Have you ever had a feeling about something, even with no evidence to support your reaction? Maybe it was a feeling that someone close to you could not be trusted, or a feeling that a person was attracted to you? How many times have you had “gut feelings” about something that ended up being true? These feelings are called intuition, and being able to intuitively sense and react are qualities built in to the human experience. Granted, it is never wise to live a life where all you do is intuitively react to the world around you, but it’s also not smart to completely ignore your intuitive impressions, either. This week we explore the psychology of intuition, and how our human hard-wiring allows us to better navigate people and life situations — even with limited or no information.
Understanding intuition
Intuition is defined as an ability to understand or know something without needing to think about it or use reason to discover it, or a feeling that shows this ability. Intuition is the ability to understand or know something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. Human intuition is thought to come about from:
- Pattern recognition. This occurs when our brain pulls stored past experiences and subconsciously compares them to the present situation.
- Emotional tagging. Our brain often attaches emotions to experiences, and this helps us make quick judgements in similar future scenarios.
- Implicit learning. We absorb knowledge and social cues over times, even if we can’t consciously articulate it.
When we experience gut feelings, is it just luck? While gut feelings certainly are not perfect, why is it that most of us can quickly identify a few important times in our lives where gut feelings really helped with our decision making? Is intuition built into our hard-wiring as a safety feature, and something we should use more often? Is the ability to intuitively feel the world around us a gift, as how the author of The Gift of Fear suggests?
When things don’t feel right in the world around us, should we pay closer attention? Or is it silly to even give those thoughts credibility? When we feel as though somebody is being done wrong, in harms way, or going to be victimized, should we listen and react to those impressions? While it is difficult to establish quantitatively that there is power behind our intuition, if you ask most people about gut feelings you might be surprised at just how many people not only experience intuition, but more often than not “trust their gut.”
Final thoughts
Intuition is a funny thing — it’s tough to establish proof that it exists, yet almost everyone you know can tell you how intuition has helped them in their lifetime. If you agree that intuition is a part of the human condition, then it likely makes sense that, over time, we do learn about the world around us by means of pattern recognition, emotional tagging, and implicit learning. Sometimes we don’t have the time needed to properly analyze a person or situation, allowing for our intuition to help guide our impression management and decision making.
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