Question
Are women more intuitive than men?
Answer
Mu.
The question is misframed. There is no such thing as "general" intuition which can serve as the basis for such a comparison. There are only intuitions, plural. What's more, there is no fundamental classification/taxonomy to be found in the sense of a periodic table of intuitions (incidentally "intuition" in this sense of women's intuition seems to me to be conceptually different from "intuitive" in the Myers-Briggs sense; the latter is really more about tendency to free-associate).
There is no meaningful way to stamp-collect a menagerie of intuitions, measure male/female strengths for each, and form some sort of weighted sum to arrive at a winning gender. The silliness of that thought experiment should tell you why: the weights would be an arbitrary function of some environment of adaptation. Not very useful.
But its still useful to understand the phenomenology of intuition and the likely source of this widespread myth.
Something similar happened in the study of "intelligence" where the notion of a general intelligence (g, which leads to IQ) has been abandoned in favor of multiple intelligences. One consequence was that the idea of men being smarter than women was undermined at the level of the general-intelligence assumption. The "theory of multiple intuitions" (it implicitly exists in the literature, but nobody has given it this name, yet) should do the same to the much ballyhooed "women's intuition."
In fact, I believe the two are related. There are likely at least as many "intuitions" as there are "intelligences" because an intuition is the same sort of specific adaptation and represents processing at a lower level about the same sorts of problems that an intelligence solves more slowly and consciously. If conscious processing cannot intervene at all, it is an unconscious behavior, not an intuition.
So there is a spatial intelligence (a common candidate in many multiple-intelligence taxonomies), and therefore there is a spatial intuition. This idea of layered information processing architecture with faster, more automated loops below slower, more open ones is usually called a subsumption architecture in robotics. There may be more intuitions than intelligences, just as a manager may have multiple reports in a department.
A refined intuition is a combination of:
If any of those pieces don't exist, you get ineffective behavior. Sure some intuitions are rough diamonds and are very effective from Day 1, but that is rare. A good way to think about an intuition is a behavior to which you must apply a "trust, but verify" discipline.
If you want a decent reference for some of these ideas, try Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer, http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelin...
Gladwell mentioned some of his work in Blink. Another Blink mention, Gary Klein, is also an important figure in the study of intuitive decision-making. His best known work is Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. http://www.amazon.com/Sources-Po...
Blink had the trademark serious foundational flaws that makes for a good Gladwell book, but as a first-pass treatment, it is actually a pretty good introduction to the subject of intuition. (Aside: Gladwell is a perfect example of a guy with poorly-supervised intuitions. He was probably "intuitively certain" that eigenvalue is spelled igon-value, and that mavens, salesmen and connectors actually matter in social contagion. It is left to dull, unintuitive schlubs to prove him wrong).
A lot of self-described "very intuitive people" are actually no better than average (often far worse, actually), but simply lack a well-developed supervisory function that has disciplined it into a more effective force. So their intuition breaks out more often, like a badly behaved child.
They usually also lack the philosophical sophistication to harbor a meta-skepticism about the sense of absolute certainty with which an intuition makes a recommendation about a decision. In other words, "intuition" is often a misdiagnosed case of poor impulse control, low self-awareness, low emotional intelligence and suffering from Duning-Kruger syndrome effects. It is usually a self-serving self-misdiagnosis.
One of my favorite pastimes in my (fortunately rare) nastier moods is to bait such people with a question where I know their intuition is going to suggest a certain wrong answer/choice to them with absolute certainty, and then pull the rug out from under their feet. This is also a useful skill in mathematics, where it can help you come up with great counter-examples.
Where might the myth of "women's intuition" (I am, err... intuitively sure it is a myth) have come from? Possibly simply from a difference in abilities to act on an intuitive judgment, historically.
Men, having had more autonomy historically, may have been able to act on their intuition without talking about it. Women have historically been disadvantaged in that department, so they may have had to articulate their intuitions more often to men, to get action.
Difference in communication styles and goals also matter. When you cannot act on an intuition by yourself, men and women may use different persuasion models.
In competitive settings (more common for males, historically), it is dangerous to attempt persuasion based on the authority of intuition, so you either verify the intuition and offer the logos argument, or disguise the intent of persuasion. In collaborative settings (more common for women, historically), persuasion based on intuition may be enough.
Amplifying this effect is the fact that intuitions often talk to the executive function through emotions (often fear/anxiety). So being expressively intuitive carries the danger of revealing vulnerability in competitive settings.
Once those gendered styles were set, intuition-persuasion would have been associated with women, and it would have been even MORE disadvantageous for men to display their intuition openly, unless it could be done in a "manly" way.
For the record, I am an extremely intuitive decision-maker, and nearly always go with my intuitions. But I am also an extreme skeptic about my intuitions, and probably check up on them far more often than I should, like a micromanager, even if I end up agreeing with it 90% of the time. If my intuitions were employees, they'd quit.
The question is misframed. There is no such thing as "general" intuition which can serve as the basis for such a comparison. There are only intuitions, plural. What's more, there is no fundamental classification/taxonomy to be found in the sense of a periodic table of intuitions (incidentally "intuition" in this sense of women's intuition seems to me to be conceptually different from "intuitive" in the Myers-Briggs sense; the latter is really more about tendency to free-associate).
There is no meaningful way to stamp-collect a menagerie of intuitions, measure male/female strengths for each, and form some sort of weighted sum to arrive at a winning gender. The silliness of that thought experiment should tell you why: the weights would be an arbitrary function of some environment of adaptation. Not very useful.
But its still useful to understand the phenomenology of intuition and the likely source of this widespread myth.
Something similar happened in the study of "intelligence" where the notion of a general intelligence (g, which leads to IQ) has been abandoned in favor of multiple intelligences. One consequence was that the idea of men being smarter than women was undermined at the level of the general-intelligence assumption. The "theory of multiple intuitions" (it implicitly exists in the literature, but nobody has given it this name, yet) should do the same to the much ballyhooed "women's intuition."
In fact, I believe the two are related. There are likely at least as many "intuitions" as there are "intelligences" because an intuition is the same sort of specific adaptation and represents processing at a lower level about the same sorts of problems that an intelligence solves more slowly and consciously. If conscious processing cannot intervene at all, it is an unconscious behavior, not an intuition.
So there is a spatial intelligence (a common candidate in many multiple-intelligence taxonomies), and therefore there is a spatial intuition. This idea of layered information processing architecture with faster, more automated loops below slower, more open ones is usually called a subsumption architecture in robotics. There may be more intuitions than intelligences, just as a manager may have multiple reports in a department.
A refined intuition is a combination of:
- a highly specific innate talent (genetic, and may be gender-asymmetric),
- adequate training of that strength through experience,
- a supervisory mechanism that can second-guess and over-ride in a useful subset of the space of behaviors where the intuition operates
- a metacognitive learned behavior that decides when to let the supervisor intervene (if this is not learned, the default mediator is the emotional state) and...
- A philosophical skepticism that is capable of "bracketing" the sense of certainty that an instinctive reaction brings, as merely another input variable, and carrying on a meta-process of introspection with reference to empirical performance data. It is this last piece that (for instance) might recognize that your "people trust intuition" is going wrong more often than it needs to, because it is operating with the unexamined belief that "people with glasses are smarter" or something. This is structural error correction, like polishing the rough-diamond intuition.
If any of those pieces don't exist, you get ineffective behavior. Sure some intuitions are rough diamonds and are very effective from Day 1, but that is rare. A good way to think about an intuition is a behavior to which you must apply a "trust, but verify" discipline.
If you want a decent reference for some of these ideas, try Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer, http://www.amazon.com/Gut-Feelin...
Gladwell mentioned some of his work in Blink. Another Blink mention, Gary Klein, is also an important figure in the study of intuitive decision-making. His best known work is Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. http://www.amazon.com/Sources-Po...
Blink had the trademark serious foundational flaws that makes for a good Gladwell book, but as a first-pass treatment, it is actually a pretty good introduction to the subject of intuition. (Aside: Gladwell is a perfect example of a guy with poorly-supervised intuitions. He was probably "intuitively certain" that eigenvalue is spelled igon-value, and that mavens, salesmen and connectors actually matter in social contagion. It is left to dull, unintuitive schlubs to prove him wrong).
A lot of self-described "very intuitive people" are actually no better than average (often far worse, actually), but simply lack a well-developed supervisory function that has disciplined it into a more effective force. So their intuition breaks out more often, like a badly behaved child.
They usually also lack the philosophical sophistication to harbor a meta-skepticism about the sense of absolute certainty with which an intuition makes a recommendation about a decision. In other words, "intuition" is often a misdiagnosed case of poor impulse control, low self-awareness, low emotional intelligence and suffering from Duning-Kruger syndrome effects. It is usually a self-serving self-misdiagnosis.
One of my favorite pastimes in my (fortunately rare) nastier moods is to bait such people with a question where I know their intuition is going to suggest a certain wrong answer/choice to them with absolute certainty, and then pull the rug out from under their feet. This is also a useful skill in mathematics, where it can help you come up with great counter-examples.
Where might the myth of "women's intuition" (I am, err... intuitively sure it is a myth) have come from? Possibly simply from a difference in abilities to act on an intuitive judgment, historically.
Men, having had more autonomy historically, may have been able to act on their intuition without talking about it. Women have historically been disadvantaged in that department, so they may have had to articulate their intuitions more often to men, to get action.
Difference in communication styles and goals also matter. When you cannot act on an intuition by yourself, men and women may use different persuasion models.
In competitive settings (more common for males, historically), it is dangerous to attempt persuasion based on the authority of intuition, so you either verify the intuition and offer the logos argument, or disguise the intent of persuasion. In collaborative settings (more common for women, historically), persuasion based on intuition may be enough.
Amplifying this effect is the fact that intuitions often talk to the executive function through emotions (often fear/anxiety). So being expressively intuitive carries the danger of revealing vulnerability in competitive settings.
Once those gendered styles were set, intuition-persuasion would have been associated with women, and it would have been even MORE disadvantageous for men to display their intuition openly, unless it could be done in a "manly" way.
For the record, I am an extremely intuitive decision-maker, and nearly always go with my intuitions. But I am also an extreme skeptic about my intuitions, and probably check up on them far more often than I should, like a micromanager, even if I end up agreeing with it 90% of the time. If my intuitions were employees, they'd quit.