Instinctive means done without thinking, because it comes naturally. The body decided first.
It describes reactions above all, so an instinctive flinch or an instinctive dislike arrives before any reasoning does. Sport uses it as high praise, since an instinctive player reads the game without appearing to calculate. Strictly, biology reserves instinct for inherited behaviour, and most of what we call instinctive in people is really very fast learned pattern recognition. The adverb is instinctively.
1adjectiveinstinctiveDone automatically, without conscious thought.
“His instinctive reaction was to apologise.”
Latin
īnstīnctus
English
instinct
English, today
instinctive
Built from
From instinct + -ive. instinct comes from Latin īnstīnctus, past participle of īnstinguō (“to incite, to instigate”), from in (“in, on”) + stinguō (“to prick”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA