Active Inference at Work: The Science Behind Professional Intuition

Understanding the Embodied Workplace Hunch. Distinguishing the Science of Professional Intuition from Biases

Mar 10, 2025

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Have you ever had that moment when something just doesn't feel right in a workplace situation? Perhaps during an interview, when reviewing a candidate's CV, or when handling a complex employee relations issue? That intuitive feeling—the workplace hunch—might be more scientific than you think.

For decades, cognitive science viewed human decision-making as essentially a brain-centered process—as if we were merely sophisticated computers processing inputs and producing outputs. But research has dramatically shifted this perspective, even if pop-culture has ignored it. We now understand that decision-making isn't just happening in isolated neural circuits; it's embodied throughout our entire physiology, where perception and action continuously inform each other in a dynamic dance (Hutton & Myin, 2018; Rietveld & Van Westen, 2018; Seifert et al., 2022). This is why neuroscience is just a small part of understanding behaviour (not that looking at the bookshops best sellers would tell you this).

This evolution in thinking represents a profound change in how we understand intuition in professional settings. Rather than seeing intuition as mysterious signals from a detached brain, we now recognise it as a whole-body response—where your entire physiology participates in perceiving, responding to, making sense of and affecting your environment.

In policing, officers often describe physical sensations accompanying their hunches—goosebumps on the back of the neck, a tightening in the stomach, or heightened alertness across their entire body. These embodied responses can sometimes mean the difference between safety and danger. But what if I told you that the same physiological mechanisms that power a police officer's life-saving intuition are at work when you make quick assessments in your organisation?

Recent research published in Frontiers in Psychology by Stubbs and Friston (2024) explores this phenomenon through the lens of cutting-edge cognitive science. Let's break down what's happening in your body when you experience these professional hunches and what it means for HR practitioners and leaders in the workplace.

This theory is just one theory of how we make decisions, there is not one singular theory that all cognitive scientists agree on. But they do mostly discard the brain as a pure cognising machine that mirrors a mechanical system.

What's Really Happening When You "Just Know"?

We often describe intuition as "knowing without being able to explain how we know."(Stubbs & Friston, 2024, pg.3) But dismissing it as merely a mysterious sixth sense does it a disservice. Your entire body is actually performing sophisticated engagement with the environment beneath your conscious awareness.

The research describes intuition or hunches through three interconnected frameworks:

Bayesian Processing: Your body constantly generates probabilistic models based on prior knowledge and new information. When you walk into a meeting and sense tension, you're rapidly calculating probabilities based on subtle cues and previous experiences—manifesting as both thoughts and physical sensations.
The Free Energy Principle (FEP): Your entire system strives to minimise "surprise"—the difference between what it expects and what it actually observes. When something doesn't match your expectations, it triggers responses throughout your body, not just in your head.
Active Inference: This is where the magic happens. Unlike traditional models that portray cognition as passive information processing, active inference reveals a body that proactively engages with its environment. You don't just make predictions—your body actively tests them through behaviour, seeking to confirm or revise its models.

Active Inference: Your Body's Dynamic Reality Testing

Active inference deserves special attention because it fundamentally changes how we understand workplace intuition. This framework suggests that your entire system is constantly running simulations and generating hypotheses about your environment (inference), but it doesn't stop there—it compels you to act in ways that will either confirm or disprove these hypotheses (active).

Consider this workplace example: You're facilitating a difficult team meeting and sense that one participant is holding back crucial information. This isn't just a thought—you might notice your heart rate subtly increasing, your posture shifting forward, or your breathing pattern changing. Your body hasn't just passively observed this—it has generated a prediction based on environmental information like the participant's body language, voice tone, or inconsistencies in their statements. According to active inference theory, this prediction creates a state of uncertainty that your entire system seeks to resolve.

This might manifest as you instinctively asking a targeted question, changing the discussion format, or even scheduling a one-to-one follow-up. These actions aren't random—they're your body's attempt to test its prediction and reduce uncertainty.

What's fascinating is that both conscious decisions and unconscious physiological responses (like a sudden feeling of discomfort, the hairs standing up on your arms, or a knot in your stomach) serve this same purpose—they're ways your integrated body-mind system actively makes sense of the world. This explains why experienced HR practitioners often report "just feeling" something was off before they could articulate why—their bodies were detecting a mismatch between expected and actual observations, triggering both physiological responses and subtle changes in behaviour. This also makes experts not always the best teachers. As much of this information is “directly perceived”, in that we are not taking raw perceptive data and “processing it” using knowledge that we can talk through at a later date, like a repeatable maths equation. Our body is effectively falling through a perception-action landscape.

Why Your Professional Hunches Matter

As leaders, we're often trained to rely on data, frameworks, and established processes. These are vital, but the research suggests we shouldn't dismiss our embodied intuitions either.

Consider this example: An experienced HR director interviews a candidate who looks perfect on paper. Yet something feels off—perhaps a tightness in the chest or a feeling of unease. Later, it emerges that the candidate fabricated parts of their experience. Through the lens of active inference, we can understand that the director's entire system had detected subtle inconsistencies in the candidate's responses—misalignments that triggered bodily "surprise." This whole-body response then compelled the director to ask more probing questions or investigate further—actions that helped confirm the initial hunch. I can already hear you shouting “but what about unconscious bias”, yes we will get to that.

Unlike police officers who might need to make split-second decisions in potentially dangerous situations, HR practitioners usually have the luxury of time to investigate their hunches. But that initial bodily intuition can be invaluable in flagging areas that deserve deeper examination.

Niche Construction: Why Context Shapes Your Intuition

One fascinating aspect of the research is the concept of "niche construction"—how professionals develop distinct embodied frameworks based on their unique experiences.

Just as police officers develop specific physiological responses related to their work (like heightened threat detection), HR professionals build distinct embodied patterns for sensing issues in organisational dynamics, candidate selection, or conflict resolution. Your hunches about workplace situations are uniquely shaped by your professional experiences and manifest through your entire body.

This explains why an experienced HR practitioner can often sense undercurrents in an organisation that others miss. Their integrated body-mind system is attuned to these environmental sources of information based on thousands of previous observations and interactions.

When Hunches Can Lead Us Astray

It's important to note that not all hunches are created equal. The research acknowledges that biases and stereotypes can influence intuition formation. Our bodies may generate patterns based on limited or skewed data.

This is particularly relevant in HR, where unconscious biases can affect recruitment, promotion, and performance evaluation. A physical sense that a candidate "isn't a good fit" might reflect genuine concern about skills or values alignment—or it might stem from unconscious bias.

The key is to use embodied intuition as a starting point for investigation, not as the sole basis for decisions. When you experience a workplace hunch:

Acknowledge the physical sensation without immediate judgment
Question what specific sources of information might have triggered this bodily response
Seek additional information to confirm or disconfirm your intuition
Consider whether bias might be influencing your perception
Use structured decision-making processes alongside embodied insights

Harnessing the Power of Professional Intuition

So how can HR practitioners and leaders make better use of their professional hunches?

1. Develop Your Body's Perceptual Intelligence

The more diverse experiences you have in your field, the more sophisticated your system's predictive models become. This means actively seeking varied experiences and exposing yourself to different organisational contexts and challenges, allowing your body to build more refined responses.

2. Create Space for Whole-Body Reflection

Our integrated body-mind systems need time to process information at both conscious and unconscious levels. Build reflection time into your workflow—whether that's through regular journaling, debriefing with trusted colleagues, mindfulness practices, or simply taking a walk after complex interactions.

3. Tune Into Your Physical Responses

Practice noticing subtle physical responses during professional interactions—tension in your shoulders, changes in breathing, feelings in your stomach. These bodily signals often precede conscious awareness of a potential issue or opportunity.

4. Combine Embodied Intuition with Analysis

The strongest decisions typically come from combining intuitive, physiological insights with analytical approaches. When you experience a strong bodily response to a situation, use it to guide where you focus your analytical efforts.

5. Create Decision-Making Frameworks That Incorporate Embodied Knowledge

Rather than positioning data and intuition as opponents, design decision-making frameworks that legitimately incorporate both. For example, when interviewing candidates, document both objective assessment criteria and embodied impressions, then explore any gaps between them.

The Art and Science of HR Practice

Understanding the science behind professional hunches elevates intuition from a mysterious feeling to a sophisticated whole-body process that we can respect and refine. For HR practitioners and leaders, this means acknowledging that your professional hunches have value—they represent your integrated system's attempt to alert you to something significant based on your accumulated experience. Many decisions are directly acted upon and not processed in a computational, probabilistic way. Instead perception can be direct and hold the information that you directly act upon (think of your response when touching a hot stove).

The next time you experience that knot in your stomach, tension in your shoulders, or inexplicable sense of excitement about a potential solution—pay attention. Your entire body may be attending to critical information beyond your conscious awareness. This is not an excuse to ignore unhelpful biases. These create noise in decision making.

By combining the wisdom of embodied intuition with rigorous analysis, we can make more nuanced decisions and develop more sophisticated approaches to the complex human dynamics that lie at the heart of our work.

After all, in a field as complex as HR, we need every aspect of our human cognition at our disposal—both analytical thinking and embodied intuition working in harmony to navigate the fascinating complexities of organisational life.

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