Opinion by John Patkin
Some radio professionals swear by Gut Feeling. The good news is well, it’s all good. Gut Feeling falls into the field of human experience known as heuristics. Recently I mapped the motor, perceptive and cognitive skills of surgeons to transcribers. In this article, I’ll discuss how it works in radio.
Surgeons relied on skills similar to artisans. They needed motor skills for suturing, perceptive skills to survey the area of work such as the gory parts of the body, and cognitive skills to understand procedures and systems of work. In radio, programmers with a tuned ear know when something doesn’t sound right, newscasters develop a skill to stack stories, and old school announcers relied on motor skills to cue vinyl discs and fire carts.
Gut Feeling is a heuristic – a set of rules or guidelines developed through trial and error. Hence, those with a better Gut Feeling may have made more mistakes and less likely to be involved in decision making. Those trial and error experiences are closely related to the terms, “It doesn’t feel right; It left a bad taste in my mouth; It didn’t sound right; It smells weird” and so on. These are closely linked to physical and cognitive senses and some are more obvious than others. Those learning experiences are often attributed to the “University of life” or the “School of hard knocks.”
The concept of Gut Feeling recently appeared in a communication workshop I attended. The instructor provided a six-point plan to initiate a discussion with a prospect. While the first five steps were based on a company-wide system, we were told to use out Gut Feeling for the sixth. The instructor described Gut Feeling as, “You know, it’s how you feel.” Such descriptions contribute to the lack of confidence in the use of Gut Feeling, however, we can validate it by utilizing empirical research methods and theories. Explaining Gut Feeling and giving it a name makes research scientists feel more comfortable because it gives them evidence to support their claims.
Some decision-making we call Gut Feeling are more than ephemeral. These lie deep within in our biochemistry and life experiences. These include pheromones, chemicals emitted from living things. Pheromones have been linked to the way in which living beings interact including aggression and friendliness. In agriculture, pheromones can be used to prevent pests from damaging crops by disrupting reproduction.
In sales, for example, pheromones can explain why sexual attraction between humans can help one account executive achieve remarkable results even if the product is not valued as highly as its competitor. While pheromones are invisible, Gut Feeling such as our eyes being trained to accept someone’s appearance or our ears feeling comfortable with the sound of someone’s voice are more conspicuous. These perceptual heuristics help us build a library of experiences over time. The winemaker’s palate, the baker’s sense of smell, and the chef’s deft carving ability are all perceptual heuristics.
Gut Feeling is also important to the content director. First, her hits and misses will help to build a library of good and bad Gut Feelings. But does this eliminate the need for audience research, which is also based on Gut Feeling? After compiling demographic data about participants, depending on the mode of data collection, they may be asked a series of multiple choice or open questions which lean heavily on their opinion which has been shaped by experience i.e. a heuristic.
Having espoused the positive aspects of Gut Feeling, it’s important to identify its shortcomings in the form of the availability heuristic and confirmation bias. The availability heuristic is dangerous because it limits our decision making to recent front of mind personal experience. Listening to a single newscast and deciding the journalist makes too many errors, refusing to listen to a song from a particular artist because the last one bombed are two examples. Confirmation bias decisions are also based on what we think. You may have listened to the newscast because your partner had said something and you may have rejected the new song because a music review said the same thing. Both cases are limiting our perceptual and cognitive skills.
Gut Feeling has an important role in our work and lives but it should be used in tandem with other methods, and with caution. Be wary of your senses and the sources you use to make informed decisions.