Intuition

Intuition is a person's capacity to obtain or have direct knowledge and/or immediate insight, without observation or reason. It's the "gut feeling" you get. People often place an enormous amount of faith on their intuition, even making decisions that seem to go against all available evidence.

For example, a coach might play a second string player instead of a start player just because they had a "hunch" the second string player would do well. This would be a case of using intuition to make a decision.