Evaluating the Spidey sense: The metacognition of intuition

The notion of intuition is a common phenomenological description of how people feel they make some decisions. Although previous work has demonstrated an objective lab-based method to measure intuition, it remains unknown how such objective data might be related to real-world phenomenology of intuition, such as metacognition. To investigate this, we compared performance in an objective lab-based intuition task and its physiological responses with off-line self-report measures of intuitive thinking. We found that intuitive phenomenology was positively correlated with objective intuition and physiology in the lab-based task. Further, we found that those categorized as ‘intuitive thinkers’ performed better on the lab-based intuition task, relative to ‘rational thinkers’. Interestingly, individuals categorized as neither intuitive nor rational thinkers demonstrated decisional adaptability in their degree of intuition, depending on the availability of conscious evidence. These findings support a link between objective psychophysical lab-based measures, physiology, and subjective phenomenology of intuition in decision making: good metacognition.