A quick gut feeling quietly does the math your brain skips

Paul Slovic proposed that people often judge risks and benefits not by weighing evidence, but by consulting a fast emotional tag attached to the idea itself: things that feel good get rated as low-risk and high-benefit, and things that feel bad get rated as high-risk and low-benefit, regardless of the actual statistics. This 'affect heuristic' lets people decide quickly, but it can override logic entirely when a gut feeling and the real numbers point in opposite directions.

— Paul Slovic, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, Donald G. MacGregor, The Affect Heuristic — 2002