If you’ve ever been around a mom friend or bunch of mom friends and been attempting to leave a cafe you know what happens. The women all start assessing the situation together. ‘Here’s your sunglasses, and your sons sweatshirt, can you hand me my drink?’ Everyone starts instinctively helping each other out. You don’t just stand there gawking while your friend changes her baby’s diaper you hand her a wipe or a new diaper or whatever item that mom might need. Not just because you’re a mom that understands about these things but because you know what that woman needs and you know that she’ll return the favor when the time comes that you need such a thing.

So what part of the female brain is working overtime while men’s brains are just not making that connection? Your wonderful husband will sit and watch, even talk to you while you fold a whole basket of laundry (his underwear included) but does it occur to him to pick up an item and fold it? Nope. Is there even such a thing as men’s intuition? If there is does it just consist of the one single thought, ‘Hot day, hmm, I give friends beer’

There is nothing particularly strange or mystical about intuition; it is something we do all the time. Why, then, do men never arrive at a conclusion without consciously following all the stages that were necessary to reach it? The answer is probably linguistic. Traditionally women’s conversation is less formal, less argumentative, and more concerned with feelings than men’s conversation. Intuitive conclusions are therefore more acceptable in an all-female group. Men, on the other hand, are expected to argue more, and to argue more logically, presenting evidence in a systematic way to back up their conclusions. It is less socially acceptable in an all-male conversation  to say “Well guys, I don’t know why, but I just get this kind of feeling that e=mc2.”

So in my typical way I wanted to go and research woman’s intuition. Since it’s sort of an ‘out there’ topic I wasn’t finding much (sadly) but I did stumble onto a board game and it’s creator and the research that blossomed out of the development of the game. The game is called, “Sixth Sense” and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Bruce Willis movie. Ron Hutchinson, a Missouri board game creator made the game purely for fun. There are no right or wrong answers but the idea is that you guess what the opposing player will pick for an answer. So a typical question might be like this ~

QUESTION: What is the greatest motivator for adults?
A. Love
B. Hate
C. Fear
D. Money

Hutchison said the game is unique because it taps into each player’s emotional and behavioral characteristics.

After early test games, Hutchison began keeping gender won-loss records. “I realized I had stumbled onto something, and when I tallied the results after three months of test games, women had won 74 percent of the time, or 31 of 42 games. I was more than a little surprised.”      
Hutchison said men have a tendency to over analyze what they think will be the answering player’s response to a question. “Women, on the other hand, rely on their intuition,” he said. Instinct, the board-game creator insisted, trumps analysis.

I wish this applied to the everyday scenario that I brought up at the beginning of this post. That men were simply, over analyzing everything and that’s what stopped them from picking up some laundry from the basket and folding it right along with you. I just don’t think that is what’s behind it in this scenario, I doubt, highly, that they’re watching you struggle to leave the cafe with a baby in one hand and a purse and a diaper bag and they’re over-analyzing whether or not they should hand you your sunglasses off the table or pack up the kids sweaters with you. Is it our tremendous corpus callosum (the thing that connects the two halves of the brain)? I wish I knew.

I do like Ron’s conclusion at least, “Woman’s intuition is not an old wife’s tale,” Hutchison maintained. “From what I’ve learned, it’s a fact. I have the numbers to prove it.”