by Ruth Scalpone

Created on: July 28, 2010

We should not trust our intuition because it is based only on feelings, not reason.  Feelings are often based on prejudices and biases of race, religion, skin color, or national origin.  Those biases are passed from one generation to the next.  Since decisions based on those kinds of prejudices may or may not be accurate, the decisions and results of those decisions are not logical or reasonable.  Decisions need to be based on logic and reasoning, not blind prejudice.

Survivors of crimes may intuitively feel afraid of anyone who looks like the criminal(s) who preyed on them.  How that person really is does not matter.  The crime victim fears and avoids them.  If the person resembling the criminal is conducting a job interview of the survivor, he or she may trust his or her own intuition and not offer a job to the person who gave them a “bad feeling”.

This happens not only in job interviews, but also in loan applications, sales, dates, and other meetings.  The lack of a job offer, loan, sale, date, or something else was not based on reason or logic.  It was pure feeling, or intuition.  Avoidance of people who cause intuitive bad feelings cannot be helped by the person being avoided.  They were born a certain race, color, and national origin.  There isn’t anything they can do to change it.  Only the person with the intuition can change their feelings by realizing there is no logical reason for their feelings.

Sexual preferences may be inborn or derived from the person’s upbringing (the nature vs. nurture debate).  Though their sexual preferences should not matter to anybody else, bias often is shown.  Those biases and prejudices may have been passed down from one generation to the next.  People can make sure to remember that a person they see or meet who happens to resemble someone they had trouble with in the past is not the person who committed the crime or did other things.  It is not them.  It is somebody who happens to look like them. 

While everybody in today's society needs to be cautious about people they meet because of the numbers of crimes committed, that does not mean new people should be completely feared and avoided.  Getting to know people of different races, colors, and national origins may lead people to change their minds and correct their biases, which does not mean that everybody of any race, religion, national origin, or sexual preferences is worthy of their attention.  Opportunities might flow that may not have happened because of prejudice and fear.

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