on Jane Friedman site:

We’ve all seen it before in movies. The female character who gets into a car with a stranger or walks into a house when the door is ajar and looks like it’s been broken into. We find ourselves tearing our hair out yelling at the screen, what are you doing?

As writers, we love these moments because they build tension and suspense. And while they frustrate us as viewers, they aren’t unbelievable. The key is that the reader sees themselves in these characters. It might not be the choice they would make, but they understand why the character makes it.

Our instincts tend to be perceived as feelings rather than logic, but intuition, or gut feeling, is a cognitive process based on your subconscious observations. It’s your brain processing information that you’ve learned from your environment, whether that’s based on your own personal experiences or observed from others. Because it’s hard to pay attention to every detail you learn in life, your subconscious does that for you. When we have intuitive moments, it’s because our subconscious works much faster than the step-by-step thinking that we do all the time. It’s knowing something but not knowing why.