Researchers in Spain and the U.K. may have found biological evidence of female intuition. According to a March 2014 study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, people who were exposed to less testosterone in the womb tend to be more intuitive.How can you tell how much testosterone you got as a fetus, you ask? Simple: measure your fingers.Scientists use digit ratio as a way to assess prenatal sex hormones. To get yours, measure your pointer finger from crease to tip, then divide it by the length of your ring finger. In women, who get less exposure to androgens during development, the second and fourth fingers are usually about to the same length, or the pointer is slightly longer. This gives them digit ratios close to or slightly above 1. Men, meanwhile, typically have a longer ring finger than pointer, so their digit ratios tend to be lower.To test the link between digit ratio and intuition, or its mental opposite, “reflexive thought,” Antonio M. EspÍn Martín, a lecturer at the University of Granada, and his team gave 659 students a three-question test designed to determine whether a person answers using knee-jerk intuition or a deliberate, more cognitively strenuous method of response. For example:A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? _____ centsIf you read this quickly and respond automatically, you’ll probably answer 10 cents. That’s intuition at work. It sounds right, so you go for it and move on. If, however, you think about it a little more, you’ll realize you’re mistaken. It has very little to do with your arithmetic skills and a lot to do with whether you can reflect on and override your initial response. (By the way, the answer is 5.)By and large, the study results show that men tended to do better on the test—and also have lower digit ratios, an average of 0.9597 (right hand). Women didn’t fare so well on the questions, relying too much on intuitive responses. Their average digit ratio: 0.9717. That might not look like a big difference, but both test scores and digit ratios were significantly different between men and women.“The difference between sexes is actually a question of few millimeters. Thus, defining what is a ‘masculine’ digit ratio is a hard task,” says Martín. He explains that men were nearly two times more likely to have a digit ratio under 0.94.If you measure your ratio and find yourself on the “masculine” end of the spectrum even though you consider yourself an intuitive person, your intuition might be telling you that this study is wrong. This is a good time to exercise some reflexive thought and remember that even science isn’t a perfect science.MORE: 5 Ways to Slow Down and Find Fulfillment
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