"Trust your instincts" -what does this mean and do we have any concrete psychological instincts?
Those times when you get the feeling you're being watched. Or when you enter a property and a cold and unsettling chill goes down your back. Or when you meet a new person and though seemingly normal something just doesnt quite sit right with you about them. Or a disturbing notion that danger is imminent or that a friend is in trouble despite any reason to believe so.
In many of these cases it later turned out that their "intuition" or "instinct" was well warranted - people who were being stalked, properties where murders have happened, people who turn out to be narcissists or psychopaths etc or a friend who you rang in panic and they just told you they had a traffic accident.
But if course in other cases their suspicions were false and resulted in nothing.
My question is this - are these genuine inherent traits to psychological function that serve a purpose and are present in all people, are they instinctual, or are they lucky guesses. Or perhaps social conditions or learnt traits - the picking up of subtle patterns and cues that the subconscious mind may process but the conscious mind isnt quite aware of? Who knows?
What do you think?
In many of these cases it later turned out that their "intuition" or "instinct" was well warranted - people who were being stalked, properties where murders have happened, people who turn out to be narcissists or psychopaths etc or a friend who you rang in panic and they just told you they had a traffic accident.
But if course in other cases their suspicions were false and resulted in nothing.
My question is this - are these genuine inherent traits to psychological function that serve a purpose and are present in all people, are they instinctual, or are they lucky guesses. Or perhaps social conditions or learnt traits - the picking up of subtle patterns and cues that the subconscious mind may process but the conscious mind isnt quite aware of? Who knows?
What do you think?
Comments (4)
I don't think an intuition that danger is imminent despite no sensory data to suggest this -- likely the human brain making correlations between uncorrelated events -- has much to do with 'intuition' that something about someone isn't quite right, which is the brain performing analysis on behaviour that the conscious mind doesn't understand.
I suppose the point of comparison is selection criteria. We have some understanding of why humans are inclined to draw correlations between uncorrelated events, and we have a lot of understanding of why humans need to make quick assessment, unhampered by slow consciousness, of a person's body language. Both are good survival traits, even if both are horrendously error-prone.
As which other cognitive functions, such as empathy, there's a difference between having the capacity to do something (nature) versus the particular learned implementations of that capacity (nurture). For example, you and I both assess the body language of a stranger unconsciously, but whereas my brain has learned to give weight to people whose eyes are too close together, yours has learned to give weight to people whose eyes dart around too much, with neither criteria necessarily consciously known of. (Examples ad rectum, don't read too much into them.)
Also, the tone of the OP suggests that the instincts being considered are about impending danger. What about instincts that inform us of something pleasant and joyful? I haven't heard of instincts spoken of, written of in that sense.
Ergo, given Murphy's law (whatever can go wrong will go wrong), it would appear that our instincts in re looming dangers become vindicated more often than not, resulting in us believing our so-called instincts.