In defense of intuition: Why gut feelings deserve respect

There’s nothing supernatural about your intuition.

Despite its long-standing association with new-age mysticism and self-help slogans à la The Secret, intuition has, by now, amassed enough scientific credibility to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our more lauded analytical faculties.

The quiet little voice in the back of your mind isn’t whispering cosmic truths others aren’t privy to, instead, it’s doing something much more grounded and, arguably, more powerful: pulling together a myriad of threads from your subconscious to help you make decisions.

Loosely defined, intuition is the ability to discern relevant patterns or cues and match them with appropriate beliefs or actions without conscious deliberation (see e.g. Hodgkinson et al., 2008). When you zoom out to consider decision-making across all species, intuition or something very much like it, is probably the dominant mode of choice on this planet. Amoebas shy from pinpricks and reach toward food without a neuron to their name.

Birds migrate without debate about whether the magnetic north pole has shifted more than usual this year. A rabbit fleeing a rustle doesn’t run the numbers on whether it may be of benign cause instead.

The real outlier on Spaceship Earth is human-style analytical thought, which stands in stark contrast with intuition.

System 1, System 2, and the myth of full rationality

Much of what we know about human cognition comes from the work of cognitive psychologists such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who popularised the framework of System 1 and System 2 thinking.

System 1 is fast, automatic, and entirely intuitive. It’s what kicks in when you catch a glass of water that you sent tumbling down by accident or feel suspicious of someone’s intentions without knowing why. In many ways, this is the brain’s default mode of information processing that is evolutionarily older, energy-efficient, and shared across many species.

System 2, by contrast, is slow, deliberate, and effortful. It’s the mode we use when calculating interest rates, writing reports, or contemplating career changes. It burns calories, takes time, and is often considered unique to humans in its complexity.

For all its rigour and vaulted position in the annals of intellect, System 2 is used far less than we think. Most decisions we make, from mundane social judgments to major life pivots, are shaped primarily by the quiet, cumulative work of System 1. We simply rationalise them with System 2 after the fact. As Robert Heinlein put it, man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalising animal, which gives us all the more reason to understand how intuition actually works in guiding our decisions.

When instinct knows best

It makes evolutionary sense that intuition would excel in areas our species has faced for millennia.

Trustworthiness, social cohesion, threat detection, and mate selection are only a few of the domains that have shaped our social species’ survival for countless millennia. As a result, it comes as no surprise how often we get gut feelings about other people and our relationships with them. We notice something off about a new coworker before we can name it just as easily as we walk away from a too-good-to-be-true pitch, even if every slide in the deck says “profit” and we have no explicit reason not to believe it.

Our ancestors didn’t have time for committee reviews or spreadsheets. All they had were the vibes.

It is equally unsurprising how easily these instincts can be gamed. Our brains evolved to make sense of subtle cues, and in today’s world, those cues can be manipulated more easily than ever, not least because of our emerging understanding of how intuition guides our thinking. Studies have shown that deeper voices are perceived as more authoritative (Klofstad et al, 2012), and taller, broader-shouldered candidates are more likely to win elections (e.g. Little et al, 2006), not because they’re necessarily better, but because they trigger inherited heuristics about strength and leadership that made sense in our past evolutionary environment.

These spurious correlations may have once served a function, but today they can lead us astray. Likewise, we’re unlikely to have the innate capacity for robust intuitions about patterns our ancestors did not encounter, or where the filtering effect of making the wrong call was not strong enough. Recognising this doesn’t mean we should abandon intuition. Instead, it gives us reason to leverage it, cognizant of its limitations.

Treat intuition as internalised expertise

We’re born a host of intuitions, but some must be earned the hard way through old-fashioned reinforcement learning.

Take the now legendary case of chicken sexers. These are, or perhaps now thanks to AI were, professionals trained to identify the sex of baby chicks within seconds, despite the birds being nearly indistinguishable to the untrained eye. When asked how they do it, most sexers can’t explain how they do it. They simply “know” (Horsey, 2002). Instead of formulas, they have thousands of iterations behind them, until the brain begins to sense patterns it can’t yet articulate.

Chess masters operate the same way. So do firefighters, elite athletes, and ER nurses. In these domains, System 2 thinking, the deliberate reasoning that novices rely on, gets etched into automatic responses. What began as hard-earned logic becomes gut-level certainty. Intuition of this kind is the trophy of relentless practice.

That’s what makes it so valuable: it frees up cognitive resources while retaining reliability, at least in the contexts where it was trained.

What’s best, we have every reason to believe that professional intuition is within grasp, if only we choose to reach for it.

Bierdeman and Shiffar showed how novice chicken sexers could come to surpass professional ones after only a minute of training with an instruction sheet (Biederman, Shiffrar, 1987). Where pros got 72% of the pictures right, trained novices hit averages of 84%, hinting at how the experts were unable to fully translate their intuitions from live chicks to a new field, while the novices had no such baggage keeping them down. Superior intuition, it seems, is ours for the taking if only we knew how.

What do we do with this knowledge?

First, reframe what intuition is and isn’t. It’s not a message from the universe or a divine cheat code for better decisions. Instead, it’s your brain, quietly absorbing signals you didn’t consciously perceive, subtle shifts in tone, facial microexpressions, background patterns that didn’t trigger System 2. And just like System 2, it can misfire. Just because it feels right doesn’t mean it is right.

Second, test your intuitions, just like you’d test a hypothesis. Follow up on decisions made via gut feeling and assess them post hoc. Did your instincts serve you well, or were you led astray? The more you reflect, the more calibrated your internal compass becomes thanks to the magic of reinforcement.

Third, feed your intuition by living a rangeful life. Explore widely and boldly enter into new domains to get better at spotting patterns. Learn new skills and seek out unfamiliar environments. The more varied the data your brain gets, the better it becomes at detecting patterns as well as avoiding the traps of bias.

Finally, understand that intuition isn’t the enemy of reason, nor is it its polar opposite. Rather, it’s its silent partner that often does most of the heavy lifting. The best decisions emerge from a subtle dance between both systems, a flash of insight followed by sober evaluation.

So yes, trust your gut and give it the respect it deserves. But not because it’s magic. Respect it because it’s yours, trained by evolution, refined by experience, and shaped by the life you’ve lived so far.