I think you might be confusing instinct with intuition. Intuition is a means of taking in information. Psychologists call it irrational because it isn't reall

I think you might be confusing instinct with intuition. Intuition is a means of taking in information. Psychologists call it irrational because it isn't really a decision making process. Instinct is very rational, we just don't usually recognize it as such because it isn't concerned with verbalizing its logic. For instance, the game of basketball actually requires a lot of logic if you think about it. It's just that it requires a very fast-acting form of logic. Imagine how ridiculous it would be for a basketball player to say something like "I know I can make this goal because of Jordan's theorem". By the time they finished that thought, the other team might have already scored.