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Intuition

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Synonyms

Feeling; Hunch; Insight; Instinct

Definition

Intuition is a strategy of knowledge use characterized by a lack of effortful reasoning with which knowledge is accessed or generated, often with great speed. When relying on intuition, individuals have little conscious awareness of the origins or basis of their thoughts and feelings and cannot point to a specific process that generated them. Intuition typically represents the holistic perception of multiple cues, which amounts to a ready capacity to recognize patterns. Thus, intuition can be defined as the capacity to comprehend facts with immediacy and without conscious reasoning. Individuals experience intuition as the direct perception of facts without effort.

Introduction

Modern research on intuition began with (e.g., Carl G. Jung’s 1926) work on psychological types, according to which individuals vary in the extent that they relied on “unconscious perception,” the habitual reliance on information obtained without reflection...

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Correspondence to Markus Kemmelmeier .

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Kemmelmeier, M., Kaplan, T. (2018). Intuition. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_692-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_692-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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