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" Your intuition is every bit as reliable as fact-finding, says psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, author of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. In fact, human brains are actually hardwired to draw conclusions based on incomplete information, or logic that your conscious mind can&amp;#039;t immediately access or articulate. To learn how to let your instincts guide you, try the following go-with-your-gut strategies. Get carried away by your emotions. You might feel defensive or uncertain about letting your emotions lead the way in decision making, but you shouldn&amp;#039;t. Though our feelings often seem irrational \u2014 because we can&amp;#039;t always describe them accurately or base them in fact \u2014 they&amp;#039;re actually functional, says Gigerenzer: Fear, for instance, leads us to run away from dangerous situations, and love lets us connect to people. So, suppose you&amp;#039;re offered two jobs; one of them seems like a better fit, yet your gut is telling you to take the other one \u2014 even though it pays a little less and is a little farther away. This is a classic case in which you should go with what feels right, says Gigerenzer. If, say, the less formal attitude of one office draws you in more than the idea of working for a powerful company, it&amp;#039;s a smarter move long-term to follow your emotions and choose the more pleasant work environment. Go with what you know. This strategy \u2014 grounded in what Gigerenzer calls the recognition heuristic \u2014 can be hugely helpful when choosing between things that are unfamiliar, from mortgage lenders to vacation destinations, even brands of toothpaste. &amp;quot;If a company makes high-quality products and that&amp;#039;s the reason everyone&amp;#039;s talking about them, then name recognition helps you,&amp;quot; says Gigerenzer. So don&amp;#039;t feel like a sheep for choosing a popular name if that&amp;#039;s where your gut is leaning. You&amp;#039;ll likely have a better time in Paris \u2014 a city that everyone&amp;#039;s heard of \u2014 than Pascagoula.  Focus on one factor. When you have to make a tough choice in an unpredictable situation, try prioritizing the one element that matters most to you. Take the upcoming elections. Sure, you know the candidates&amp;#039; track records, but maybe you still can&amp;#039;t figure out who&amp;#039;ll be the best person for the job; after all, there&amp;#039;s no way to know their political futures. So trust your instincts by asking yourself what one or two qualities or issues are most important to you, then vote for the candidate who most closely suits your values. Call on common sense. Let&amp;#039;s say you have a bad feeling about that stranger you see milling around the school yard when you pick up your kids. This person hasn&amp;#039;t done anything wrong, but you still feel uneasy \u2014 so you should alert someone about your hunch. Even if you&amp;#039;re not an expert at recognizing pedophiles, &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;re all experts about other people,&amp;quot; says Gigerenzer. As a parent, you know plenty about kids&amp;#039; safety and how other parents, teachers, and school staff typically react around children, so you may well be picking up a legitimate bad vibe from this outsider, even if you can&amp;#039;t quite articulate why. The bottom line is, you don&amp;#039;t have to be an &amp;quot;expert&amp;quot; to make the smart call. If something doesn&amp;#039;t feel right, don&amp;#039;t ignore the warning bells going off in your head. Are women more intuitive? That much-vaunted (and sometimes derided) &amp;quot;women&amp;#039;s intuition&amp;quot; may be, um, all in our heads, says German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer. Women don&amp;#039;t actually surpass men in the intuition department, he says \u2014 the difference is more in perception than ability. According to Gigerenzer&amp;#039;s studies of 1,000 men and women, both genders thought that women were better at interpersonal intuition: catching on to social cues, reading other people&amp;#039;s minds, finding a romantic partner, and the like. Yet 90 percent of both men and women thought that males have better intuition in matters of science. Both males and females also guessed that men would be better at intuitively picking stock investments. Bottom line: Research (and common sense) shows that men and women are pretty much equal when it comes to intuition \u2014 the only real difference is what we believe we know. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/body/mental-health/advice/a3804/intuition-strategies/?link=rel&dom=wmd&src=syn&con=art&mag=rbk>