Clinical intuition and inferential accuracy.

There is an aspect of behavior prediction which can be classed under the broader meaning of the term clinical intuition. As used in the present discussion, clinical intuition will denote the inferential process producing clinical inferences made by a percipient or receiver person relative to a target person in which the inferences have their source in cues or cognitive processes that the percipient is unable to identify or specify with satisfactory completeness. This includes examples in which the percipient thinks he uses specified cues, but other evidences show that these cannot reasonably account for the accuracy. Obviously, therefore, clinical inferences based upon objective items are not derived intuitively within this connotation of the word. For example, the target person's sex, his age, items of dress, physical appearance, or behavior constitute information from which inferences are routinely drawn; these inferences from obvious cues are not intuitional unless their accuracy or extent exceeds that which can reasonably be accounted for. Intuition is involved either when the available information seems inadequate to produce the inferences drawn by the recipient or when the integrative powers of the percipient seem to exceed ordinary rational analysis. In any case, one of the main problems of this paper is to explore whether the phenomenon exists at all. If it does exist, then it may depend upon principles useful in training, or it may be an invariant example of individual differences and not subject to modification by training.