Intuition: John Douglas on How to Strengthen Intuition

Intuition is an instinctual form of cognition by which a person can size up a situation or person in rapid time. Rather than go through a lengthy process of deliberation, you instead rely on a gut feeling to make your assessment.

These intuitive feelings are often right, although the way human consciousness arrives at such effective conclusions on such short notice remains somewhat mysterious. It’s also essential to check your biases—intuition might make for unfair judgments from time to time as well.

The word “intuition” derives from the Latin “intuēri” (with “in” meaning the same thing it does in English and “tuēri” meaning “looking at”). This evolved into the late Latin word “intuitio” before morphing into yet another new word in Middle English, “intuycyon.” From here, it became its contemporary English spelling: intuition.

Intuition is a form of information processing your body and mind perform by filtering through similar situations you’ve experienced in the past. While every psychologist’s definition of intuition might differ slightly, almost all agree intuition is a form of pattern-matching. This explanation of intuition has remained one of the most popular from the early philosophy of Plato up through the contemporary work of premier cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Intuition might be easier to understand in practice than in theory. Consider these three examples of the cognitive process in action:

• A first impression: Suppose you meet a person for the first time and can tell from the minute you meet them you’ll be friends. Now, imagine you meet someone else the next day and are certain you won’t be. Of course, you might be wrong in both instances, but people often know very quickly whether they’ll get along with another person based on their own intuition.
• A moral decision: Think about a time when you had a moral quandary on your hands. Ask yourself if you knew right away what the ethical thing to do was. If you did, you experienced a form of moral intuition (your conscience). It’s possible this derives from your upbringing and education, as well as your own positive experience of how kindness, integrity, and positivity contributes to your own well-being as well as that of others.
• A life-or-death situation: Picture yourself in a New York subway station. You hear a train coming in the distance and see a person fall onto the track. Before you know it, you’ve run to the person in question to help them to safety. There’s no rational chain of action here—instead, you responded to the time pressure of the situation by acting off intuition and instinct.

Intuitive decision-making is essential to navigating life. If you went through a lengthy chain of rationalization for every decision you ever had to make, you would have a hard time getting almost anything done. Human beings must rely on their intuitive faculties to make real-life decisions in real time. By drawing on past experiences and unconscious processing, you can respond to the needs of the moment in a speedier and more efficacious way.

Fear is almost always a negative reaction of immediate apprehension or anxiety, whereas intuition can be very positive. Intuition is also more likely to appear in a cool and collected state of mind, while fear appears when your fight-or-flight mode activates. Both operate at the level of your gut, in both a figurative and occasionally literal sense.

For instance, suppose a group of women have to cut through a dark alleyway at night to get home. They notice a group of menacing people emerge from the shadows who then start to run toward them. In this circumstance, the women’s intuition and fear tells them to do the same thing: run. In other words, at least in some circumstances, fear and intuition can operate in the same way.

Former FBI criminal profiler John Douglas has spent years developing his own intuition. Keep these tips from him in mind as you refine your own use of intuition:

• Ask questions. As you experience intuitive feelings, ask yourself why they might be arising. Try to make sense of the person in front of you. “What is the motive?” John asks himself. “What does this person want? Why is he or she treating me like this, talking to me like this? What is their motivation?” As you gain self-understanding from this process, your intuition will prove even more effective in the future.
• Evaluate body language. When you attempt to size people up, take a moment to look at both their verbal and nonverbal communication. “What's their voice like? How [are] their hand gestures, facial expressions?” John suggests you ask. “Eye evasiveness, tension in [their] body, repeating the question,” he says, are all significant signs that provide meaningful clues into why you feel the way you do in response to the other person.
• Look at past experiences. John believes it’s very useful to look backward and see where you failed to listen to your accurate intuition. “What was the end result from that?” he asks. “Did you make mistakes in retrospect? Should you have listened to it? Most of us have been in situations where we should've listened to our intuition.” On the same note, look back and ask yourself when you did listen to your intuition and it wound up being wrong.
• Practice makes perfect. Try to find opportunities to put your intuition to the test. See if you can read people in real time. “Listen to others,” John suggests. “Spot signs of lying, people who contradict themselves or [repeat] themselves. Are they always on the defensive?” As you accrue more experiences, you’ll develop a more refined intuition over time.

Getting to the core of human behavior takes knowledge and skills—just ask former FBI criminal profiler John Douglas. Learn how to spot a liar and uncover John’s tips for identifying other deceptive behaviors when you sign up for the MasterClass Annual Membership.