Squeez­ing the arti­cle into a ten­u­ous com­par­i­son between Obama and McCain, The Boston Globe has a nonethe­less inter­est­ing arti­cle on recent research into the ben­e­fits of, and the dif­fer­ences between, instinc­tual (gut) deci­sions and method­i­cal (ratio­nal) ones.

The cru­cial skill, sci­en­tists are now say­ing, is the abil­ity to think about your own think­ing, or metacog­ni­tion, as it is known. Unless peo­ple vig­i­lantly reflect on how they are mak­ing an impor­tant deci­sion, they won’t be able to prop­erly use their instincts, or know when their gut should be ignored. Indeed, accord­ing to this emerg­ing new vision of decision-making, the best pre­dic­tor of good judge­ment isn’t intu­ition or expe­ri­ence or intel­li­gence. Rather, it’s the will­ing­ness to engage in intro­spec­tion, to cul­ti­vate what Philip Tet­lock, a psy­chol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, calls “the art of self-overhearing.”

In the early 1990s, Dama­sio began pub­lish­ing a series of land­mark papers describ­ing the symp­toms of patients who, after a brain injury, were unable to per­ceive or expe­ri­ence emo­tion. At the time, most sci­en­tists assumed that such a deficit would lead to more ratio­nal deci­sions, since the patients were free of their irra­tional instincts.

Dama­sio found the oppo­site: these dis­pas­sion­ate patients made con­sis­tently bad deci­sions. Some made ter­ri­ble invest­ments and ended up bank­rupt; oth­ers started drink­ing heav­ily and get­ting into fights; most just spent hours delib­er­at­ing over irrel­e­vant details, such as where to eat lunch. Accord­ing to Dama­sio, when peo­ple are cut off from their emo­tions even the most banal deci­sions become all but impossible.

via Seed