Intuition gets a lot of credit it has not earned.
In a 2016 study published in Psychological Science, researchers found that experienced managers who relied heavily on gut instinct made systematically worse predictions than those using simple statistical models — even in domains where the managers had decades of experience. The pattern held across finance, HR hiring, and clinical diagnosis.
Where intuition actually breaks down
Intuition performs reasonably well in high-repetition, fast-feedback environments — chess, firefighting, emergency triage. Outside those narrow conditions, it degrades fast. Most business and life decisions do not offer rapid feedback loops, which means your gut never gets corrected. It just accumulates confidence.
The dangerous part is not that intuition is wrong. It is that it feels more reliable the more experienced you are. Senior professionals are often the worst offenders precisely because their track record makes them dismiss contradicting data.
A concrete failure pattern
A product director at a mid-size SaaS company I consulted with rejected user research findings three consecutive quarters because they contradicted her read of the market. Each quarter, churn increased. She had 14 years of experience. That experience was the problem — it gave her a coherent but outdated mental model she never updated.
If you are making decisions that matter, build in a forcing function: write down your prediction before you decide, then track outcomes. Unverified intuition is just bias with good PR.