The Risks of Intuition

When we adopt an “if it feels right, it must be true” approach to truthfinding, we leave our minds open to exploitation by people who know how to make us feel things.

As a person who makes many decisions by gut-feel rather than dispassionate analysis, I’ve come to respect the role of intuition in my life. But there is a danger to giving oneself up entirely to intuition.

I think of intuition as shorthand for: “My conscious mind is getting information from other parts of me, and I’m listening to it.” It’s smart to cultivate this inner listening, since our subconscious minds and bodies have so many important things to share with us.

But just like email, our intuition inbox can be infiltrated by deceptive spam and phishing links. We can get messages that seem like they come from wiser parts of us, but in fact they came from someone else who is adept at exploiting our biases or feeding us false information. Or they come from unwise/selfish/scared parts of us that masquerade as inner wisdom.

That doesn’t mean we need to toss out the inbox completely, but it does mean we need to be discerning about the messages we receive from it. We need to check our intuition with other sources of information outside ourselves, especially those that “feel wrong.” (Science is far from perfect and many of its blindspots stem from the way it’s funded, but it still is still one of our best “spam filters.”)

Most importantly, we need to get comfortable with saying “I don’t know” when we’re confronted with conflicting messages. Yes, let’s continue to get useful information from our intuition (and other sources), but as soon as we fully trust our intuition, we’ve essentially turned our minds into easily hackable computers.