A team of firefighters were called to a house fire. At first glance it seemed pretty standard—flames coming from the kitchen.
So they followed the usual playbook: send in the hose crew, hit it with water, and put it out.
But when they spray the source of the fire. There’s No change.
The fire keeps raging as if nothing happened. Weird.
So they try again. Still no difference.
The lieutenant gathers the crew in the living room to plan the next move.
But he starts to feel really uneasy.
He can’t see anything wrong. There’s no explosion, no sudden changes.
He just has this deep, nagging feeling that something’s seriously wrong.
He trusts his gut and tells his crew, to get out. right now.
“The second they make it out, the entire living room floor collapses.
If they’d stayed even just a few more seconds, they would’ve dropped into a raging inferno.
The real fire wasn’t in the kitchen—it was underneath them, in the basement.
“Afterward, when they asked the lieutenant why he pulled everyone out, he had no idea.
He actually joked that maybe he had extrasensory perception.
Some people say intuition is a psychic ability—like telepathy, a sixth sense, or a link to the universe.
Ancient cultures saw intuition as divine wisdom.
Mystics and spiritualists claim it’s proof of extrasensory perception.
Today we’re diving into the latest research into the science of intuition!
The Three I’s Quiz
Where we figure out if your decision-making skills are instinct, intuition, or insight!
I’m going to show you 3 questions and you need to tell me which you think it is! Are you ready?
Question 1
You’re hiking through the woods and suddenly—a bear appears! You don’t think, you just run. Is this:
A) Intuition
B) Instinct
C) Insight
That’s instinct! It’s hardwired for survival. You don’t analyze, you don’t predict—you just react!
Question 2
You’ve been racking your brain, trying to remember an actor’s name from a movie.
Nothing. You give up. Then, two days later, while in the shower, the name randomly pops into your head. Is this:
A) Intuition
B) Instinct
C) Insight
That’s insight! Your subconscious kept working on the problem while you weren’t thinking about it, and boom—the answer arrives when you least expect it!”
Question 3
You have two job offers. One looks great on paper, but something about it feels… off. You go with the other one instead. Is this:
A) Intuition
B) Instinct
C) Insight
That’s intuition! Your brain is picking up on subtle cues from past experiences, even if you can’t explain why.
Thanks for playing The Three I’s!
We’re told to ‘trust our gut’—but should we?
What was really happening when the firefighter made the call to evacuate?
Cognitive psychologist Gary Klein studied the firefighter’s while researching how experts make split-second life-or-death decisions.
When Klein interviewed the fire lieutenant, he kept asking—‘What made you realize the danger?’
But the firefighter couldn’t explain it. At that moment, he just felt something was wrong.
And it’s not just firefighters who do this.
ER doctors
A patient is rushed into the emergency room. Chest pain. Sweating. The ER doctor has seconds to decide—is it a heart attack or something else?
There’s no time for extensive tests, or to analyze every possibility. They have to trust their gut.
A study found that many experienced ER doctors can spot a heart attack almost instantly, before any tests come back.
Stock Market Traders
Another experiment looked at professional stock market traders.
With the markets moving fast, there are millions of dollars on the line, and they have to decide—buy or sell?
They don’t have time to analyze every detail… so they trust their gut. And somehow, it works.
Their intuition was often more accurate than pure data analysis.
But when asked why, they couldn’t put it into words. It just felt right.
Recognition-Primed Decision Making
Klein calls this Recognition-Primed Decision Making. In other words, it’s pattern recognition.
The lieutenant had been in so many fires that his brain picked up on tiny cues like the fire being too hot and too quiet.
These anomalies sent his spidey senses tingling.
Emergency room doctors have seen so many heart attacks they can recognize the symptoms immediately.
Traders pick up on subtle market patterns over years of experience.
They see movements, reactions, and trends so often that it builds mental shortcuts—allowing them to react without overthinking.
Intuition works best where experience gives you exposure to patterns.
But the patterns need to give you reliable, repeated feedback whenever the circumstances are the same.
So even with experience, a firefighter will have more reliable intuition than a stock trader. Because stock markets are highly unpredictable.
Whether you’re a musician, a chef, or a parent, the more you practice, the more experience you get, and the more your brain learns to recognize patterns and make decisions without thinking too hard.
Psychology studies on intuition
But how do scientists study this? How do they figure out what’s actually happening in our brains and bodies when we trust our intuition?
4 piles of cards
Imagine you’re playing a card game with four decks of cards.
Your goal is to win as much money as possible.
But here’s the catch—two decks are secretly rigged against you.
This is exactly what happened in a famous psychology experiment.
Participants sat in front of four stacks of cards with different amounts of winnings and losses on them.
Some of the cards led to big payouts, others to big losses.
Two decks were bad— with bigger wins but also more losses. They were designed to make players lose over time.
The other two were good—giving smaller, but consistent, wins and smaller losses.
At first, people drew cards randomly. But here’s where it gets interesting…
It took about 50 cards before participants consciously realized which decks were bad. But after only 10 cards, participants started sweating slightly when reaching for the bad decks.
Their hands hesitated. Their bodies were literally reacting to danger… even though they hadn’t consciously figured out the pattern yet.
What’s happening here?
The brain is always scanning for patterns, picking up on tiny clues without us even realizing it.
Your gut feeling is your subconscious working faster than your conscious mind.
Chess boards
Imagine looking at a chessboard for just five seconds… and then perfectly recreating every piece on it. Sounds impossible, right?
Psychologists tested chess masters and beginners on their ability to memorize chess positions.
Players were shown a chessboard for a few seconds. Then, they had to recreate it from memory.
Chess masters aced it—placing almost every piece perfectly.
Beginners? Total chaos.
It looked like chess masters had superhuman memory. But then the researchers changed one thing and everything fell apart.
Instead of showing real chess positions, researchers randomized the pieces into nonsense positions—ones that would never happen in a real game. And suddenly…
The chess masters struggled just as much as the beginners.
Why? Because they hadn’t been memorizing individual pieces—they were memorizing patterns.
Their expertise wasn’t about better memory, but faster pattern recognition from studying and playing thousands of hours of chess—their brains grouped familiar layouts into chunks, like words in a sentence…
Reflex vs Reflect Quiz
Round 1
I’m going to show you three questions. Answer them as fast as you can. Ready? Go!
✅ What’s 2 + 2?
✅ What color is the sky?
✅ Complete the phrase: Peanut butter and…
That felt effortless, right? Your brain instantly pulled answers from memory. That’s fast thinking—intuition. But let’s try something harder…
Round 2
❓ What’s 17 × 24?
❓ If a bat and a ball cost $1.10 total, and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, how much is the ball?
If you answered that last question too fast, you might have got it wrong.
Most people instinctively say ‘10 cents,’ but the real answer is 5 cents. Your brain tried to take a shortcut—and shortcuts don’t always work.
Thanks for playing Reflex vs Reflect!
Two systems for thinking
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discovered that our brains run on two systems when making decisions.
System 1
System 1 is the autopilot. It’s fast, effortless, and instinctive.
It helps you instantly recognize faces, finish common phrases, or dodge a ball flying at your head.
It’s great for snap judgments—but also really prone to errors. System 1 loves shortcuts—it goes with what ‘feels’ right, not what’s logically correct.
System 2
Then there’s System 2. This is the deep thinker, the detective in your brain.
It kicks in when you solve a tough math problem, apply critical thinking, or make a big life decision.
It’s careful, logical, and deliberate—but also lazy. If System 1 can handle something, System 2 won’t even show up.
Can intuition help us with massive, life-changing choices?
Big life decisions—things like choosing a career, buying a house, or deciding to start a family—are way more complicated than playing cards or chess.
Psychologist Adrian Camilleri asked people to list the ten biggest decisions of their lives. Then reflect on how they made each decision.
Did they make a quick decision relying on their gut? Or was it logical and analytical? And did they feel the decisions turned out to be good or bad.
Maybe you can relate to the kind of big life decisions they made?
Education – What to study, whether to go to college, or switch fields.
Career – Picking a profession, quitting a job, or starting a business.
Relationships – Getting married, breaking up, or committing to someone long-term.
Family – Deciding to have kids (or not) and how to raise them. Whether or not to get a pet.
Finances – Buying a house, making big investments, or planning for retirement.
What did the study find?
People who made choices that aligned with their values and took the time to think things through were way more satisfied in the long run.
But those who made snap decisions or ignored what really mattered to them? They were the ones most likely to look back with regret.
The decisions people felt best about were the ones that focused on self-growth and led to a meaningful life, they made them with purpose and following their morals.
Gut feeling reactions
Imagine you’re deciding whether to take a new job in a different city.
You’ve researched the company, the role, the location, and it all seems perfect on paper. But then, as you’re sitting down to make the final decision, your chest tightens, and you get this sudden sense of unease.
You’re not sure where it’s coming from, but something doesn’t feel right.
Or maybe in the same situation, you feel a rush of excitement, like your heart is pumping faster when you think about the opportunity.
Where do these reactions come from?
As you go about your daily life and encounter a situation, your body sends signals—like your heart racing, muscles tensing, or even your posture changing.
These are your somatic markers. Over time, your brain learns to connect these physical reactions to past experiences.
So, if you’ve made a decision before that turned out well, your body might give you a little boost of happiness, encouraging you to make a similar choice.
On the flip side, if a decision led to a negative outcome, your body might send a signal of discomfort—like a warning to avoid that path again.
But we have experiences all the time so trying to trace back where our body originally learned to send these positive or negative signals can be very difficult.
And science shows that the signals they are sending might even be completely wrong.
When intuition is wrong
Gambler’s Fallacy
Imagine you’re at a roulette wheel in a casino and the ball has landed on red the last 5 times.
Which colour do you think it is more likely to land on next?
Red or black?
If you said black, you’re falling for the Gambler’s Fallacy.
Every spin is independent and the probability of it landing on red or black is the same as it was in the previous spin.
But in this situation, a lot of people will believe that their gut is telling them a pattern exists when it really doesn’t.
Hindsight Bias
After a big event—like a stock market drop or a cup final game — have you ever felt like you just knew that was going to happen? Even if you didn’t predict it beforehand.
This is Hindsight Bias at work. Be careful with this one as if you believe this too often, it can make you feel overconfident in trusting your gut in the future.
The Halo Effect
Ever met someone who is dressed well and speaks confidently at work? Did you assume they must be highly skilled or good at their job?
This is the halo effect at work. When we see one positive trait in someone it leads us to believe that they have other positive traits too.
Hiring managers need to be especially aware of this so they don’t just hire the best dressed or most charismatic candidates!
It works in reverse too. If someone has a negative trait we assume they have other negative traits.
Confirmation Bias
I’m sure you’ve come across some friends or family who are on a new diet.
They can’t stop talking about how amazing it is and they read and share stories and books from people who have had success with it.
But they ignore scientific studies showing it’s no more effective than other diets—or even potentially harmful.
This is Confirmation Bias. We seek out or interpret information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs.
Price-Quality Heuristic
If there’s two bottles of wine available on the restaurant menu. A $10 bottle and a $20 bottle. Which one do you think will taste better?
Price and branding can lead us to infer that something is higher quality, even when blind taste tests for wine often prove otherwise.
Each of these examples shows how our intuition tricks us! It can feel right but actually lead us in the wrong direction.
But don’t dismiss your intuition just yet!
Neuroscientists have found a way you can harness the power of your intuition to make better decisions.
Harnessing the power of your intuition
Neuroscientist Joel Pearson developed the SMILE framework in his book The Intuition Toolkit (Amazon affiliate link).
If your intuition passes the SMILE, it might be worth trusting it.
S – Self-Awareness
Before trusting your gut, check how you’re feeling. Are you stressed, tired, or emotional?
Strong emotions—whether excitement or fear—can hijack intuition and make you overconfident in a bad decision.
If you’re in a heightened emotional state, take a step back before making a big call.
M – Mastery
Intuition works best in areas where you’ve put in the time.
If you’ve spent years playing driving, your gut instinct about when a car will change lanes is probably solid.
But if you’re new to being around dogs, your “intuition” on whether a bark is playful or aggressive is really just a guess.
Make sure your gut is backed by real experience in situations which have given you reliable, consistent feedback.
I – Impulse Control
Not every gut feeling is intuition—sometimes it’s just an impulse.
Craving junk food? That’s not intuition, that’s dopamine talking.
The key is learning to tell the difference between a deep, instinctive knowing and a fleeting urge. How can you check?
Real intuition feels calm, not urgent.
L – Low Probability Trap
Your gut is terrible at predicting rare events.
If you’re making a decision where the odds are really low—like winning the lottery or being struck by lightning—intuition won’t help.
For anything based on pure chance, skip the gut feeling and go with logic instead.
E – Environment Matters
Your intuition thrives in familiar territory. A firefighter can trust their gut in a burning building because they’ve been there before.
But if you’re in a completely new situation, your instincts might be totally off. Make sure your gut is playing on home turf.
So the next time your intuition is shouting for you to do what it wants, just SMILE.
If you can check off these SMILE rules, you can trust your gut. If not? Take a little more time to think it through.
Though, don’t think it through too much! If you get stuck in analysis paralysis when making decisions, then check out this video on the psychology behind overthinking and 4 ways you can overcome it immediately.
Click to watch the full video on YouTube
References
The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why, Joel Pearson. https://amzn.to/3XBkxyy
The four types of intuition managers need to know
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0007681321002196
Intuition: Myth or a Decision-Making Tool https://www.researchgate.net/publication/29455822_Intuition_Myth_or_a_Decision-Making_Tool
Intuition and Insight: Two Processes That Build on Each Other or Fundamentally Differ? Thea Zander, Michael Öllinger, Kirsten G Volz https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5020639
Fitting decisions: Mood and intuitive versus deliberative decision strategies,
Marieke de Vries, Rob W. Holland & Cilia L. M. Witteman (2008):
Cognition &
Emotion, 22:5, 931-943 https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/55063
Spotting the Gaps. Gary Klein https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/seeing-what-others-dont/201607/spotting-the-gaps
Sources of Power, 20th Anniversary Edition: How People Make Decisions. Gary Klein. https://amzn.to/423H8VP
An investigation of big life decisions
Adrian R. Camilleri
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/article/an-investigation-of-big-life-decisions/CB8C03820840951ABE104AB24AB9ECE2
A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning
Shigehiro Oishi 1, Erin C
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34383524/
How to make big decisions: A cross-sectional study on the decision making process in life choices
Lucrezia Savioni et al.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-022-02792-x
The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex, A R Damasio. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1996 Oct 29;351(1346):1413-20. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8941953/
A Universal Model of Diagnostic Reasoning. Croskerry, Pat MD, PhD.
https://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/abstract/2009/08000/a_universal_model_of_diagnostic_reasoning.14.aspx#
Perception in Chess. Chase and Simon.
https://iiif.library.cmu.edu/file/Simon_box00005_fld00354_bdl0001_doc0001/Simon_box00005_fld00354_bdl0001_doc0001.pdf
Thought and Choice in Chess. Adriaan De Groot.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332863064_Thought_and_choice_in_chess
The Iowa Gambling Task: A Review of the Historical Evolution, Scientific Basis, and Use in Functional Neuroimaging.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244019856911