MORALITY COMES FROM THE GUT

We think of moral decisions as the raw material of great drama—as warring internal desires or puzzles to solve via logical arguments. But most people actually determine whether an action is right or wrong automatically, finds Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt likens moral intuitions to aesthetic judgments: We instantly know whether we think something is beautiful, but we don't necessarily know why. "The rational mind is like a press secretary that spins reasons for our intuitive moral decisions," he says.
The "press secretary" is all about advancing our own interests, prosecuting those we don't like and defending ourselves. Haidt theorizes that we have evolved this way because of the competitive advantage attached to being able to navigate society's dense web of gossip . Because what people think you do is just as important as what you do, it pays to be able to explain your behaviors in a rosy light. That makes the internal machinery inherently self-deceiving. You may have no qualms about cheating on  your taxes, but you'll probably think twice after speaking with friends about it (if you dare even bring it up).
That's why Haidt does not advocate going with your gut when contemplating a moral decision. "The general advice I would give is to check with others to see what they think." We can see the splinter in our neighbor's eye, after all, but not the plank in our own.

A Strong Hunch can be the Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship

We've all heard stories of couples who "just knew" the moment they met that something serious was going to develop between them. (David Myers, professor of psychology at Hope College and the author of Intuition, had that feeling about a young woman as a teenager; they've been married for more than 40 years now.) The heart has reasons which reason does not know. But maybe the "heart" is governed by the unconscious emotional pattern matching that produces intuitions.
The phenomenon  is as an overall feeling that someone would be "good for you," perhaps even irrespective of passion. "It's tapping into your unconscious and triggering prior emotional experiences. We need to trust that this is a survival system that has evolved to our benefit," he says.
As choosing a mate is rife with unknowns, it's not best arrived at by number crunching. Here is a story of how Ben Franklin advised his nephew, torn between two sweethearts, to list each woman's qualities, place a numeric value on the importance of those qualities, and total each column. But when a friend did just that and calculated the winner, his heart sank. That's how the friend knew he really wanted the other woman