Do you think with your head or your heart? Denise Chan/Alamy
Here’s a simple task that might help you to understand your mind a little better. Place your finger on part of your body that best represents the location of the “self”. Don’t overthink it; there is no right or wrong answer. Simply tune into the feeling of where the essence of “you”, the very core of your being, resides.
If you are like most people, you will point to either your head or your heart. As absurd as it may seem, a host of research suggests that your answer reflects your thinking style – whether you are being driven by logic and analysis, or intuition and emotion. And learning to shift between the two modes of being – and to do so at will – may have some surprising benefits for your decision-making.
The idea that we may be led by our heads or our hearts is, of course, : the metaphor has become something of a cliché. It was only in 2013, however, that the researchers , now at the University of Houston in Texas, and at North Dakota State University are more than mere figures of speech, with real consequences for our behaviour.
Through self-report questionnaires, they showed that so-called “head-locators” were more likely to describe themselves as rational and logical, whereas “heart-locators” saw themselves as more emotionally driven. And those perceptions seemed to be reflected in more objective measures of behaviour. Fetterman and Robinson found that students who lived inside their heads tended to score better on tests of general knowledge, for instance – an indication that they were leading a more cerebral life. Those who were driven by their heart tended to feel worse in stressful situations, in contrast – which might reflect greater emotional sensitivity compared with those who intellectualise their problems.
Quite astonishingly, they found that people’s general opinions of where the self was located could predict certain outcomes – such as their scores on measures of rational or emotional thinking styles – a year later. This suggests it is a somewhat stable characteristic. Very few aspects of our psychology are entirely fixed, however. Even something as basic as our level of extraversion, after all, can depend on the contextual factors, such as the people around us. Could our notions of the self be similarly flexible? That was the topic of from Robinson’s team at North Dakota State University.
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Across two studies, they asked 455 individuals to imagine performing a variety of activities. For each activity, participants then estimated how much of their self would be in the brain or the heart during that task, on a scale from 1 (none of myself) to 7 (a lot of myself). As expected, many people’s answers tended to shift depending on the nature of the task: they were naturally more likely to put the self in the head when thinking about their studies, for instance, compared with analysing their feelings, when the self flipped to the heart. And this flexibility was directly related to their performance on various tests. Those with a more mobile sense of self scored higher on the American College Testing (ACT) assessment, an exam used for college admissions in the US, as well as the North Dakota Emotional Abilities Test, which measures how well we can predict others’ feelings in various scenarios and find suitable solutions to social problems.
To explain these results, the psychologists draw on the “dual process theory” of human thinking. According to this model of the human mind, we have one mental system engaging in slow but deliberative assessments, while the other is driven purely by intuition and instinct.
The location of the self, Robinson and his colleagues propose, reflects which system we’re engaging – and people who can switch more easily between them will show enhanced decision-making in all domains. The higher performers, they argue, had “mastered the art of recruiting a processing strategy” that suited the task at hand. They had learned when to use the head and when to use the heart.
Might we all learn to do this? I put the question to Robinson. “I think it would take a while to be able to fully visualise the self moving up and down the body in a strategic way, but we could get there through meditation and other body-focused attention exercises,” he told me. “As an intellectual, I feel a lot of self above the neck, but I’m working on this.”
A small experiment from Robinson and Fetterman’s original paper in 2013 found that simply asking participants to touch the different parts of the body could shift their thinking modes while , similar to If they touched their temple, they were more likely to use rational appraisal, whereas if they touched their chest, they were more likely to be guided by their instincts about what is right or wrong. It also influenced their performance on true-or-false tests of general knowledge that required logical deduction: shifting their thinking from the heart to the head seemed to enhance their performance by around 9 percentage points.
I wouldn’t rely on this strategy in my everyday life until it has been replicated in larger trials. Since learning about Robinson’s ongoing research, however, I have started paying a little more attention to the subtle shifts in my sense of self. At points, I’ve noticed, it can seem to lie squarely behind my eyes, while at others, it really does seem to slide down into my rib cage. The difference is so stark it’s quite remarkable that I hadn’t registered the transition before. And by recognising that shift, I have a slightly better insight into what may be driving my decisions.
That’s what I love about psychological research: it can uncover some fundamental aspect of our existence, that we had previously taken for granted, and cast it in a new light.
David Robson’s latest book is The Laws of Connection: 13 social strategies that will transform your life. If you have a question that you would like answered in his column, please send him a message at
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