Do you have a sharp intuition?

Me? My intuition is about 51% reliable. My hunches don’t have much connection to reality.

Generally, yes. Most often when dealing with machines, but whenever I very a feel for a person (which is uncommon), it’s usually dead-on.

Yes, absolutely.
I am the ENTP personality, the extroverted, intuitive, thinking, perceiving type.
We are known to be highly intuitive and uncannily accurate in our assessments as well as clever in our deductions.
We are an excellent blend of intuition and rational thinking which gives us a special edge. ;-)

I sure do- it’s as sharp as a nerf ball!

Here’s an example of just how sharp it is: the next person to post after me will be rojo. ;-o

If I have an immediate dislike or distrust of someone I have just met I have learned to go with my intuition even if others disagree with me. They are trouble.
Based on @coloma ‘s post, I would classify myself as an INTP.

@rojo Hey, we’re a good blend, infact female ENTP’s are rare, only 1% of the total 4% of the population. Explains my unusual thought processes. lol

I also used to have a good sense of presence, that is to be able to know where I was in relation to where I planned to go, but I have noticed that it is not as sharp as it used to be. Maybe because I am not in unfamiliar environments as much as when I was younger.

I always regret it when I don’t listen to my gut.

I’m really good with weather. I can forecast days ahead. I’m really good when someone is being dishonest. I can spot a criminal mind a thousand miles away. I can also tell when someone is about to go into a health crisis. But I really think that I’m just subliminally processing well due to years of training at sea and in medicine. My ex-wife was amazing, though. She could see a con a mile away. She knew immediately when someone was lying or omitting something. She was extremely confident in her intuition even when all evidence pointed in the opposite direction. She could always tell if I was troubled or about to pull a fast one, or hiding something from her. She was TOO intuitive, but made up for it by being a patient, good person with very good judgement. And she sucked at weather and direction. So, besides taking out the garbage and lifting heavy objects, I had other uses around the house.

I also regret when I don’t listen to my gut. I just wish I could chart things then I would know how accurate I am! I guess emotion skews results or things. But why was the emotion there in the first place, you know? I wonder why too, we push it aside when it is so sharp.

@Shippy

I wish I trusted you enough to answer you on this.

Nah. I almost always seek out second opinions.

I’ve often known when someone is lying to me, and they’re often amazed when I call them on it (but how could you have known???).

Of course, I have no idea how often anyone has lied to me and gotten away with it. ;)

It really comes down to how much attention I pay to that person.
In real life, I am probably about 90 percent accurate. When it comes to my love ones, I am about 99 percent accurate with people they associate with because I am protective and look for things that are telling.
It is also easier in person because people give physical cues that they are not aware off. Once in a while I will encounter someone who is not aware that their expressions do not match their thoughts.
On the web, not so much. But it probably has more to do with the fact that no one knows who I am so I am not guarded as much and at the same time I do not care if someone does or doesn’t like me so much on line.

I think that intuition probably makes more sense than people think. Most of us have a mental model of how people behave that is filled with bits of data from a lifetime of people watching. So when we see someone has a nervous tic, and it reminds us of so and so with a nervous tic who had some kind of anxiety disorder. And sure enough, after talking for a while, we find out so and so has an anxiety disorder.

That’s an obvious example, but there are thousands of such hints that I think we pick up on without even being aware of it. We watch people and talk to them and make all these guesses about them, and when a guess is confirmed, we feel like we have a good intuition. Of course, all those other guesses that are never confirmed, we forget about. We tend to only remember when we are right.

I make a lot of guesses about people here. It’s always nice when someone confirms the guess. It’s also good if they can tell you if you are wrong, too. That helps you make the model better. Better model—better intuition.

I know who not to contract with after a couple minutes with them. Most of us can tell if someone is full of shit.

@Shippy Are you sure you have a sharp intuition, or do you just suffer from confirmation bias and a powerful need to resolve post-decisional dissonance? I think that @augustlan is smart to qualify her answer because the unknown unknowns are unquantifiable. We know how many times we think we were right and how many times we think we were wrong, but we don’t know how many times we were actually right and actually wrong. But we sure can pretend—and we can even build models to help our confirmation bias keep rolling ahead (like @wundayatta said he does).

Oh yeah!

Face-to-face my intuition is rarely off, but humans are still surprising sometimes as to the depths they will sink.

@Patton I think that it’s important to feel like we know things, even if it is just confirmation bias. It’s always nice to try to be honest with yourself about what you are doing, but that’s nearly impossible. We make guesses. We ignore the wrong ones. We take the right ones as evidence our models are correct. We move on. Could anyone be immune from this?

Yes. Listening completely and paying attention is key.

I don’t suppose I’m any better than average, but I think “average” for humans is amazingly good.

I’ve been reading about unconscious perception of non-verbal signals, and came across an interesting experiment. A group of subjects were recruited to be “testers” in a psychological test (though they thought they were administering the test, they were actually subjects themselves). These “testers” were divided into two groups, and each group were given head-shot photos of several people. They were told that the test involved showing these photos to their subjects and having the subjects evaluate how “successful” the person in the photo was.

The photos had actually already gone through a pre-screening process and were the ones that had emerged as the most neutral (i.e. they really didn’t strike the screeners as either “successful” or “losers”), but one group of testers was told that the photos were of successful people, and the other group was told that they were losers. The testers were given a script of the exact words they were to say to the subjects they’d be administering the test to, and cautioned not to say any other words, nor to in any way influence their subjects’ perceptions.

So the only variable was that one group of testers thought they were showing photos of winners, and the other group thought they were showing photos of losers. Both also thought they were giving no signs of that “knowledge”. Still, the test subjects’ scores consistently reflected the beliefs of the “testers”. Somehow, they were picking up on some unspoken and inadvertent signal that influenced their choice. Analysis of video of these testing episodes turned up no identifiable signalling, but the message got through nonetheless.

@wundayatta I doubt anyone could be immune to it, but that seems like no excuse for not trying. We should always be on our guard against all of our cognitive biases, even if it’s uncomfortable. The reason why science works is that no one just takes for granted that our models are correct and ignores contradictory data. That sort of self doubt is what separates us from the charlatans. I don’t know how my computer works, but I get by just fine with it. So I don’t agree that we need to feel like we know things, either. I’d rather just keep looking.