Sentimental people say that if you have a gut feeling, you should always follow it. Is this good decision making, though? I've studied tons of books about the flaws of human reasoning, and I would conclude that no, this isn't always the best choice that one could make. The school of cognitive psychology claims that our feelings are preceded by our thoughts. If we define the term "thought" more broadly as an "algorithm", then I would agree. When we feel a certain way, it's because we have a certain thought. An example of that is fear - the intensity of our fear varies depending on how dangerous we believe something to be for us. That belief could be totally wrong, which is the case with many, if not all, phobias.
There are some processes that are hardwired in our brains through evolution, which are called heuristics, also known as information-processing shortcuts. When we process new information, we package it into convenient chunks, that our limited brains can handle. During this process, we have to distort, delete, or generalize some of the information. So taking this in consideration, the beliefs that we form may many times be quite inaccurate. From this, it follows that our intuition may also turn out to be wrong.
I would say that the term "gut feeling" is synonymous to "intuition". I define "intuition" as an automatically-triggered behavior that has been learned through repetition and experience. For example, once learned, riding a bicycle becomes an unconscious process that we never think about. In other words, we develop intuition for riding the bicycle. Similarly, we might develop intuition for moral judgment. Imagine a coincidence where you've met 5 black people and they've all been mean to you. This might generate a subconscious prejudice against black people in you, because your brain might generalize, for your convenience, that all black people are meanies. This prejudice would be another type of intuition.
Another gut feeling you may develop is one for liking people. If you were raised by violent people, you might have formed a belief that "your mom and dad are good people because they have raised you, therefore being violent is also good". Once you leave the family, you end up falling in love with violent people, because that's what your gut feeling is telling you. But here, again, it turns out to be wrong.
I'm not saying you should never listen to your heart. I bet that most of the time, it's actually in your best interest to do so. But before you go with your gut feeling, if you have the time, think about how this decision is going to benefit you in the short term and in the long term. Think about the ways that you could be biased. Like my friend Chris Bradshaw says, "You should always consider your heart but follow nothing blindly".
