One in five Americans thinks they’re psychic. Not in a crystal ball, séance, speak-to-the-dead way—more in a “I just knew something was wrong before anyone said a word” way.
A new survey of 2,000 adults from Talker Research found that 19% of respondents straight-up believe they have psychic abilities, another 71% lean on intuition at least some of the time, and over the past year, the average person logged around 18 moments they’d describe as psychic. Only 11% said they don’t buy into it at all.
So what’s actually happening?
A Lot of Americans Think They’re Psychic. Science Says Something Else.
Nobody was predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers. The experiences people pointed to were more like: knowing something was off before anyone confirmed it (33%), clocking that someone was lying (28%), or just feeling like it was time to leave a situation (26%). Twenty-five percent had a bad feeling about something before it went awry. Twenty-four percent thought of someone right before that person texted. Psychic or just paying attention? Depends on who you ask.
Adam Dickinson, a former FBI intelligence analyst, didn’t dress it up. “Intuition is your body compressing years of experience and pattern recognition into a clear signal you can feel right now.” The people who sensed dishonesty before it surfaced, or finished someone’s sentence before they got there—they’re reading data. They’ve just been doing it long enough that it no longer feels like work.
The part of the survey that deserves more attention is the anxiety overlap. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they genuinely can’t tell the difference between a real gut feeling and anxiety spiraling. Dickinson’s way of separating the two: get still, get neutral, and notice whether the inner voice feels steady or frantic. “That urgent, demanding tone is usually anxiety trying to control uncertainty,” he said. Not intuition. Just the nervous system doing its thing.
As for what’s making people less trusting of their own instincts, social media (46%), remote work (40%), and increasing dependence on tech and AI (both above 40%) all made the list. Which, sadly, tracks. The more decisions get offloaded, the harder it gets to know what your own judgment even sounds like anymore. And maybe that’s exactly why people want to believe they’ve still got something the algorithm doesn’t.
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