What Science Says About the Reliability of Our Intuition

Researchers are studying our individual intuition and its impact on entire fields, such as agriculture. They are also examining what hinders or strengthens it and how we can best utilize it.

Hiya!

While most everyone is aware of their intuition in some sense, it’s long been viewed as an almost mystical sense, for better or worse, that’s beyond our ability to define, let alone study how accurate it may be.

Yet, such mysticism is fading in the modern world as technological advancements better help scientists research our more esoteric abilities, including our intuition. While still mysterious, we’ve become much better at defining and understanding our intuition than ever before, including what hinders it and how to improve it.

What is Intuition?

Like dreaming, people have long associated intuition with the divine or as a sort of prophetic sixth sense. The term itself comes from the mid-15th-century Latin word intuicioun, which refers to "insight, direct or immediate cognition, and spiritual perception."

Intuition continues to evoke a mystical connotation all these centuries later, but these days, we commonly refer to it as a “gut feeling,” which is more of a physical description than a definition. Still, it’s not exactly wrong.

Hrund Gunnsteinsdóttir, author of the book and subsequent documentary InnSæi, which explores the Icelandic art of intuition, describes the phenomenon as “an embodied knowledge.” In other words, intuition is often experienced by the body as a sense or feeling of rightness or unease.

Similarly, sometimes people use “intuition” and “instinct” interchangeably, which is understandable since they both involve our subconscious mind and physical sensations. However, they are not the same.

Intuition is defined as,

“the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.”

Meanwhile, the definition of instinct is,

“largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason.”

To put it another way, both terms refer to decisions we make that are shaped by or dependent on subconscious knowledge, like cues in our environment, body language, or recognizing patterns of information.

Intuition typically presents as a subtle feeling, as if it’s guiding us to an answer. In contrast, our instincts are innate, often intense, immediate reactions, especially when our lives are at risk.

Now that researchers have a more precise definition of intuition, they’re studying everything they can about it and discovering some astonishing things.

New Research

Before discussing what increases or hinders our intuition, or how to utilize it best, I want to tell you about recent research that goes beyond studying our individual intuitive abilities to investigate the role intuition plays in one of humanity’s most vital functions for a successful society — agriculture.

In a new study, published on April 09, 2025, in the Journal of Rural Studies, a doctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland, Soja Sädeharju, writes:

“Global environmental change induces the demand for urgent and transformative action to shift the paradigm in agricultural practices from degenerative to regenerative. The decision-making of farmers has a significant role for our future, since agriculture has an enormous impact on the well-being of our planet.”

If you don’t know, degenerative agriculture, sometimes called “slash and burn,” refers to agricultural methods that lack soil conservation practices or nutrient replenishment when modern farmers use heavy machinery, harmful fertilizers, and pesticides to maximize food production.

As you can likely guess, regenerative agriculture is essentially the opposite of degenerative agriculture because it revitalizes the soil and surrounding ecosystems and enhances the health of farmland even with a changing climate. It also just so happens to increase farming profitability, sometimes by as much as 120 percent.

A regenerative farming organization, Regeneration International, warns that if we don't transition away from degenerative agriculture and toward regenerative agriculture, there may not be enough healthy soil left to feed the world within 50 years.

Considering the significant differences and pressure to switch, Sädeharju wondered what, if any, role intuition has in regenerative farmers’ decision-making processes. So, she decided to find out.

Sädeharjuh used data collected by interviews and surveys of 84 Finnish farmers involved in the Carbon Action project by the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Baltic Sea Action Group. The data was repetitively analyzed using a qualitative inductive approach known as the Gioia Method.

The results

When asked to describe what intuition means to them, the participating farmers reported it as “certain,” “reliable,” and “relevant to the person experiencing it.”

They also believe that intuition,

• always prompts either action or inaction,

• typically refers to the future, and

• combines internal and external sources of knowledge.

In particular, the farmers said that input from nature is especially influential in their decision-making process.

However, the farmers acknowledge that intuition isn’t flawless and that many factors, including fatigue, stress, intense emotions, over-analysis, and too much factual information, can interfere with how they interpret their intuition.

We’ll discuss these factors more in a moment, but all of them can make us overlook our intuition or at least make us more likely to misinterpret or misidentify it.

In a news release by the University of Eastern Finland, Sädeharju, who is also the study’s author, explained:

“Addressing and acknowledging intuition can enhance our understanding of the role of internal processes in decision-making, thus promoting the sustainability transformation. In addition, intuition can provide novel tools for socio-ecological decision-making. This study also offers a new approach to examining and developing decision-making in a changing world.”

Sädeharju believes the relationship between nature and human intuition should be studied further, as should the role intuition plays regarding regenerative dynamics and global education. In the same statement, she explains,

"In the analytical process, intuition acts as a summarizing and guiding 'decision-making assistant.' It is constantly present in decision-making, particularly at the beginning and end stages. Since intuition was perceived as leading to the right and good outcome, it may be linked to what is generally known as the 'voice of reason.'"

It’s now well established that people in all sorts of professions, from research and leadership roles to business managers, athletes, and now regenerative farmers, all utilize their intuition to make decisions. However, we use our intuition for more than just at work.

Utilizing Our Intuition