Gut feelings are not a particularly good way of evaluating the outside world. Gut feelings are a reflection of all our biases and intuitions and heuristics. Those all grow, largely unconsciously, out of our experiences. Our experiences are our own; they do not generalize. The phrase “the plural of anecdote is not data” describes all the reasons gut feelings are not reliable for evaluating the world around us. Although we do pick up on things subconsciously, our intuitive responses are also easily misled. Wisdom demands we discount those gut feelings fairly sharply — though certainly not entirely — against whatever actual facts we gather.

Gut feelings are still useful, though. They tell us about ourselves. When you get cold feet about something, that is really useful information about your own thinking and — especially — your own emotions. The same when you get almost-unreasonably enthusiastic about something. When evaluating a choice where the facts alone do not make an obvious choice, gut responses are helpful not in spite of but precisely because they tell us about our biases and intuitions and heuristics. That kind of information about ourselves is often hard to surface purely by introspection. Here, they are more valuable, though still far from infallible.

A gut feeling does not resolve a hard question, of course. It can, however, be a good prompt for, and provide helpful insight for, further consideration.