When Should You Trust Your Intuitions?

You’ve undoubtedly had the experience of something or someone seeming “too good to be true.” As attractive or enticing as that new person in your life may seem, there’s just something within you that feels a bit off.  Some people,

notably those high inpsychopathy, are incredibly good at passing themselves off as terrific and wonderful individuals who have nothing but your best interests at heart.  It therefore becomes incredibly difficulty for you to sniff them out until it’s too late and you’ve been taken advantage of or even physically harmed.

However, I would argue that even when you’re being snowed by a con artist, if you truly listened to your inner voice, you’d back out of the situation before it reaches that point. It’s true that sometimes our inner voice reacts with undue alarm and you need to tune it down, especially if you’ve been hurt in similar situations. Erring on the side of caution is probably less of a risk, though, then jumping in without regard for the possible consequences.

Consider this situation. You need some extra help around your home and want to hire a reliable person to provide you with this help. The first person to respond to your ad shows up, and you feel pretty good that this is the right one for the job. However, you’re a tiny bit skeptical. This person, let’s say it’s a young woman, talks about how she is taking a break from school because she’s not completely sure of what she wants to study. In fact, she’s had a few jobs in a few different areas and she’s also relocated several times in the past couple of years.

Something about this young woman starts to set your skeptic wheels in motion. Moved around? Changed job paths? Can’t stay in school? You may not be a career counselor, but this strikes you as a little unstable. Your skeptical thoughts recede, though, because she does seem so capable and is also quite charming and friendly. So you decide to hire her for those odd jobs. After showing up once, though, your new assistant misses her next appointment at your home and doesn’t return your calls. A couple of weeks go by, and you receive a voicemail from her in which she apologetically announces she’s taken a new job in a different town.  Thinking back on the experience, you realize that you should’ve taken those skeptical thoughts more seriously. You vow that the next time, you’ll either call a person’s references or make your decision based how capable, not nice, the person appears to be.

The psychological study of intuition may perhaps be traced back to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who proposed that there is an intuition dimension topersonality. People high on this dimensionwould, he argued, be more likely to let their own thoughts dominate their experience. Rather than take a “bottom-up” approach to life in which the data drive their decisions, they let their own thoughts and feelings take command, a more “top-down” approach. Therefore, people high in the intuition dimension of personality in the Jungian sense would be more prone to making the error in hiring the young woman who seems nice but is actually flighty.

There is actually now considerable interest in intuitive judgments within the area of philosophical psychology, as indicated by a series of articles in the May 2015 issue ofPhilosophical Psychology (link is external)that examine questions such as intuition in moraljudgments and the relationship between intuition and free will.

At a more practical level, positive psychologists wish to learn whether there can be advantages to trusting your intuitions by tapping into your own inner experience in a situation. In a way, this would be the opposite of the Jungian meaning of the term because it means making judgments on the basis of what you’re thinking or feeling, not what you’re actually experiencing. However, the two approaches are not incompatible if we broaden the Jungian definition.

One feature of intuition in the Jungian sense is that you allow yourself to have access to your inner, unconscious, experience. This could be that gut feeling which is triggered by something being not quite right in a tricky situation, as in the hiring of the young woman. To act on the basis of intuition would mean that you open your mind to your own thoughts and feelings and balance those against the data gained by your senses. In fact, Jung was a strong believer in balance, maintaining that throughout life we gain in maturity through “individuation,” or the ability to counter our yins with our yangs.

In a study intended to demonstrate the connection between intuition andmindfulness, or the ability to remain present in the moment, University of Hildesheim psychologist Carina Remmers and colleagues (2015) attempted to manipulate, experimentally, the state of mindfulness in participants.

Remmers and her collaborators noted that there can be benefits to intuition, “especially in situational contexts in which a person is under stress, time pressure, and when facing complex problems” because “intuitive processes often lead to judgments with higher diagnostic value for the to-be judged criterion than rational-analytic processes of reasoning” (p. 283). In other words, trust your gut when you don’t have much time to think through all the implications of what’s happening around you.

Another time to trust your gut, according to Remmers et al. is when you’ve had a great deal of experience in making a certain judgment. Trying to decide whether a purchase is worth the money, for example, is much easier when you’ve made similar purchases before and know the value of what you’re getting.

How would mindfulness play into this process? The theory guiding the Remmers and team study was that by tapping into your inner experience, you become more open to those all-important intuitive processes. As a further complexity, they manipulated negative mood-set. Theoretically, when you’re in a positive mood, the window to your inner experiences opens up but when you’re in a negative mood, you put your mind to work trying to understand why you feel so bad. This process of rumination increasingly distances you from your gut judgments.

In the mindfulness-induction condition, the Remmers team presented participants with sentences written on cards and told them either to “take note of your thoughts and feelings without judging them” (mindfulness induction) or to “think about the kind of person you are and why you react the way you do” (rumination) (pp. 285-6). Their task was to judge whether a set of 3-word stimuli shared a common meaning or not. From this, the researchers calculated an “intuition index.”

Contrary to prediction, the mindfulness induction didn’t enhance the intuition index of participants. The authors reasoned that it was possible the instructions to participants to tap into their inner feelings without judging them just didn’t work. Instead, when judging the words, they actually employed their more rational, analytic thought processes.

One interpretation of the fact that the study didn’t come out as intended is that becoming more mindful or aware of your experiences won’t help you listen to your intuitions. Another possibility is that the study showed just how difficult it is to tap into our intuitions. Perhaps after so many years of being told that we need to focus on rational judgments, not our inner feelings, we’ve stopped trusting our guts completely.  

However, the theory that intuition can help you make better decisions suggests that it’s still worth paying attention to. When that inner voice tries to make itself heard, it might be time for you to listen.