Lab #57: The Psychology of Intuition

This article describes how gut reactions work, the link with intuition, and how experience and practicing to trust your gut can help you make better decisions.

The old saying “trust your gut” refers to trusting your feelings, your intuition. The expression means to trust your inner voice; the “gut reaction” or “gut feeling” is more profound than your conscious mind.

Gut feeling is intuition, which can be a valuable tool in some circumstances. It seems gut feelings do mean something, and they can often help you make good decisions if you know how they work.

Trusting your gut takes practice to get good at it. When people talk about having great intuition or being good decision-makers, it’s because they’ve worked at honing their gut feeling skills.

What is your Gut?

Your brain is delicately linked to other body parts through your nervous system and through chemical signals such as hormones and neurotransmitters. Some neuroscientists assert that the mind is this intertwined system of brain and body. This, then, helps explain why intuitive feelings are frequently accompanied by physical reactions.

You may sometimes get an unusual feeling in the stomach, other times in the throat, and other times on the skin. The sensation can be like looking at a great piece of art for the first time or a feeling that seems deeper and wiser than the surface-level conscious mind. Intuitive decision-making or ‘gut instinct’ is your ability to instantly get an understanding of something without needing to consider other people’s opinions about it or take time to think it over. It is your inner feeling about something.

Gut feelings arise within your body, and it’s hard to explain to others the exact source or meaning of them. Intuitions are personal, and no one else can understand the full extent of your gut feeling. You have to deal with it alone. Trusting your gut or intuition is an act of trusting yourself.

One of the more common places a gut feeling arises is when dealing with unhealthy situations and relationships. It’s often hard to pinpoint why someone might make you uneasy, for example, on a date that’s not going well or in a one-on-one meeting with someone who gives off a discomforting or threatening aura. You likely perceive signals on a subconscious level that your senses spot, but your conscious mind doesn’t. Those signals manifest in your gut and let you know that something isn’t right. But a gut feeling isn’t just a negative ‘warning sign’ sort of intuition — it’s beneficial for creative and entrepreneurial thinking too.

How does a gut feeling work?

Gut feelings or intuitions come from patterns we’ve identified in our past experiences. Your subconscious mind continuously processes information that you are not consciously aware of, not only when you’re asleep but also when you’re awake. This helps explain the “aha” moments you experience when you see, feel, hear or learn something that you actually already knew. The revelation of the obvious occurs when your conscious mind finally learns something that your subconscious mind had already known.

Gut feelings or intuitions occur when your brain makes a substantial match or mismatch between past experiences and current experiences. What we are noticing are patterns based on past experiences, we store these patterns and associated information as long-term memory, and then retrieve the information when we see these patterns again in our everyday experience. These patterns we can envisage as rows of data being populated in a never-ending spreadsheet.

In the left-hand columns are the patterns, the bits of information that we notice across similar situations. And in the right-hand columns are other various bits of information — outcomes, expectancies, reasonable goals, and expected actions, things that we have learned to associate with those patterns. The next time we detect one of these patterns (or something similar), our brain finds it in the spreadsheet and delivers the corresponding outcome information to us.

Current research suggests that a brain is a predictive machine constantly comparing new experiences against previously-stored earlier experiences and, as a result, can predict what will happen next. If you have enough experience in a particular field, the mind’s intuitions or information are more reliable. Gut feelings or intuitions, therefore, improve with experience, especially breadth and depth.

Being experienced in your field allows you to rely on your gut feelings more. If you have years of experience under your belt or you’ve performed extensive research to deal with a problem, the solution will automatically materialize before you. You don’t have to question how you came to a particular conclusion; you just know. You have enough facts, and you know what is right, so don’t overthink it: trust your gut.

Bruce Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group, may have put it best when, in 1977, he called intuition “the subconscious integration of all the experiences, conditioning, and knowledge of a lifetime, including the cultural and emotional biases of that lifetime.”

Experience improves your gut feelings

To use and trust your gut feelings, you need practice. Our gut feelings are only as good as the patterns we draw them from. So, you need to have had sufficient experience noticing and changing patterns in order to have built up a spreadsheet that is accurate and extensive.

A poker player with years of experience and an amount of trial and error will have built up patterns as to what a winning hand looks like. When they peek at their cards and are struck by a feeling of joy, they would be wise to take that intuition seriously.

But while the quantity of practice is important for establishing patterns and therefore reliable intuitions, their quality is just as important. The best form of practice, the one that most reliably leads to accurate intuitions, is known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice isn’t just repetition, it involves constant refinement based on feedback. It means noticing your gut feelings, thinking about them and the situation that has prompted them.

Truly inspired decisions, however, seem to require an even more sophisticated mechanism: cross-indexing, the ability to see similar patterns in unconnected fields is what elevates a person’s intuitive skills from good to brilliant. Obviously, the power of cross-indexing increases with the amount of material that can be cross-indexed. In general management, people with varied and diverse backgrounds are going to probably be more valuable and will learn faster because they’ll recognize more patterns.

A survey that was conducted in May 2002 by executive search firm Christian & Timbers reveals that fully 45% of corporate executives now rely more on instinct than on facts and figures in running their businesses.

This means we’re likely to have reliable gut feelings in certain situations and unreliable ones in others. Think of your gut feelings as a compass and the world as a vast land dotted with areas of high magnetic resonance.

The compass is invaluable in certain areas and, corrupted by the magnetic field, misleading in others. One of the most important tasks of professionals is to draw a map for ourselves, so we know when to trust the compass and when to put it away.

Benefits of trusting your gut

When making business decisions

• It’s a way for you to make fast and effective decisions in unfamiliar, changing, and complex situations.
• You can align your decisions with your sense of purpose and core values.
• Intuitions help you retain energy otherwise spent trying to make decisions consciously.
• You make choices that utilize higher intelligence and deeper wisdom.
• You become more comfortable with trusting yourself intrinsically.
• Executives routinely rely on their intuitions to solve complex problems when logical methods won’t do. In fact, the consensus is that the higher up on the corporate ladder you climb, the more you will need well-honed business instincts.

When you distrust someone

• If you’re looking for cues that someone is untruthful, you’ll rarely find them in their conscious actions and their words. You can get cues from the vibes they’re giving off and their body language — the latter of which can’t be consciously picked up but will be by those deeper animal parts of your brain that evolved to quickly judge character under duress.
• Although lying — or bending the truth — seems to come naturally to some people, it’s actually pretty difficult for most of us. The body often betrays the words it speaks by giving off micro-expressions revealing the underlying truth. When we spot these subtle cues, we don’t always immediately know we’ve spotted them, but our gut does.
• Logic and systematic thinking aren’t enough to tell you that the person is telling the truth. If you have a gut feeling that a person is deceptive or lying, there is a good chance that you are right.

When something tests your moral constitution

• In business, you’ll sometimes face situations in which you have to opt between what is right and what is profitable.
• Decisions such as new partnerships, recruitment, firing, strategic calls, and making investments can all fall under this category. It’s not always easy to make the right call under the pressure of competing stakeholders.
• Moral judgements and decisions aren’t easy to unpick rationally. Some things just won’t have a good outcome at all, and you’ve got to choose the least bad of the options.
• In these situations, all you can really do is trust your gut. If you’re not struck by remorse or confusion about your decision, you’ve made the right call. In other cases, you might have to deal with a turbulent conscience. Either way, sometimes you might not be able to rationalize your thinking at all. Just make sure you’re ready to explain yourself when questioned.
• It is important to note, however, that in the hiring process, be sure to establish structures that help to overcome unconscious biases, in order to prevent your gut feeling from derailing diversity.

When something feels right

• Intuition isn’t just useful for dealing with problems. It’s highly useful for driving creativity and bringing a bit of magic to otherwise prosaic business procedures.
• You might interview a candidate who doesn’t quite fit the bill for what you were looking for but just feels like a great fit for the team. Or you could be sizing up a purchase — new software or office space, for example — that might have a few flaws on paper but just feels right.
• More intangible things like brand design or marketing copy can be a mix of science and art; you’ll often need to start work guided by data and then use creative imagination to come up with ideas that really sparkle. In cases like these, the gut can be the best guide to what works and what doesn’t.
• Again, be ready to back yourself up with explanations if you’re doing things that leave a paper trail or have an effect on someone else.

Ralph S. Larsen, chair and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, explains the distinction: “Very often, people will do a brilliant job up through the middle management levels, where it’s very heavily quantitative in terms of the decision-making. But then they reach senior management, where the problems get more complex and ambiguous, and we discover that their judgment or intuition is not what it should be. And when that happens, it’s a problem; it’s a big problem.”

Case Study — Dr. Joyce Diane Brothers

Dr Joyce Diane Brothers was an American psychologist who coined the phrase “Trust your hunches. They’re usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.” She became a famous television personality in 1955 for winning the top prize on the American game show The $64,000 Question. She won by trusting her hunches, her gut feelings when presented with multiple choice answers to questions. Often not knowing why she picked answers that just came to her as being correct and as a result got the right answer virtually every time.

You can see the gut feeling in action

Watch a Game Show (like The Chase) where contestants are presented with multiple choice answers to questions. The people who win most are those who go with their gut feeling, saying things like “B just stands out to me” or “C just came to mind”. Then you will hear losers often say “Oh — I thought it was A, that’s the first thing I thought of”. But they selected D instead, not going with their gut.

In-game shows those contestants that go with their gut are right 99% of the time even though they often say they know nothing about the question. It. is a perfect example of a pattern of information in long-term memory known to the subconscious but not the conscious mind. I personally believe we remember (like a long video recording) everything we have ever seen or read and that it is all stored away only accessible by our subconscious memory.

Why should you trust your gut?

In the age of analytical and rational thinking, intuition or gut feelings have fallen out of favour, but your emotional responses towards certain things are not something to be ignored.

It’s difficult to imagine the owners or CEOs of prominent companies making important decisions purely based on their intuition. Big decisions usually have to be made deliberately, carefully, and rationally. However, your emotions are not useless responses that must either be corrected by logic or ignored altogether. Your emotions are evaluations of what you’ve been thinking or experiencing. They’re a crucial part of your information processing system.

But when relying only on a rational mind and logical data in decision making, you can be unintentionally blinkering yourself. Sometimes, you are so data-driven that you can’t see the forest for the trees and fail to exercise wisdom and insight where it’s really needed. If you’re confused over which option to choose and cannot make a decision, the only way you can move forward is often to just trust your gut.

More than 40% of CEOs say they make decisions based on their gut feeling (or intuition) despite having access to troves of data, analytical tools, and experts at hand.

The Take-Away

Intuitions or gut feelings occur when your brain makes a substantial match or mismatch between past experiences and current experiences. We notice patterns through past experiences, store these patterns and associated information into long-term memory, and then retrieve the information when we see these patterns again in our everyday experience.

To use and trust our gut feelings, we need practice. Our gut feelings are only as good as the patterns we draw them from. So, we need to have had sufficient experience noticing and changing patterns in order to have built up a database that is accurate and extensive.

Being experienced in your field allows you to rely on your gut feelings more. If you have years of experience under your belt or you’ve performed extensive research to deal with a problem, the solution will automatically materialize before you. Many companies and their executives find themselves in increasingly turbulent waters. Thanks to rapid advances in technology, business models in some markets are changing seemingly overnight and new competitors are emerging from everywhere.

There is no way that you could have the time to thoroughly analyze every one of the options or alternatives available to you, so sometimes you just need to rely on your gut.