No. My opinion is based on interpretation of the information I have and adapts when new information is processed.
Yes, I do trust my gut instincts and follow them as well. They are rarely wrong.
There was a man that lived with my family for months once, and although he was very nice and generous, and never did anything "off", I didn't trust him. He was going to get cable set up for my family. He said that he had to go into town and run some errands, and if the cable company called, I should set everything up for him. He left his full name and his social security number for me to give to the cable company for scheduling an instillation. No one except myself thought much of this; he was always very genial.
I pretended to be him on the phone when the cable company called to speak to him, and gave his full name. I did want to get cable and internet. But when they asked for the social security number, the whole situation became very off. I stopped there and asked if I could call them back.
Later that night when everyone was out, he took some of his stuff and left with no notice right before his rent was due. I called the cable company back afterward and told a manager that I lied and said that I was him when they had called. The manager told me the next time I seen him, to tell him to get in contact with them, as he owed them several hundred dollars.
Well, gut feelings themselves come from some sort of analysis of people and past experience. It's nothing supernatural. I trust and follow my instincts and that's helped me plenty. If I'm faced with good enough proof that they were/are wrong, I'll go against my instincts. I'm not happy when I have to do that.
My gut instincts about people are usually spot on. If I'm really paying attention, that is. I was proved right about someone today in fact, and it would have saved a lot of inconvenience if people had listened to me months ago. But it's difficult when all you have to go on is little more than a feeling.
However, I always allow for the possibility of being surprised by someone.
Gut feelings come from rapid cognition that takes advantage of the brain's built-in shortcuts. Think of intuition as a mental matching game. The brain takes in a situation, does a quick search of its files, and then finds its best analogue among the stored memories and knowledge.
Based on that process, you ascribe meaning to the situation in front of you. For example, a doctor might simply glance at a pallid woman complaining of fatigue and shortness of breath and immediately intuit she has anemia.
Gut feelings are felt in the gut because there are millions of nerve cells there but gut feelings originate in signals from the brain. Butterflies in the gut indicate that emotions are an intrinsic part of all gut feelings. Emotion guides how we learn from experience; if you witness something while your adrenaline is pumping, it will be remembered very vividly.
Intuition is best used as the first step in solving a problem or deciding what to do. The more experience you have in a particular domain, the more reliable your intuitions.