We’ve been told to "trust our gut" in everything from our career to our love lives, but really, is there any proof behind to this advice that’s so old our Great Grandparents were telling our Grandparents it back in the day?
Turns out there is! A trio of British economists put their guts together, ran some tests, and found that people who second-guess themselves make considerably worse decisions than those who stick with their first instinct.
How did they reach this conclusion? They studied the biggest gut-reliant industry there is: gambling. They gathered the data from 150 people on a sports betting site and studied how these gamblers predicted the scores for soccer matches.
Users were allowed to enter predictions and revise their scores up to the minute the game started. The revised forecasts were about 17% less accurate than those that never changed. In other words, if you’re feeling like putting all your money on red, put it all on red and leave it there.
And if you need more reason to trust your gut, the researchers also pointed out the scores that were revised after a longer period of time were considerably less accurate than those changed within a few minutes. Basically, the longer you think about something, the more you over analyze, and the more wrong you’ll end up being.
Source: Greenwich Time