Female intuition related to lower testosterone

71200 Are you a woman and often know things that can’t be explained rationally? Do you get a gut feeling and then it turns out to be right? Let no one underestimate this ability again. Yes, intuition exists and it is a woman thing, according to a study conducted by the University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and the University of Granada, both in Spain.
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Female intuition
Women’s intuition may have a biological component related to lower prenatal testosterone exposure experienced by women in the womb. This reduced exposure predisposes women to adopt a sort of more intuitive and less reflective thinking than men. Instead, men generally receive higher amount of prenatal testosterone, which influences them to become less empathetic and and more likely to take risks than women.
The less testosterone, the more intuition
To determine the effects of testosterone on the thought processes, the researchers conducted a series of experiments with more than 600 students from the Faculty of Economics and Business, in the University of Granada.
They used a marker of prenatal exposure to testosterone, the so-called «digit ratio,» which is obtained by dividing the length of the index finger between the length of the ring finger of the same hand. The lower the ratio, the more testosterone is received before birth and therefore more «masculine» is the brain organization, regardless of the genre of the person.
Female intuition is a real thing.
The less testosterone, the more intuition(Shutterstock)
Participants responded to a series of questionnaires, including the so-called Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), that measures this dichotomy between intuition and reflection, penalizing intuitive thinking. The researchers then scanned the volunteers’ hands to measure their digit ratio. The results showed that men responded better than women to the CRT, even though those ladies with a more «masculine» digit ratio responded just as accurately as the men.
«We found an indication that prenatal exposure to testosterone predisposes people to a more thoughtful and less intuitive thinking. Moreover, this effect appears to be stronger among women,» says Manuel Antonio Espin, professor of Economic Theory and History at the University of Granada and one of the paper’s authors.
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