每天一篇经济学人 | When to trust your gut 何时该...

Humans have been honed over millions of years of evolution to respond to certain situations without thinking too hard. If your ancestors spotted movement in the undergrowth, they would run first and grunt questions later. At the same time, the capacity to analyse and to plan is part of what distinguishes people from other animals. The question of when to trust your gut and when to test your assumptions—whether to think fast or slow, in the language of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist—matters in the office as much as in the savannah. 

经过数百万年的进化，人类已经被磨练得能够不费吹灰之力地应对某些情况。如果你的祖先发现灌木丛中有动静，他们会先跑开，然后嘟囔着问题。与此同时，分析和计划的能力也是人区别于其他动物的一部分。用心理学家丹尼尔·卡尼曼的话说，什么时候相信自己的直觉，什么时候检验自己的假设，思考是快还是慢，这个问题在办公室和在大草原上一样重要。

Deliberative thinking is the hallmark of a well-managed workplace. Strategic overhauls and budget discussions are built on rounds of meetings, memos, formulas and presentations. Processes are increasingly designed to stamp out instinctive responses. From blind screening of job applicants to using “red-teaming” techniques to pick apart a firm’s plans, rigour trumps reflex. 

审慎思考是一个管理状态良好的工作场所的标志。战略改革和预算讨论建立在一轮轮的会议、备忘录、公式和报告的基础上。越来越多的程序被设计用来消除本能反应。从对求职者的盲目筛选到使用“红队测试”技术来打破公司的计划，严谨胜过条件反射。

Yet instinct also has its place. Some decisions are more connected to emotional responses and inherently less tractable to analysis. Does a marketing campaign capture the essence of your company, say, or would this person work well with other people in a team? In sticky customer-service situations, intuition is often a better guide to how to behave than a script.

然而，直觉也有它的作用。有些决策更多地与情绪反应有关，质上难以分析。一场营销活动是否抓住了你公司的本质，或者说，这个人能否与团队中的其他人很好地合作？在棘手的客户服务情况下，直觉往往比脚本更能指导如何行事。

Gut instincts can also be improved (call it “probiotic management”). Plenty of research has shown that intuition becomes more unerring with experience. In one well-known experiment, conducted in 2012, volunteers were asked to assess whether a selection of designer handbags were counterfeit or real. Some were instructed to operate on instinct and others to deliberate over their decision. Intuition worked better for those who owned at least three designer handbags; indeed, it outperformed analysis. The more expert you become, the better your instincts tend to be. 

【1】unerring 万无一失的

直觉也可以得到改善(称之为“益生菌管理”)。大量研究表明，直觉随着经验而变得更加准确无误。在2012年进行的一项著名实验中，志愿者被要求评估挑选出来的名牌手袋是假货还是真货。一些人被指示凭直觉行事，另一些人则需经过深思熟虑后做出决定。直觉对那些至少拥有三个名牌手袋的人更有效；事实上，它的表现超过了经过分析的结果。你变得越专业，你的直觉就会越准。

However, the real reason to embrace fast thinking is that it is, well, fast. Instinctive decision-making is often the only way to get through the day. Researchers at Cornell University once estimated that people make over 200 decisions a day about food alone. The workplace is nothing but a succession of choices, a few big and many small: what to prioritise, when to intervene, whom to avoid in the lifts and, now, where to work each day. 

然而，接受快速思考的真正原因是，嗯，它是快速的。本能的决策往往是熬过一天的唯一方法。康奈尔大学的研究人员曾估计，仅关于食物，人们每天就会做出200多个决定。职场就是一连串的选择，有大有小：优先选择什么，什么时候干预，在电梯里避开谁，以及现在，每天在哪里工作。

To take one example, when your inbox brims with new emails at the start of a new day, there is absolutely no way to read them all carefully. Intuition is what helps you decide which ones to answer and which to delete or leave unopened. Emails that are part of existing threads: open. Messages from people directly above and below you: open. Reminders from the chief information officer that cyber-security really, really matters: delete. 

举个例子，当你的收件箱在新的一天开始时充满了新邮件，你绝对没有办法都仔细阅读它们。直觉能帮助你决定回复哪些邮件，删除或不打开哪些邮件。属于现有线程的一部分的邮件：打开。直接来自你的上级和下级的邮件：打开。首席信息官提醒说，网络安全真的、真的很重要:删除。

Instinct is also at work on those occasions when people have completely zoned out. They might be working on something else during a Zoom call, or playing chess on their phones, or simply admiring the ceiling pattern. Suddenly they are aware of a silence, and realise that they have been asked something or are expected to make a contribution. This is the office equivalent of coming face to face with a lion. Those who are fit to survive will say something plausible like “I’d like to understand how we are measuring success,” prompting murmurs of agreement from everyone else who hasn’t been paying attention but senses this might be a good answer. 

当人们完全走神的时候，直觉也在起作用。他们可能在Zoom通话的时候在做别的事情，或者在手机上下棋，或者只是在欣赏天花板的图案。突然，他们察觉到一阵沉默，并意识到他们被问及了什么，或被期望做出贡献。这就相当于在办公室里与一头狮子面对面。那些适合生存的人会说一些貌似有理的话，比如“我想知道我们是如何衡量成功的”，这促使其他一直没有集中注意的人纷纷表示赞同，他们没有注意到这可能是一个好的答案。

Fast thinking is not just about self-preservation. It can help the entire organisation. The value of many managerial decisions lies in the simple fact that they have been made at all. Yet as data gushes from every pore of the modern organisation, the temptation to ask for one more bit of analysis has become much harder to resist. A well-established psychological phenomenon known as “verbal overshadowing” captures the danger of overthinking things: people are more likely to misidentify someone in a line-up if they have spent time writing a description of their faces. Managers often suffer from analytical overshadowing, mulling a simple problem until it turns into a complex one. 

重新讲述会让叙述的准确度会下降。也就是说，复述的过程会干扰最初以知觉的形式编码的记忆快速思考不仅仅是为了自我保护。它可以帮助整个组织。许多管理决策的价值就在于这样一个简单的事实：它们已经做成过。然而，随着数据从现代组织中喷涌而出，要求再多做一点分析的诱惑变得越来越难以抗拒。一种被称为“语言遮蔽效应”的公认的心理现象揭示了过度思考的危险：如果人们花时间描述一组人的脸，他们更有可能认错他们。经理们经常遭受分析上的“遮蔽”，把一个简单的问题琢磨成一个复杂的问题。

When to use intuition in the workplace rests on its own form of pattern recognition. Does the decision-maker have real expertise in this area? Is this a domain in which emotion matters more than reasoning? Above all, is it worth delaying the decision? Slow thinking is needed to get the big calls right. But fast thinking is the way to stop deliberation turning to dither.

什么时候在工作场所使用直觉取决于其自身的模式识别形式。决策者是否在该领域拥有真正的专业知识？在这个领域，情感是否比理性更重要？最重要的是，推迟做决定是否值得？要做出正确的重大决定，需要缓慢的思考。但快速思考是阻止深思熟虑变成犹豫不决的方法。