InTUITION Study
The Intuition in Pregnancy study, completed in 1998, has generated quite a bit of interest--and more than its share of controversy. The study's central finding, that women who have an intuition about the sex of their unborn child are right 70% of the time, has been featured by NBC's Today Show as well as USA Today and various national magazines, including Parenting, Baby Talk and Real Woman magazine.
For decades, cognitive psychologists have defined intuition as unconscious thinking. This definition never seemed quite right to me; it was inconsistent with my own intuitive experiences or those of the artists I have interviewed and studied over the years. For me, intuition has always felt like a form of knowledge that extends beyond thinking.
When friends of mine, Mary and Keith, were expecting their first child, Mary confided that she was certain it would be a boy. I inquired about the reasons for her certainty, only to learn that she had been having dreams about a son since the first trimester of her pregnancy. In the last two months of her pregnancy, Keith began to have similar dreams.
A few weeks after I spoke with her, Mary gave birth to a boy. When I shared this story with a colleague at a conference, he thought that Mary had just made a lucky guess. "Couldn't it be that she was right purely by chance?" he asked. "After all, she had a 50% probability of being right." At that moment, I realized that my colleague's question was an empirical one that could be tested scientifically. What made this a particularly interesting subject for an intuition study was the fact that no known logical or perceptual process has ever been proven effective at predicting the sex of a baby. If a mother has an intuition about the sex of this child, this intuition must be based on some mechanism other than unconscious thinking.
In 1996, I began surveying women at a local birth and women's health center, with the aid of graduate student Amanda Dawson. For the next two years, we collected and analyzed data as thoroughly as we could, be careful to rule out mothers' predictions that were based on a medical procedure (e.g. ultrasound or amniocentesis), folk wisdom (e.g. the theory that male and female fetuses are positioned differently in the uterus--a theory that appears to have no basis in fact), personal preference, or the influence of friends and family members. Our selection criteria ruled out many of the mothers in our study, which is why it took us two years to gather 100 data points.
Our effect size of 70% was impressive by any measure. This marks a significant departure from chance, which is roughly 50%. The accuracy of predictions made by women in our study about the sex of their unborn babies was not just a matter of dumb luck. Nor does it seem to have been the result of unconscious thinking, because there is no known inferential process that could lead to such accurate predictions.
So, what did contribute to these predictions? For the sake of measurement, we identified an intuition as a prediction based on a dream or a "gut feeling." When you or I have an intuition, we just know that something is right, but we don't necessarily have any insight into how we know. There is much to say about the nature of intuition and the reasons it has remained something of a mystery to researchers. You will find some of these ideas in Deep Creativity: Inside the Creative Mystery, and others in my Blog posts.
Here is the original news release for the Intuition in Pregnancy study, written and distributed in October 1998, in response to media interest in the study:
Press Release
Mothers Use Intuition to Know Their Babies, According to Study
Researchers have found that expectant mothers can use the power of their intuition to learn about their unborn babies. A pair of psychologists from the University of Arizona has completed a preliminary study on pregnancy and intuition showing that pregnant women can predict the gender of their babies on the basis of their intuition alone.
In a two-year study conducted at the Birth and Women's Health Center in Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Victor Shamas and Amanda Dawson asked 100 pregnant women to predict whether they would give birth to a girl or a boy. Women who claimed to have an intuition about the gender of their child made the right choice over 70 percent of the time.
"These findings took us by surprise," says Dr. Shamas, a cognitive psychologist who studies the role of intuition and inspiration in everyday life. "We suspected that some of the women would have accurate intuitions about their infants but certainly not such a large percentage."
The women who participated in the study chose not to know the results of any medical procedure that would inform them of the gender of their child. Although sonograms are performed in the majority of pregnancies and can determine the gender of a fetus with 95 percent accuracy, some expectant mothers still prefer to keep their baby's gender a mystery until the time of delivery.
All of the participants in the study were patients at the Birth and Women's Health Center, an independent facility that provides health care to hundreds of pregnant women and their families each year. The Center's director, Kathryn Schrag, observes, "Our entire staff was excited to learn about this study. We have all heard our pregnant patients' stories of their 'knowing' things such as the gender of their baby. We were eager to see it scientifically studied."
After making a prediction about their babies' gender, participants in the study had to indicate whether their prediction was based on an intuition or on some other source of information. They were also asked if they preferred a girl or a boy.
"One of the interesting findings to come out of this study," explains Dr. Shamas, "is that women who have a preference for one gender or the other don't tend to have accurate intuitions. The point is that there's a big difference between what you want to happen and what your intuition tells you is going to happen. When a woman really wants either a girl or a boy, her desire gets in the way of her intuitive ability."
Although the Arizona study deals only with the issue of gender, Dr. Shamas points out that mothers can also use their intuitive ability to discover other aspects of their baby's identity. "If you look at the kinds of dreams that expectant mothers tend to have, quite often you will find that these dreams deal with themes related to the kind of people their children will turn out to be, including the children's temperament, their likes and dislikes, and even their future career choices."
According to Dr. Shamas, the majority of sons and daughters are aware of the intuitive connection their mothers have with them. Nearly three-fourths of colleges students he surveyed maintained that their mothers are able to read their thoughts and feelings in a way that nobody else can. Approximately 80 percent also said that their mothers are more intuitive than their fathers.
"Most of us recognize the closeness of the bond that can form between a mother and her child, but we may not realize the extent to which the power of intuition makes this bond possible. The accuracy and the scope of a mother's intuition are something we're just beginning to understand," notes Dr. Shamas.
For decades, cognitive psychologists have defined intuition as unconscious thinking. This definition never seemed quite right to me; it was inconsistent with my own intuitive experiences or those of the artists I have interviewed and studied over the years. For me, intuition has always felt like a form of knowledge that extends beyond thinking.
When friends of mine, Mary and Keith, were expecting their first child, Mary confided that she was certain it would be a boy. I inquired about the reasons for her certainty, only to learn that she had been having dreams about a son since the first trimester of her pregnancy. In the last two months of her pregnancy, Keith began to have similar dreams.
A few weeks after I spoke with her, Mary gave birth to a boy. When I shared this story with a colleague at a conference, he thought that Mary had just made a lucky guess. "Couldn't it be that she was right purely by chance?" he asked. "After all, she had a 50% probability of being right." At that moment, I realized that my colleague's question was an empirical one that could be tested scientifically. What made this a particularly interesting subject for an intuition study was the fact that no known logical or perceptual process has ever been proven effective at predicting the sex of a baby. If a mother has an intuition about the sex of this child, this intuition must be based on some mechanism other than unconscious thinking.
In 1996, I began surveying women at a local birth and women's health center, with the aid of graduate student Amanda Dawson. For the next two years, we collected and analyzed data as thoroughly as we could, be careful to rule out mothers' predictions that were based on a medical procedure (e.g. ultrasound or amniocentesis), folk wisdom (e.g. the theory that male and female fetuses are positioned differently in the uterus--a theory that appears to have no basis in fact), personal preference, or the influence of friends and family members. Our selection criteria ruled out many of the mothers in our study, which is why it took us two years to gather 100 data points.
Our effect size of 70% was impressive by any measure. This marks a significant departure from chance, which is roughly 50%. The accuracy of predictions made by women in our study about the sex of their unborn babies was not just a matter of dumb luck. Nor does it seem to have been the result of unconscious thinking, because there is no known inferential process that could lead to such accurate predictions.
So, what did contribute to these predictions? For the sake of measurement, we identified an intuition as a prediction based on a dream or a "gut feeling." When you or I have an intuition, we just know that something is right, but we don't necessarily have any insight into how we know. There is much to say about the nature of intuition and the reasons it has remained something of a mystery to researchers. You will find some of these ideas in Deep Creativity: Inside the Creative Mystery, and others in my Blog posts.
Here is the original news release for the Intuition in Pregnancy study, written and distributed in October 1998, in response to media interest in the study:
Press Release
Mothers Use Intuition to Know Their Babies, According to Study
Researchers have found that expectant mothers can use the power of their intuition to learn about their unborn babies. A pair of psychologists from the University of Arizona has completed a preliminary study on pregnancy and intuition showing that pregnant women can predict the gender of their babies on the basis of their intuition alone.
In a two-year study conducted at the Birth and Women's Health Center in Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Victor Shamas and Amanda Dawson asked 100 pregnant women to predict whether they would give birth to a girl or a boy. Women who claimed to have an intuition about the gender of their child made the right choice over 70 percent of the time.
"These findings took us by surprise," says Dr. Shamas, a cognitive psychologist who studies the role of intuition and inspiration in everyday life. "We suspected that some of the women would have accurate intuitions about their infants but certainly not such a large percentage."
The women who participated in the study chose not to know the results of any medical procedure that would inform them of the gender of their child. Although sonograms are performed in the majority of pregnancies and can determine the gender of a fetus with 95 percent accuracy, some expectant mothers still prefer to keep their baby's gender a mystery until the time of delivery.
All of the participants in the study were patients at the Birth and Women's Health Center, an independent facility that provides health care to hundreds of pregnant women and their families each year. The Center's director, Kathryn Schrag, observes, "Our entire staff was excited to learn about this study. We have all heard our pregnant patients' stories of their 'knowing' things such as the gender of their baby. We were eager to see it scientifically studied."
After making a prediction about their babies' gender, participants in the study had to indicate whether their prediction was based on an intuition or on some other source of information. They were also asked if they preferred a girl or a boy.
"One of the interesting findings to come out of this study," explains Dr. Shamas, "is that women who have a preference for one gender or the other don't tend to have accurate intuitions. The point is that there's a big difference between what you want to happen and what your intuition tells you is going to happen. When a woman really wants either a girl or a boy, her desire gets in the way of her intuitive ability."
Although the Arizona study deals only with the issue of gender, Dr. Shamas points out that mothers can also use their intuitive ability to discover other aspects of their baby's identity. "If you look at the kinds of dreams that expectant mothers tend to have, quite often you will find that these dreams deal with themes related to the kind of people their children will turn out to be, including the children's temperament, their likes and dislikes, and even their future career choices."
According to Dr. Shamas, the majority of sons and daughters are aware of the intuitive connection their mothers have with them. Nearly three-fourths of colleges students he surveyed maintained that their mothers are able to read their thoughts and feelings in a way that nobody else can. Approximately 80 percent also said that their mothers are more intuitive than their fathers.
"Most of us recognize the closeness of the bond that can form between a mother and her child, but we may not realize the extent to which the power of intuition makes this bond possible. The accuracy and the scope of a mother's intuition are something we're just beginning to understand," notes Dr. Shamas.
