What Is a Gut Feeling, and Should You Trust it?

Before relying on your intuition, ask yourself these questions

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For something most people rely on so heavily, intuition is also fairly nebulous, mysterious, and ill-defined. Where does it come from? What causes it to kick in? And what does your “gut” know that your brain doesn’t?

We tend to talk about the two as separate, often conflicting entities, but your rational mind and your intuition are more closely linked than you might realize. In fact, the former is a tool of the latter: Your intuition uses the information your mind has already collected. (In that, it differs from instinct, which is a hardwired response to real or perceived danger.)

One widely cited paper described intuition as “affectively charged judgments that arise through rapid, nonconscious, and holistic associations” — in other words, decisions tinged by emotion and experience, both working under the radar to steer you in a certain direction.

That’s not to say that the resulting judgments are necessarily good ones. “One of the dangers is that we can have false intuition or feelings of knowing that turn out to be misleading,” says Gerard Hodgkinson, professor of strategic management and behavioral science at Alliance Manchester Business School. Your friend’s been acting a little…