Jody Steinglass, founder of Empire Education, a private New York City-based tutoring company, says that the trick to preparing for standardized tests such as the SAT is to hone intuition by identifying cues—say, certain words—that let you know which category a question belongs to (quadratic equation), which in turn tells you how to solve it. "Right before test time, we go through drills where I will give students a list of questions. I don't have them actually solve them but just quickly tell me how they would solve each one. This way they are trained to make good snap judgments and then to confidently trust those judgments."
Great Liar-detectors Build on a Big Rolodex
Many of us are sure we could never be deceived, and yet our gut instincts about people's veracity are usually off. "We don't pay enough attention to all the channels of communication, and we believe what we want to believe," says Maureen O'Sullivan, professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco. There are no set rules to follow in order to improve your fib-spotting—liars do not necessarily avoid eye contact, for example. But you can ask yourself questions, such as whether the person you are sizing up is deviating from his or her typical repertoire of behaviors. If your daughter is using strange gestures and an odd tone of voice, she may indeed be hiding something.
There is, however, a tiny elite whose deception detection could be considered intuitive. O'Sullivan has spent years identifying and studying "truth wizards," people with a way-above-average ability to detect lies. Interestingly, they have various modes of arriving at their spot-on intuitions. Some are very empathetic and sort of morph into the person they are judging. "As they assume the subtle postures and expressions of the other person, they seem to be putting themselves into their skin, or into their emotional reality," she says. Others coolly notice subtle nonverbal cues and voice tones and put all of those together in a meaningful way. And until directly questioned, most are unaware of what they are doing.
O'Sullivan compares the truth wizards to Agatha Christie's fictional Miss Marple, who accurately judges people by matching them against a Rolodex of personality types in her head. Unsurprisingly, astute judges of character are people who have an intense interest in people and a broad range of experience under their belts. "They may be a corporate lawyer who also worked in a coal mine at one point," she says.
Though you may not reach wizard status, anyone can improve general interpersonal intuition. Simply put, if you are highly motivated to understand people, your intuitions about them will be better. Take Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University, who has spent his life trying, he says. After all, he creates models of the human mind. "I'm deeply curious about what makes people do certain things. I am somebody who spends a great deal of time trying to understand what the real reasons for their behavior are."
Even so, Hofstadter emphasizes the importance of not prematurely closing your mind when it comes to intuitions about people and their motivations. "You have to test these cautiously. When you have confirmation—then you can make the daring leap," he says, whether it's telling your friend that you suspect she's getting divorced for the wrong reason or confronting your boyfriend about what you think are fabrications.
Long-term Love Turns Intuition Upside Down
Because you know him so well, your intuitions about what your spouse is thinking and feeling are fairly correct. But that doesn't mean you should always act on them. Let's say your husband is flipping through a catalog and you can sense that he's thinking about how much he'd like to be with one of the lingerie models.
Research on "mind reading" tells us that in such situations, where "relationship-threatening" thoughts are intuited, happier couples keep their hunches to themselves. They don't bother to test them out; they understand that such thoughts are temporary and not serious.
Anxious people need to apply the most caution. They are particularly accurate at divining any negative feelings and thoughts their spouse might be having. But the catch is, they are probably missing the positive things their partner is also thinking about them. Singling out critical feelings only winds up sabotaging the relationship.
Jeff Simpson, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, who has led this line of research, puts it this way: "Anxious women are accurate at the wrong times." Alas, your intuition may have led you down the aisle in the first place, but that doesn't mean it won't turn around and trip you up.
Improvisation Takes Instant Feedback—and Years of Practice
The spontaneous voyage that creative improvisers take their audiences on exemplifies a paradox of intuition: The more a jazz musician has deliberately prepared throughout his musical career, the better he is at instantly responding to the cues around him when deciding what to invent in the moment onstage.
"Virtually all serious students of jazz copy solos from their favorite musicians' records," says guitarist Randy Napoleon. "All our preparation in music is designed to make our instincts more reliable, our execution more free. Gut-level playing is mastery born from a lifetime of discipline and thought. The more you think, analyze, study, practice, the stronger you internalize the natural flow of music. You are free to think less when on the bandstand and trust your feelings more."
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