A hunch. A nagging feeling. A suspicion. A sixth sense. An inner voice. All of these are ways of describing intuition, that most nebulous and new-agey ability that supposedly lies inside all of us. Many women claim to rely heavily on their intuition, while many men say that it doesn’t factor into their lives much at all. But whether we grasp it or not, our powers of intuition affect our lives and our decision making more than we ever realize.
A Sensory Shortcut
Intuition gets lumped in with crystals, chakras, and tarot cards as the kind of thinking that humans respect least. We value logic, which requires reason and evidence, and intuition is its polar opposite— unconscious knowing without any logical rationale. Intuition leads to strong assessments that we can’t explain readily. If you’ve ever had a powerful feeling that you know something without knowing how you know it, you’ve experienced your intuition at work.
Our minds absorb and process incredible amounts of information every moment, and when we use our intuition, we fall back on those sometimes tiny and inconsequential observations to make decisions. Even if we don’t remember them, we squirrel them away in the recesses of our memory, where they wait to be called into use. For example, when walking down a familiar street at night, a woman might feel apprehensive without understanding why. She may not remember the shifty characters she saw loitering there a few days ago, or the newscaster who reported an increase in assaults in the area. She may not consciously hear the footsteps behind her that are a little too close. But her brain keeps these cues on file, and it sends her a warning to protect her. Intuition allows us to arrive at an answer without showing us the problem first; some studies have even shown it to be faster and more accurate than deliberate thought.
“A Woman Knows” … or Does She?
One cultural stereotype says that women have better intuition than men do, but many studies reveal that’s not the case. In his book Everyday Mind Reading, Dr. William Ickes writes that only in studies in which women are aware of the stereotype do they perform better than men on tests of intuitive ability. He hypothesized that there is no real innate difference in the sexes; it’s just that when there’s an expectation that women will do better, they try harder to excel at the task. Men, already assumed to have inferior intuitive powers, have no such motivation, but researchers have found that when study participants were paid for correct answers, the gender disparity went away. Once the men had a motivation to do well, they were able to answer the questions just as accurately, even though they were more likely to credit their manly “gut feelings,” rather than their “feminine” intuition.
Women are accustomed to relying on their intuition and are more comfortable using it in daily life. They’re not afraid to follow hunches, whether they turn out to be right or wrong. Men, on the other hand, often feel uncomfortable straying from rational thought, and never get used to trusting their inner voice.
