after making your initial choice, and that does not happen on a test.
I never changed an answer in my life and was right about it lmao
But wouldn’t there be a possibility of changing a right answer to wrong to right?
how comes something that leads to worse decisions evolved? like with the availability heuristic
I read another study once, that said males did better changing, while women better with 1st answer. I know that's generally true for this female when playing multiple choice trivia.
Never trust your heart. It's very stupid
Incidentally, studying tends to subvert most of these statistics. lol
Makes sense if you are the type of person who doesn't already choose their gut feeling. Highly contextual. Please don't imply that there is no purpose to use your guy feeling on tests. There's always a time and place, and balance - depending on the personalized approach everyone develops, based on their nature and nurture (genes and social experiences).
My approach is to rush thru the test so I'm done about the same time as the first person. Then I spend the rest of the time reviewing. I use my gut to decide which answer I'm not as confident or knowledgeable on than I
Don't perpetuate false dichotomy, and remember that even though I'm critiquing you, I love and admire you just the same. There is balance to your content, just don't like grabby titles
In a multiple choice test, wouldn't any action that is right more than 25% of the time be a good thing? This video seems to say anything with less than 50% accuracy is a bad choice
I’m always wrong the first time 😂
I did great in my test cause my gut told me to cheat.
Just kidding I would just finished the question I new then go back through the rest and eliminate the answers that I new to be wrong and then just guess.
Bass
You shouldn't stop observing how the mind functions and find the causal chain of mechanistic happenings on the preceding side of the spectrum when someone advices you to stop trusting your guts because it misleads you. Instead go back all the way to the first cause or the primordial and fundamental psychological state while not forgetting to follow the forward direction of causation to the end of all things mechanical. Observe and understand the infinitesimal as well. Be absolutely uncertain of everything so that you can truly follow the advice of questioning everything and never make a mistake because then knowing will come to an end and you'll be in the natural state as UG Krishnamurti put it. A person in this state can never do anything wrong. Meanwhile everyone else can put a lot of effort into striving to be grateful while never quite being so and feeling tortured at your own inability to be free of your psychology and physical existence thus using scare tactics to get others to agree with you because you are not free from fear and have totally submitted to it at some functional level of your mind. You will then after remaining within this mental framework, eventually come to accept the cycle of life while either taking an optimistic view of it to keep your fears at bay or a pessimistic view of it to succumb to depression and melancholy until you die anyway. Doesn't all of this seem pointless? Wake up from predictability. The human psychology hasn't changed in 200000 years of existence much less since the start of civilization which is a several thousand years itself. I don't accept the cycle of life. I wish to solve or dissolve it permanently. Call me eccentric or delusional or pipe dream chasing futility of a person or use scare tactics on me to satisfy your ego and sleep well at night or even dismiss all I'm saying as irrelevant because the individual in the western sense means acquiring personal, physical freedom while owing nothing to anyone. Even stranger's kindness is only reserved for like-minded people or to people who are readily optimistic because this kindness is superficial at heart. Very few people are kind for it's own sake and even those people accept this vicious circle of a worm ouroboros kind. This is the base psychology at work in so-called civilization.
I don't wish anyone ill will. Be safe until I fix everything.
Jeffrey Dahmer relied heavily on gut feeling...
Okaaaaay but this doesn’t appear to account for when kids erase their first answer, put a second, and change back to their first answer, erasing the second one. I can confirm at least one student who does this and I think some erases could be kids changing back to their first instinct!
The reason people are more afraid of plane crashes is because they use cars more often. Hard to be afraid of something you do since you are a baby.
For me all the talk about how car crashes are more likely/dangerous makes me afraid to drive a car, because I have been a passenger since I can remember.
Your intuition is your best friend.
Don't trust on anything and blue eyes.
I mean, the data doesn't mean anything, many of the corrections were probably just people realizing they made a mistake, the other were just people not knowing the answer so it could have been completely random and you still would get this biased result for people who knew they made a mistake and corrected
To make sense of the data you would need the number of people who decided not to change answer and how often they were right or wrong
Note to the editor: Intro was _way_ too loud. Please keep an eye on that, I already have hearing damage, I don't need more. Thanks.
You should always trust your gut when dealing with humans though.
Not really, no. First impressions are often wrong.
I don't get how instinct plays a part in this. You either know or you don't or, well, maybe you need more time to remember the information you need to answer.
How about you may not know 100% but you have an inkling that this is the right answer.
There are plenty of test questions that are word problems or involve reasoning and not just reciting back information.
If I asked you what (for example) the capital of Scotland was, you might think it's Glasgow or that it's Edinburgh, but you wouldn't necessarily be sure. In that moment, you'd have to decide between the two. Whatever answer you feel is more likely to be correct, even if you can't point to any evidence or thought pattern behind it, is your gut feeling.
PS - I picked this one because quite a lot of my fellow Scots also get it wrong! It's Edinburgh.
Isn't Gut instinct based on experience though? so it's less about whether you should trust it and more on whether you are familiar with the subject matter that the gut instinct is drawing from. Anything else is baseless hunches with a degree of luck to it.
My gut tells me this research was a waste of time and money.
This is the harshest critique for a scishow video I've made:
After watching this video I have learned nothing
Hi