Beyond hyperbole and hypothesis: a protocol for measuring intuitive behaviour

Much of the literature on intuition in business monographs and journals takes a phenomenological approach. Some of this work dates back as far as the early 1930s. The modern-day approach primarily adopts a cognitive-psychological perspective, which utilizes self-report measures of intuitive perception and behavior. The consistent theme is that entrepreneurship is learned behavior, yet there is no robust empirical evidence that supports this viewpoint. The scientific understanding of intuition in business has not progressed very far in the last 50 years due to two major limitations in the current research on intuition. First, much of the work is theoretical in nature and makes no contribution to an understanding of the conditions under which and processes by which individuals access and successfully use intuition to inform their business decisions and behavior. Second, beyond qualitative approaches relying on the case-study method and quantitative approaches based on cognitive measures involving self-report instrumentation, there is a lack of rigorous, objective methods for studying intuitive perception and behavior in business. Thus, in the absence of solid experimental evidence to support or discount the role of intuition in successful business behavior, the field is left with much that is hypothetical and hyperbole, masquerading as scientific knowledge. This paper seeks to contribute to a rectification of this state of affairs by describing an experimental protocol for electrophysiological measurement of intuitive perception and behavior that has been successfully pilottested in a recent study of serial entrepreneurs in the Cambridge Technopole (UK). The primary focus of the paper will be on describing the logic, rationale, procedures, and preliminary results of the research methodology of the experimental protocol. The protocol has its measurement basis in recent experiments which have shown that intuitive information about a future event is perceived by the body's psychophysiological systems (Radin, 1997), and that the processing of this pre-stimulus information can be reliably measured with electrophysiological instrumentation (McCraty et al., 2004a, 2004b). Research results should be interpretable within the terms of a recent quantum-holographic theory of intuition (Bradley, 2006).