For example, instinct can refer to reflexive or stereotyped behaviour, to an intuitive hunch, to a congenital aptitude or disposition, to a deep-seated impulsion (e.g., "maternal instinct"), to ways of acting that do not appear to have involved learning or experience in their development, or to knowledge that is inborn or subconsciously acquired.
There are plenty of ideas and intuitive hunches, but rather less incontestable evidence.
After a long career on Wall Street, for instance, picking stocks might come down to intuitive hunches, but that doesn't mean your inner voice is also skilled at picking football scores or spouses or anything else, really.
The rich cognitive complexity that forms the architecture for our capacity to perceive others often escapes our conscious awareness, emerging only as intuitive hunches or "gut feelings".
Test intuitive hunches against the data, being critical and looking for counter examples.
In our sample, the participants never took a bird's-eye view of this reconstructing process to become aware of possible tacit clues or intuitive hunches hidden in the patient's story or context.
This discussion was typical of the concerns expressed by professionals about the challenge of making implicit (or tacit) knowledge explicit during a process of mutual engagement; both by articulating to each other the basis for their intuitive hunches about parents' support needs but also by making their professional knowledge explicit to parents in a way that was meaningful to the parents.
However, this proved a misguided decision; those cute, counter-intuitive hunches do not always work.
In intuitive decision-making, hunches, gut feelings, subconscious and holistic associations are pivotal indicators of what decision to make, rather than a 'good rationale' (Dane and Pratt 2007, Eling et al. 2014).
Breaking the code was largely a triumph of esoteric mathematics; yet one intuitive cryptanalyst had a hunch that lazy German encoders would probably take certain shortcuts when setting up their machines.
Always a highly intuitive scientist, Birkeland had a hunch that the phenomenon was linked not to the earth's atmosphere but to the sun's magnetic activity -- specifically, he later found, to sunspots.
