Back in the 20th century, researchers noticed a strange pattern: most often, accidents and accidents occur with those planes and trains that are about half full, while at least 76% of passengers go on safe trips.
The mysterious difference can only be explained by the existence of intuition. Life expectancy and its quality depend directly on the "sixth" sense. But why is this gift unevenly distributed among people?
Fateful intuition
Intuitive knowledge can actively influence a person's life: intuition has saved lives more than once (after all, someone did not sit on the Titanic advertised as “absolutely reliable”). There are many examples where intuition helped to get rich. An experienced entrepreneur sometimes feels in his gut a hidden catch in the behavior of potential partners.
This is nothing more than social intuition. Social intuition prompts the young lady for marriage the optimal candidate for the chosen one. There are a number of professions in which social intuition plays a truly fateful role: judges sometimes intuitively pass judgment, already at the subconscious level “calculating” the “unreliable elements of society”; doctors intuitively make a diagnosis in a difficult situation.
And it is simply difficult to underestimate what room for self-realization the social intuition gives to representatives of HR-departments! After all, thanks to the developed social intuition, one can “see” the applicant through and through: catch on a deception, predict his achievements and relationships with other employees in the company.
Practical life experience is the basis of intuitive cognition. Over time, we create some general stereotypes: good - evil, reckless - wise, and the like. It is significant that we manage to draw conclusions about a person extremely rapidly, and he does not even need to say anything at the same time!
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The state and characteristics of the interlocutor are captured only by the periphery of consciousness: gestures and facial expressions pass directly into the accumulated intuitive experience, which then prompts the attitude towards this type of people. Later, for each specific person, it can change when conscious analysis turns on - but not at the stage of intuitive assessment.
Intuition is weakly manifested in mentally ill people: patients with schizophrenia extract unlikely associations from the past, which suffers from the effectiveness of the prognosis. Neurotics are overly hesitant about which of the many options to choose. Healthy people are endowed with an intuitive gift in different ways: an inner instinct is more characteristic of people who are balanced, sociable. But people who are depressed and aggressive have social sensitivity, like any other, is given much less often.
There is also a difference in the propensity for intuitive cognition in men and women: American psychologist Judith Hall, having analyzed 125 studies, concluded that women are superior to men in decoding non-verbal emotional messages. When women were shown a two-minute silent video of an upset woman's face, they made more accurate guesses about whether she was criticizing someone or discussing her divorce.
In other experiments, women's sensitivity to non-verbal cues allowed them to take the lead in identifying lies. Women are also superior to men in recognizing whether a couple is actually loving and romantic or faking, and which of the two people in the photo is the boss and who is the subordinate.
Understand another in a second
The discoveries of American psychologists Nalini Ambadi and Robert Rosenthal relate to the influence of first impressions and the speed of social intuition. "Thin slices" of someone's behavior can reveal a lot. Ambadi and Rosenthal videotaped how 13 Harvard undergraduates taught courses to undergraduates.
Observers then looked at three “thin slices” of each lecturer's behavior (ten-second clips from the beginning, middle, and end of the session) and rated each teacher's confidence, activity, warmth, and other qualities. These behavioral ratings, based on 30 seconds of teaching for the entire semester, predicted with astonishing accuracy what average student grade a given lecturer would receive at the end of the semester.
In various experiments, "thin slices" were studied using video clips (with or without sound recording) and observations through a one-way window. By just hearing the participants pronounce the alphabet aloud, observers were able to make a reasonably accurate intuitive guess about their social status and character.
After observing for 90 seconds how people walk and talk, observers could assess how others evaluate these individuals. It also turned out that even just by looking at a photograph, one can draw some conclusions about the personal characteristics of this person.
At the same time, one of the most important benefits of having social intuition is the ability to subconsciously catch insincerity and lies. Important information translates into intuitive experience, which is then analyzed in each specific situation. When lying, for example, a person has tension, and his facial expressions do not correspond to the content of the statements of both his own and the interlocutor. While our consciousness analyzes what has been said, the subconscious mind absorbs what we see, signaling a discrepancy, which can even be dangerous (therefore, intuitive people quickly recognize cheaters, prone to sudden aggression of characters and the like).
Psychologist Paul Ekman, professor at the University of California, San Francisco and author of the bestselling book Telling Lies, the world's premier liar-detecting expert, has conducted a series of tests to measure the degree of lie recognition. He came to the conclusion that in 86% of cases in the process of lying, the timbre or volume of the voice changes.
Ekman also found that among several surveyed groups that regularly study many people (students, psychiatrists, lie detector specialists, judges, police officers), only one - US intelligence agents - is actually able to detect lies (64%). However, if you purposefully develop this skill, your observation and the ability to listen to emotions (both your own and the interlocutor's) before turning on the intellect (scan, as they say, not what), the danger of deception can be avoided with a greater probability.
We all have another interesting feature: when we hear one person say good or bad things about another, we attribute the same qualities to the speaker. In several experiments, psychologists Linda May, Donal Carlston, and John Skowronski discovered that if someone spreads gossip about a person, listeners unconsciously associate the content of the gossip with their narrator.
Call someone a fool or a nonentity, and later people may classify you in these categories. Describe someone as subtle and sympathetic and you will appear that way too. Even those who “just” bring bad news are instinctively disliked, as are strangers who are reminders of an unpleasant person.
Developing intuition
But intuition is important not only for recognizing lies and all kinds of dangerous people and situations: it generally allows you to reach a fundamentally new level of awareness and self-realization. As long as social intuition can be useful in the affairs of family and workers (especially in the latter, since emotional empathy is more involved in family matters), it would be nice to develop it. How to do it?
For a start - work on yourself.
The famous Swiss psychologist Max Luscher identifies four essential qualities for the development of intuition:
self-esteem - acceptance of oneself and one's feelings (self-knowledge); self-confidence - it is important not only to hear, but also to trust what you hear; everyone follows the leader in one way or another, but not everyone has the courage to follow themselves; internal satisfaction is the ability to combine intuitive experience and thinking to understand and accept it without rationalization; internal freedom is openness, the ability to feel your spiritual needs.
How to make intuition your advisor? Experts advise to listen to yourself and your feelings. A clue can be a visual image, an unexpected association associated with an object of interest. Start trusting yourself, relying on your feelings and feelings. Then you can always check whether they were correct or wrong.
It is helpful to "activate" your right hemisphere. It is it that is responsible for creativity, imagination, intuition. Start painting, meditating, listening to music, and do it regularly. This is how you begin to use your creativity, which is associated with the sixth sense. Remember, intuition is inherent in all of us. Just start using this precious resource, and here are the special exercises:
Exercise one. To complete this exercise, you need a target - an object or person. You need to try to sense your purpose. After that, close your eyes and rotate around your axis. When you stop, feel which side of you the object is. After that, open your eyes and check if you were right.
Exercise two. Write any question on a piece of paper. You need to write with the hand with which you usually do it - with the right for right-handers, with the left for left-handers. Then, with the pen in your other hand, write your answer. The meaning of this activity is that by performing an action with an unusual hand, you force the mind to fully engage in work and thereby give freedom of intuition.
Exercise three. As you ask a mental question or imagine a situation, feel which of the signals from your internal detector lights up at the same time? Let it be the gamut of the usual traffic light. If the mental picture lit up with green light, then everything is in order, you have chosen the right solution. The yellow-red combination says that the chosen solution is dangerous, the green-yellow one warns that caution does not hurt.
In general, you can practice developing your intuition almost constantly. Here they call you on the phone or at the door: before you open or answer the call, imagine who it might be. In the beginning you will have misses, but the more you train, the more often the results will be correct.
When communicating with anyone, try to understand their thoughts and emotions. "Reading people" is generally a wonderful exercise in developing intuition. This skill can be very helpful to you. With regular training, you will soon feel how your intuition has developed, how it manifests itself in almost all your actions and decisions, helping to live and improving the quality of your life.