Challenging the gift of fear: What if your gut is wrong?

So Gavin Debecker wrote a book about essentially how our fear and gut instincts are a gift.

He’s not touching on something completely bogus, research shows when we make decisions, we make the choice first then reason why we did it. Many times our brains know the right answer before even we ourselves realize it.

So at it’s root premise I don’t disagree with Gavin Debecker. I don’t think he’s wrong in saying we should listen to our fears or gut instincts.

What I don’t trust is people, and their lack of meta-cognition. Intuition and fear linked to it can be trusted, but do people even recognize that within them compared to other junk they have internalized?

Now that image above is a strong statement. But I want to ask everyone reading: Do you trust your neighbor who listens to Joe Rogan’s podcast or Alex Jones unironically to have instincts that make judgments not coloured by prejudice or false information?

How do I know my fear response toward a man walking into an elevator isn’t because I’m not used to his race or ethnic group being around me, or if he is truly a threat?

The answer is of course metacognition, and having a procedure in your mind to spot danger and deal with it.

The problem is, the average person, including the average self-defense guy reading Gavin’s book probably doesn’t practice metacognition, and probably doesn’t have well informed procedures and plans to spot danger enough to have reliable instincts.

Chances are they just go with what they feel, regardless of the bias they may have.

When you look at something like racial profiling, it’s done by cops who see someone matching a suspect, which is a pretty reasonable thing.

Buuuuut…we also have stop and frisk of suspicious looking people, and sometimes that crosses over to ethnic groups.

Now perhaps the suspicion of these ethnic groups matches a pattern the officer has seen of people in a specific demographic being more likely to commit a type of crime. But that’s still a bias not exactly looking at people individually. It’s a gut judgement based on a bias rather than some powerful gift of fear isn’t it?

So while research shows that fear often is communicating information to us worth listening to, gut instincts an often be right, we must also realize that people bring a great deal of baggage they attach to their gut instincts and emotions.

Let’s not even mention all the black people shot in front of their own houses because their neighbors see a black person and assume they are breaking in or alien to the neighborhood. Police are called, the black person gets shot. Their little gift of fear was clearly wrong in thinking they are a criminal.

So yeah the gift of fear can save your life, but let’s not pretend it isn’t faultless.

Case in point, at the MMA gym I train at there is a guy who had a ‘bad feeling about me’ this guy also goes on long rants against middle easterners and Muslims. And apparently I’m some kind of extremist or something because of my religion.

So why should anyone trust his gut instinct? His sense of fear around me because the Muslamic Ray guns make him feel uncomfortable?

How many people can differentiate between bias and intuition?

Muslamic Ray Guns.