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Research that addresses intuition as experienced by nurses in critical care settings is rare; however, evidence to support the usefulness of intuition in making complex clinical decisions is mounting. The research reported here suggests that intuition is not a second-rate substitute for intelligent and rational decision-making; rather, it is a legitimate adjunct to empirical observation and linear analysis.
Intuition as a hallmark of nursing knowledge was traced through an analysis of literature published in the American Journal of Nursing between 1900 and 1985. Three questions were addressed: Does the concept appear in the literature; if so, what are its attributes; and how did they evolve through time? Titles of articles (n = 14,971) were examined and from this population only 51 were found to contain intuition or related terms. From analysis of the paucity of literature containing the concept it is concluded that intuition as an essential component of complex decision making is neglected in the professional literature.
Human beings have always been intuitive toxicologists, relying on their senses of sight, taste, and smell to detect harmful or unsafe food, water, and air. As we have come to recognize that our senses are not adequate to assess the dangers inherent in exposure to a chemical substance, we have created the sciences of toxicology and risk assessment to perform this function. Yet despite this great effort to overcome the limitations of intuitive toxicology, it has become evident that even our best scientific methods still depend heavily on extrapolations and judgments in order to infer human health risks from animal data. Many observers have acknowledged the inherent subjectivity in the assessment of chemical risks and have indicated a need to examine the subjective or intuitive elements of expert and lay risk judgments. Such an examination was begun by surveying members of the Society of Toxicology and the lay public about basic toxicological concepts, assumptions, and interpretations. The results demonstrated large differences between toxicologists and laypeople, as well as differences among toxicologists working in industry, academia, and government. In addition, toxicologists were found to be sharply divided in their opinions about the ability to predict a chemical's effect on human health on the basis of animal studies. These results place the problems of risk communication in a new light. Although the survey identifies misconceptions that experts should clarify for the public, it also suggests that controversies over chemical risks may be fueled as much by limitations of the science of risk assessment and disagreements among experts as by public misconceptions.
Drawing on the work of Gilligan (1982) and Heidegger (1962), this article explores the topic of intuition. It examines whether nursing intuition can be researched, if it is possible to develop a language of intuition, and if it is related to 'hands-on' experience.
As defined by Jordan (1992, 1993[1978]), authoritative knowledge motivates decision and action. Based on interviews with 22 white middle-class midwives in the United States conducted between 1992 and 1993, this article explores the inner knowing that constitutes a primary source of authoritative knowledge for homebirthers but is granted no authority in the realm of technomedicine. The purpose of this article is to call attention to these midwives' utilization of and reliance on intuition as a guide to action and decision making during homebirths. The midwife-interviewees are highly literate and competent in technological skills and biomedical diagnosis, and are keenly aware of the cultural and legal risks they run when they cannot justify their actions during a birth in logical, rational terms. Nevertheless, the deep value they place on connection, in the context of their holistic model of birth and health care, leads them to listen to and follow their "inner voice" during birth, rather than operating only according to protocols and standard parameters for "normal birth". The nature of intuition and the reasons for and consequences of the general devaluation of intuitive thinking by the wider society are also considered.
This article re-evaluates the place of intuition in the hierarchy of nursing skills in the light of recent neuro-scientific findings. The author draws on neural scientific perspectives to clarify ambiguity associated with intuition and redefine it as a working concept. Fresh credence is attributed to the previous claims of practitioners, theorists and other proponents of hypothetico-deductive approaches. Gender advantage in the use of emotional intelligence in professional life is critically explored. Arguments are tabled for a conceptual framework to house, guide and shape intuition in practice.
Intuition in the medical diagnostic sphere is a subconscious cognitive act, the result of which appears consciously as a flash of imagination. Scientific intuition presumes expert knowledge and works consciously with the mnemic reservoir and the associative forces from the subconscious. Low degrees of a hysterical and paranoic nature facilitate access to the subconscious and projection. Intuitive knowledge is corrected by rational thinking.
Using the data from Blank's (1976) description of his clinical efforts with his first patient, selected tissues on becoming a psychiatrist and psychotherapist are explored. Considered among the motives for entering this profession are opportunities for the therapist to projectively identify into his patients, and to introjectively identify with and contain his patients' psychopathology. The relationship between empathy and intuition on the one hand, and projection and projective identification on the other, is also studied, as is the need for the application of the validating process in confirming all so-called empathic and intuitive responses on the part of the therapist. Counter-transference influences on the experience and use of empathy and intuition are also investigated. The development of therapeutic misalliances and framework "cures," the distinction between transference and nontransference, the constructive elements contained in essentially countertransference-based interventions, the mastery of countertransference difficulties, and the choice of insight-oriented versus noninsightful therapeutic modalities are discussed.
Taking into account the different concepts of delusion and analysing rational and intuitive cognition, the present phenomenological-conceptual study aims at defining the essential nature of delusion. Intuitive cognition as a result of holistic processing is founded in the development of polysensoric-kinaesthetic basic pictures (eidetic matrices), which are recognized preverbally and prereflexively by subliminal perception of corresponding eidetic structures. A positive match between a matrix and a given phenomenon produces an eidetic feeling. This eidetic feeling encompasses three aspects. The first is a preverbal knowledge of something as something definite. As a direct self-reference, the second is the feeling of an object-inherent significance of the given phenomenon for the subject itself. Thirdly, a power vector is perceived to derive from the object. The application of this concept allows us to consider delusion as a disturbance in the system of holistic information processing. This disturbance is characterized by a disinhibition and actualization of eidetic matrices in different ways. The resulting eidetic feeling we call delusion; its expression in thoughts and words we call a delusional idea. All features of an eidetic feeling can be demonstrated in delusion. Owing to their special intensity and suspended reason, they mostly appear to be unique. The analysis of the eidetic structures of delusion allows a deeper understanding of delusion and facilitates both its diagnosis and its differentiation. Heterogeneous terms, such as delusional mood, idea of meaning, idea of reference, delusional notion and delusional perception emerge in an understandable context.
Narrow Window theory, suggested by Y. Kareev ten years ago, has so far focused on one central implication of the limited capacity of working memory on intuitive correlation estimation, namely, overestimation of the distal population correlation. This paper points to additional and perhaps more dramatic implications due to the large dispersion of intuitive estimates: (a) large estimation errors, possibly causing overestimation of negligible rhos, misses of strong rhos, and distorted hierarchies of the rhos between different pairs of variables; and (b) large interpersonal differences in the estimation of any given rho and highly incongruent hierarchies of estimated correlations between different pairs of variables. These implications impede both individuals' adaptation to the empirical world and communication among themselves.
There are certain simple rotations of objects that most people cannot reason about accurately. Reliable gaps in the understanding of a fundamental physical domain raise the question of how learning to reason in that domain might proceed. Using virtual reality techniques, this project investigated the nature of learning to reason across the domain of simple rotations. Learning consisted of the acquisition of spatial intuitions: there was encoding of useful spatiotemporal information in specific problem types and a gradual accumulation of this understanding across the domain. This pattern of learning through the accumulation of intuitions is especially interesting for rotational motion, in which an elegant domain-wide kinematics is available to support insightful learning. Individual ability to reason about rotations correlated highly with mastery motivation, skill in fluid reasoning, and skill in reasoning about spatial transformations. Thus, general cognitive advantages aided the understanding of individual rotations without guaranteeing immediate generalization across the domain.
Research on judgment and choice has been dominated by functionalist assumptions that depict people as either intuitive scientists animated by epistemic goals or intuitive economists animated by utilitarian ones. This article identifies 3 alternative social functionalist starting points for inquiry: people as pragmatic politicians trying to cope with accountability demands from key constituencies in their lives, principled theologians trying to protect sacred values from secular encroachments, and prudent prosecutors trying to enforce social norms. Each functionalist framework stimulates middle-range theories that specify (a) cognitive-affective-behavioral strategies of coping with adaptive challenges and (b) the implications of these coping strategies for identifying empirical and normative boundary conditions on judgmental tendencies classified as errors or biases within the dominant research programs.
The social intuitionist model (J. Haidt, 2001) posits that fast and automatic intuitions are the primary source of moral judgments. Conscious deliberations play little causal role; they are used mostly to construct post hoc justifications for judgments that have already occurred. In this article, the authors present evidence that fast and automatic moral intuitions are actually shaped and informed by prior reasoning. More generally, there is considerable evidence from outside the laboratory that people actively engage in reasoning when faced with real-world moral dilemmas. Together, these facts limit the strong claims of the social intuitionist model concerning the irrelevance of conscious deliberation.
Protecting children: intuition and awareness in the work of health visitors This paper is based upon an ethnographic study of a group of health visitors engaged in child protection work. The purpose of this paper is to explore the meanings individual health visitors attach to events concerned with identifying children who may be at risk of harm from child abuse, and also the idiosyncratic nature of health visiting in this complex but everyday social situation. The paper focuses on understanding the importance of a particular form of knowledge which the health visitors referred to as 'intuitive awareness'.
This paper proposes a complementary approach to Rasmussen's taxonomy of the human skill-, rule-, and knowledge-based performance models by combining the ecological concept of affordances with the neural concepts of human emotion and intuition. The classical cognitive engineering framework is extended through the neuro-ecological approach, including personal human attributes important in exercising control over the work environment. The proposed affordance-, emotion-, and intuition-based models correspond to the three types of human performance, namely: learning, adaptive and tuning control, respectively. The new framework is not a predictive model of the operator behaviour, but rather it describes the processes of neuro-ecological control of the human environment.
In this paper, two psychological functions, intuition and attention, are modeled by a newly proposed hierarchically arranged generalized regression neural network (HA-GRNN). The main contribution of the paper is two-fold: 1) to provide an engineering basis for a macroscopic representation of psychology-oriented functions by means of artificial neural networks; 2) to propose a concrete model for the two functions, intuition and attention, in terms of the associated interactive and evolutionary processes within an HA-GRNN. In the simulation study, the effectiveness of an HA-GRNN is justified within the context of pattern classification tasks.
Two experiments used Information Integration Theory to study how children judge expected value of complex gambles in which alternative outcomes have different prizes. Six-year-olds, 9-year-olds and adults (N = 73 in Study 1, N = 28 in Study 2) saw chance games that involved shaking a marble in a bicolored tube. One prize was won if the marble stopped on blue, another if it stopped on yellow. Children judged how happy a puppet playing the game would be, with the prizes and probability of the blue and yellow outcomes varied factorially. Three main results appeared in both studies: First, participants in all age groups used the normatively prescribed multiplication rule for integrating probability and value of each individual outcome--a striking finding because multiplicative reasoning does not usually appear before 8 years of age in other domains. Second, all age groups based judgment of overall expected value meaningfully on both alternative outcomes, but there were individual differences--many participants deviated from the normative addition rule, showing risk seeking and risk averse patterns of judgment similar to the risk attitudes often found with adults. Third, even the youngest children took probability to be an abstract rather than physical property of the game. Overall, in contrast to the traditional view, the present results demonstrate functional understanding of probability and expected value in children as young as 5 or 6. These results contribute to the growing evidence on children's intuitive reasoning competence. This intuition can, on the one hand, support surprisingly precocious performance in young children, but it may also contribute to the biases evident in adults' judgment and decision.
PURPOSE: To discuss the need for a shift in focus from intuitive to more analytic ways of examining both the process and outcomes of professional decisions based on "best evidence." SCOPE: Different assumptions inherent in intuitive and analytic explanations of nurses' decision making are outlined, and the two approaches are compared. The benefits and limitations of such approaches to decision making in nursing and health care are discussed, using available research evidence to show that in most instances the analytical approaches are more effective. CONCLUSIONS: A systematic approach to decision making in health care is needed, so that both health professionals and patients have a means for knowing the basis of decisions about treatment.