Women's Intuition: Myth or Reality?

Studies show men are just as intuitive as women, so why does folklore disagree? Does women's intuition really exist? Do women have higher emotional intelligence? Join Caroline and Cristen as they take a closer look at the nature of intuition.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
From housetop works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Caroline and I'm Kristen. Kristen, you know that feeling

(00:22):
in your gut that's not indigestion, I was saying, because
I was about to go there, the one that tells
you to go one way over another, or trust one
person over another. Are you talking about intuition? You just
didtui that you. You looked at my face and you
were like, I know what my friend Caroline is thinking.
And then I looked down at my notes and said intuition. Indeed,

(00:47):
and intuition it's like your brand on autopilot. Since you
know me, you were just thinking like, okay, well, let's
what are the circumstances. What could she be thinking about? Yeah,
and we feel it probably in our guts, because there
are a lot of nerve endings in our guts, so
much so that some doctors referred to it as our
second brain in our belly. Um, well, it's actually has

(01:15):
nothing to do with your belly. Even though you get
these feelings in your gut. Yeah, it uh. They seem
like they're coming out of nowhere, but they actually begin
with a perception of something going on around you that
your brain picks up on subconsciously. And Professor Gerard Hodgkinson
of the Center for Organizational Strategy, Learning and Change that

(01:36):
leads University Business School, he actually cites the example of
a Formula one driver who, um, he breaked sharply when
nearing a turn without knowing why. You know, normally race
car driving, you're supposed to be fast, and he just
breaked and he wasn't exactly sure why, and his intuition
ended up saving him because he avoided a pile up

(01:57):
on the track ahead right. And Hodgkinson and says that
what's going on, what was going on the Formula one
race car driver's brain was that it was drawing on
past experiences and external cues to make a decision because,
come to find out later, the external que that he
saw without even realizing that he saw it, was the

(02:18):
look of panic on the fans faces toward the pile
of seeing what was coming ahead. If he had barreled
onward instead of putting on the brakes right, they ended
up playing the tape back, and he realized that they
were all looking away from him instead of cheering him on.
So something in his brain picked up on that and
told him to slow down. Yeah, And some psychologists refer

(02:40):
to this process as a mental matching game as well,
in which the brain, again on that autopilot, like you said, Caroline,
matches new experiences to old emotional states. And it reminds
me of that old factory trigger that we have, Like
how a just a scent of, say, chocolate chip, these
can bring up a vivid memory from childhood, or I

(03:04):
frequently get flashbacks to my cafeteria in elementary school. I
don't know why so many things smell like yeah, but
something where you're not even it's a totally subconscious thing,
not even trying to catch this with and all of
a sudden you have this overwhelming experience. And I think
that we could liken that to the overwhelming urges that
we get with intuition. Right, But I don't think race

(03:26):
car drivers are the only ones to experience this. Oh no,
we all have intuition. But there's seems to be this
idea that women have a stronger sense of intuition. Women's
women's intuition. Yes, it's the stereotype that women I think
because of our nurturing, caregiving characteristics, or at least the

(03:50):
titles that have been those titles that have been given
to us, uh, means that we are better endowed and
better tapped into our emotional states and there for other
people's emotional states. Right, I mean, historically, we haven't been
exposed to the same levels of education, uh, the same

(04:10):
access to the technical technical world that men have. Um,
we've been more relegated to the roles of observer and caregivers.
So we kind of do historically, we kind of have
spend our time watching people, right, And so that's where
the stereotype of women's issue intuition comes from. But as
we started researching whether or not it is a myth

(04:33):
or reality, we uncovered some really interesting patterns of how
gender stereotypes and the social expectations and motivations that those
trigger in us can really influence. Um, I guess our
our mental states and how we behave and respond. Right. Yeah, women,
it's I guess it's all about your motivation. That's what

(04:55):
a lot of these researchers say. William X, a University
of tech us At Arlington's psychology professor has the quote,
women will display greater accuracy in guessing thoughts and emotions
than men when they're empathetic. Motivation is engaged by situational
cues that remind them that they, as women, are expected
to excel at empathy related tasks. And that's probably why

(05:19):
you can find a number of studies saying that, yes,
women are better with nonverbal communication. They might exert higher
levels of something called emotional intelligence, which is sort of
like intuition in action how you sends other people and
respond to other people, and especially different nonverbal cues. And

(05:40):
so therefore they say that women are better at picking
up on subtle emotional cues and this must be a
byproduct of our lower social power and role of as observers. Like, no,
it's not over lining, it's a myth. Oh, let's bust
it word, break it down some kaboom hand. Yeah, I'm

(06:04):
throwing back from kaboom hand. And I don't know why
I'm so excited to bust the smith about women's intuition.
Maybe because I'm I don't have much of it, or
don't I'm not motivated to tap into it, But I
thought it was pretty pretty fascinating on how that this
is actually total, total myth. Yeah. The motivation they talk

(06:25):
about is it's it's actually pretty simple if you think
about it. Um. Many surveys that were meant to rate
empathy levels, which empathy is related to intuition, being able
to read people. Um, they actually some of them started
with leading questions like are you male or female? And
that's what William X is talking about when he says

(06:46):
that women were reminded to respond in a feminine way,
like how how would you as a woman respond? So
if it's asking if the study was asking are you
male or female, women would be like, oh yes, love
great intuition because I am a woman, there are expected
to And it took X a little while to figure

(07:08):
out what was going on here because at first he
performed seven studies of empathetic accuracy and found no statistically
significant difference between men and women. They were doing all
these blind tests on students, both male and female, figuring
out like how how empathetic they were, um, and whether

(07:28):
or not they could just looking at say a picture
of three people, figure out like who is the relationships
between them? Who's the father and son? Things like that,
and he said, whoa wait a minute, there's no difference.
Women and men are are just as good at at
sessing out these nonverbal cues. And there was also, this

(07:49):
is another interesting thing, there was also no difference in
diet ads. In other words, if you paired up female
to female, male to female, male to male, still no
gender differences emerged whatsoever. But then something happened, right in
the last three studies. They they slightly changed the questions
the way they were asking the questions, and these empathy studies, Um,

(08:13):
instead of just saying what I thought the relationship was,
I would then have to say, also how accurate I
thought my assessment of the situation was. And so suddenly
I as the subject and being made aware, Um, oh, well,
there they must be judging my empathy ability to guess.
Once people figured out, the participants were allowed to know

(08:36):
what they were being rated on, and in this case
the empathy, which we associate as some kind of female trait,
then the gender difference emerged. And so Ix says they
were able to pinpoint that, and he said we could
actually turn off going back and doing studies after they
figured this out. He said, we could turn off the
gender difference by removing the queue that signaled that this

(08:58):
was an empathetic ability task. And while yes, intuition and
empathy are two different things, you gotta understand that they
are still in the same family, in the same psychological family, right,
because intuition we've talked about is being able to pick
up on things without even realizing it. An empathy, you know,
being able to understand not only people you care about,

(09:19):
but even the average stranger next to you on the bus,
being able to kind of sense what they're feeling, if
they're going to attack you or if it's just a
hug and I just hug a hopefully a side huge um.
But one other way that you can turn off as
X would say, that gender difference for intuition, and this

(09:40):
was discovered by a pair of researchers, Christie Kline and
Sarah Hodges at the University of Oregon. One way to
turn off that gender difference as well is to incentivize
things a little bit. Getting rich. Yeah, and by that
I mean paying people for performance. The more accurate your
empathy in these tests, then the more participants could earn.

(10:04):
And boy did that kick the male participants motivation into
high gear, and again it leveled the playing field. I
showed that men can be just as empathetic and intuitive
as women can as long as there's some sort of
money involved. But money is not the only thing that
can flip that switch. Caroline, you gotta know you got
another kind of funny, uh motivator I do. Apparently you

(10:26):
can just make stuff up to convince people to be
more empathetic. It's sort of a placebo effect sugar pills
because it's sweet, sweet sweet. This is a very sweet
sweet switch enlighten us. I will, according to Cordelia Fine,
after reading an essay that said men who were more

(10:47):
in touch with their feminine side got lucky with women
more often, men actually perform better on empathy tifts. Yeah,
it brought it out. It enhanced that motivation. And Cordelia
Fine talks about this a lot in her book The
Lusions of Gender, and she basically says that social expectations

(11:07):
will create motivation gaps between men and women that explain
women's intuition and why on numerous tests that don't control
for that kind of gender influence will find over and
over again that women are excelling at nonverbal communication intuition
and empathy, sympathy, things like that because we're so nice women.

(11:31):
So yeah, Going along with what Cordelia find said about
the male sensitivity attracting women passage um, carl and Flora
of Psychology Today wrote that if you were highly motivated
to understand people, your intuitions about them will be better.
So if you think you're getting paid, or if you
think you're getting lad, you're going to be more empathetic,
or if you think that you simply should be better

(11:53):
at something. And this reminds me of how there might
be something called the stereotype threat that holds women back
from performing better in science and math courses because there, um,
there's this notion that girls in the classroom don't expect
to do very well and math and science say expect

(12:13):
to do better at verbal And Cordelia Fine actually mentions
that like in some studies, or they asked so the
women straightforward, like what are they better at, they'll always,
regardless of their test scores, they'll say that they're better
at verbal. Right, And that's that they were primed ahead
of time by the question male or female? Right, what's
your gender? Because that then establishes those kind of those stereotypes.

(12:34):
So I thought that this, uh, this empathy motivation gap
is sort of the other side to that stereotype threat
coin or maybe just another side of that Rubik's cube,
because they are obviously multiple colors never figure out. So
what about intuition in the workplace, because, again going back

(12:57):
to Cordelia Fine, she asked an interesting question of if
social expectations can create a motivation gap, could they also
be responsible for an ability gap and wondering how these
um different expectations and stereotypes can affect us directly in
the workplace. So with intuition, it seems like it can

(13:20):
definitely help you, right. Women actually show a higher level
of emotional intelligence, which helps them rise through the ranks
because they can read people. They know what's going on
with their employees. Yeah, um, and women managers. This is
from a study out of University of Leads. Women managers
who show higher emotional intelligence and have a more intuitive

(13:42):
decision making style are more likely to influence change. So
it's not a trait that we should necessarily shy away
from because it can actually be a very powerful tool
in the workplace. And this is just focused on women.
I have a feeling that male managers who tap into
that higher emotional intelligence intuitive decision making style would also
be able to better influence change because basically it says that, hey,

(14:06):
you got good people skills, you actually care about your
employees and want to make created a harmonious working environment
while transforming it makes sense. I mean, you think about
a boss you've had who doesn't listen to what you say,
doesn't care what the employees want, just it's my way
or the highway. You typically feel happier to work for
someone who's more willing to hear you out, you know,

(14:29):
understand what everybody needs, that kind of thing. But once again,
in order to not pigeonhole us into back into this
women's intuition box, because while it is an excellent tool,
I think that it is time for the stereotype to
to maybe at least expand out of the guys. Guys
take advantage of this powerful tool. It's not it's not
just for us, but going back to the workplace. While

(14:52):
we might exert higher levels of emotional intelligence, studies have
also found though, that that does not make us any
less analytical than male non managers. Right overthinking, Yeah, and
it seems like The best balance you could have would
be a little bit of analysis, a little bit of intuition.
Mix it all up, and you got a magic potion.

(15:15):
A great boss. He's kind of magic potion of intuitions,
a potion for the corner office. I should probably let's
should go home and mix someone out off Caroline. This
this podcast, I think we just found the secret of success.
I don't want to make anyone sick though, um went
from all those gut feelings, mixing up too many gut feelings.

(15:39):
Just circle it back, you know, yeah, exactly, bringing a
full circle. Yeah, I mean just the same way that
you don't want to be someone who's all about snap
judgments and intuition, because you know sometimes it's wrong. You
also don't want to overthink things and and just be
paralyzed by self doubt and oh my god, which one
is better, which one is worse? Just you know, combine them.
You've probably been in a similar situation before. Think about it, right,

(16:01):
And I'm not I'm not railing on the women's intuition
stereotype because I necessarily think it's a bad thing. There's
certainly far worse to stereotypes. Indeed that we can bust
I just found it. Uh really great example of just
how those motivations and expectations can build up into such

(16:23):
a strong um and even supposedly scientifically confirmed stereotype. You know,
and it all depends on just how you turn those keys.
Are you priming for gender? Are you priming for you know,
women are the nurturing observers or aren't you? And seeing
how those results can change. I think another interesting thing

(16:43):
about busting this myth is that it just shows hey, dudes,
you can be intuitive. Also, you can pay attention to emotions.
It's fine. And yeah, it's because it's not. We just
took the pressure off. It's not an inherently feminine rate.
Exactly awesome. We can all be intuitive and maybe get
paid and get laid. Intuition is a sexual That's right,

(17:08):
we're really selling it. Who knew we get this excited?
I have no, I don't know. Well, I think that
I think that about covers it. I feel like we
have ground that's not only busted it, but grounded into
a fine dust with two heels, yes, um, but but
sensible heels. Sensible. Uh So, in the meantime, why don't

(17:30):
we why don't we A couple of stener emails. Do
it all right? Well, I've got one here from David
and he has this is one of the favorite, my
favorite things that a guy has written us in a
long time. And he says, Dear Christening Caroline, thanks so
much for that douche podcast. You're welcome. I really shouldn't

(17:52):
have listened to it as I drank a smoothie. But
moving on, as far as the girl else who are
aggressors in dating podcast? You got our attention, though, uh,
he said. I believe I'm the anomaly. All four of
the meaningful romantic, heteronormative relationships in my life have started

(18:13):
out with girls asking me out. I've never successfully started
a relationship by asking a girl out, and it usually
ends up in a friend date or never gets off
the ground, been their day. I think there is definitely
a confidence issue when I do go out on a
limb and ask a girl out, I feel like I'm
pretending to be someone else and generally can't maintain that
level of confidence through the courting period. A girl asking

(18:35):
me out inspires the confidence that it takes to get
a shy guy into action. Of course, all of my
meaningful relationships have been with women. With serious emotional issues
which ultimately led to their ends. So maybe this is
not the best method of dating. I noticed that moore
was expected of me in these relationships because I wasn't
the one to initially show interest, and I was expected
to continually reaffirm my attraction. Interesting observation, David testing just

(19:00):
my experience. Thanks well, thank you. The wheels are turning on.
I know, Caroline, you want to repeat this. I would
love to read this email from Aaron in response to
the Marrying Our Parents podcast. She says, I am one
of those girls who married a man who was like
her father. Sometimes I look at my husband and I think,
holy cow, he has a lot of the same personality traits.

(19:21):
I always thought it was crazy that a girl would
marry a man like her father, But as the years
have gone on, I realized that it is okay. My
dad is a great man. He and I are close,
so close that I joke I am the son he
never had. One day, when my dad is gone, I
can look at my husband and be reminded of why
I chose to marry him. You know, when I think
about the marrying your father, if I think that's gonna

(19:42):
be impossible, for me because I'm so much like my dab.
It would be like marrying myself. It will be a
lot of me. I think my dad and I both
have a tender sometime. If we should not marry each
other's stay away from her. So if you have an
email to send our way a mom, stuff at how
stup works dot com is the address, and you can

(20:03):
also hit us up on Facebook and follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast. And finally, you can check
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Told You at how stuff works dot com. Do be
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(20:26):
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