Save angels perhaps": A critical examination of unconscious thought theory and the deliberation-without-attention effect (original) (raw)
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According to unconscious thought theory, complex decisions are best made after a period of distraction assumed to elicit ''unconscious thought.'' Here, the authors suggest instead that the superiority of decisions made after distraction results from the fact that conscious deliberation can deteriorate impressions formed on-line during information acquisition. The authors found that participants instructed to form an impression made better decisions after distraction than after deliberation, thereby replicating earlier findings. However, decisions made immediately were just as good as decisions made after distraction, which suggests (a) that people had already made their decision during information acquisition, (b) that deliberation without attention does not occur during distraction, and (c) that ruminating about one's first impression can deteriorate decision quality. Strikingly, in another condition that should have favored unconscious thought even more, deliberated decisions were better than immediate or distracted decisions. These findings were replicated in a field study.
Unconscious Thought Theory and Its Discontents: A Critique of the Critiques
Social Cognition, 2011
A review of Unconscious Thought Theory, its original empirical support, and the several methodological and empirical critiques that followed leads to the following conclusions: (1) the basic tenants of Unconscious Thought Theory are in harmony with recent research and theory on unconscious processes if not with the dated, "straw-man" version of the unconscious presented by its critics; (2) the several published "failures to replicate" are actually, on closer inspection, found to be a series of consistent replications of at least the equivalent quality of unconsciously made versus consciously made decisions; (3) the most recent research is showing superiority of unconsciously made decisions in more ecologically valid "real-life" judgmental situations (e.g., fairness assessments and cheater detection) for which natural selection has likely equipped us with unconsciously operating expertise, compared to the artificial situations studied by the decision theorists (which often involve numerical computations); and 4) going forward, all researchers should be open-minded about the potential contributions of both unconscious and conscious processes in complex decision making.
Judgment and decision making
According to the deliberation without attention (DWA) hypothesis, people facing a difficult choice will make a better decision after a period of distraction than after an equally long period of conscious deliberation, an effect referred to as the unconscious thought advantage (UTA). The status of the DWA hypothesis is controversial, as many studies have tried but failed to replicate the UTA. Here, we report a series of experiments that sought to identify the conditions under which the UTA can be replicated. Our starting point was a recent meta-analysis that identified the conditions under which the UTA was strongest in previous studies. Using a within-subjects design and a task that met each of these conditions, we failed to replicate the UTA. Based on closer inspection of previous methods and findings, we then examined some additional factors that could be important for replicating the UTA, including mental fatigue and choice complexity. This was to no avail, as the results reveale...
On Unconscious and Conscious Thought and the Accuracy of Implicit and Explicit Judgments
Social Cognition, 2011
research suggesting merits of deliberation under distraction mainly have assessed explicit judgments. however, unconscious thought theory argues that also under conditions of conscious thinking (some) unconscious thinking takes place albeit at implicit cognitive levels. Therefore, we performed two studies in which we assessed the effects of unconscious and conscious thinking on explicit and implicit judgments. in both experiments, participants read a complex situation description. Next, they made judgments immediately, could consciously think about their judgments for a couple of minutes, or were distracted for a couple of minutes and then made their judgments. Finally, we assessed implicit judgment accuracy using an implicit association test, and explicit judgment accuracy using rating scales. replicating earlier research, results suggest that unconscious thinking leads to the best explicit assessments. however, as expected, both unconscious thinking and conscious thinking lead to better implicit assessments than participants in immediate judgment conditions. importantly, only for unconscious thinking these implicit assessments were in line with explicit assessments. implications are discussed. Earlier research (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & Van Baaren, 2006) has suggested that deliberation without attention can lead to more accurate complex judgments than conscious deliberation or immediate judgment, and showed no clear pattern of differences between the latter two. However, little is known about the processes of unconscious thought. We argue that both conscious
Does unconscious thought improve complex decision making?
Psychological Research Psychologische Forschung, 2009
In a recent study, Dijksterhuis et al. (Science 311:1005, 2006) reported that participants were better at solving complex decisions after a period of unconscious thought relative to a period of conscious thought. They interpreted their results as an existence proof of powerful unconscious deliberation mechanisms. In the present report, we used a similar experimental design with an additional control, immediate condition, and we observed that participants produced as good (and even descriptively better) decisions in this condition than in the "unconscious" one, hence challenging the initial interpretation of the authors. However, we still obtained lower performances in the "conscious" relative to the "immediate" condition, suggesting that the initial result of Dijksterhuis et al. was not due to the action of powerful unconscious thought processes, but to the apparent disadvantage of further conscious processing. We provide an explanation for this observation on the basis of current models of decision making. It is Wnally concluded that the beneWt of unconscious thought in complex decision making is still a controversial issue that should be considered cautiously.
Unconscious influences of, not just on, decision-making
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2014
To what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology (cognition, perception, social behavior) to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view places a heavy explanatory burden on an intelligent cognitive unconscious, with many theories assigning causally effective roles to unconscious influences. This article presents a novel framework for evaluating these claims and reviews evidence from three major bodies of research in which unconscious factors have been studied: multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions under uncertainty. Studies of priming (subliminal and primes-to-behavior) and the role of awareness in movement and perception (e.g., timing of willed actions, blindsight) are also given brief consideration. The review highlights that inadequate procedures for assessing awareness, failures to consider artifactual explanations of "landmark" results, and a tendency to uncritically accept conclusions that fit with our intuitions have all contributed to unconscious influences being ascribed inflated and erroneous explanatory power in theories of decision making. The review concludes by recommending that future research should focus on tasks in which participants' attention is diverted away from the experimenter's hypothesis, rather than the highly reflective tasks that are currently often employed.
Perspectives on medical education, 2014
Previous studies have shown that with important decisions, unconscious thought has surprisingly led to better choices than conscious thought. The present study challenges this so-called 'deliberation-without-attention effect' in the medical domain. In a computerized study, physicians and medical students were asked, after either conscious or unconscious thought, to estimate the 5-year survival probabilities of four fictitious patients with varying medical characteristics. We assumed that experienced physicians would outperform students as a result of their superior knowledge. The central question was whether unconscious thought in this task would lead to better performance in experts or novices, in line with the deliberation-without-attention effect. We created four fictitious male 60-year-old patients, each of whom with signs and symptoms related to likely prognosis, from 12 (Complex) or 4 (Simple) categories. This manipulation resulted in objectively different life expecta...
The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect Evidence for an Artifactual Interpretation
2009
Proponents of unconscious-thought theory assert that letting the unconscious ''mull it over'' can enhance decisions. In a series of recent studies, researchers demonstrated that participants whose attention was focused on solving a complex problem (i.e., those using conscious thought) made poorer choices, decisions, and judgments than participants whose attention was distracted from the problem (i.e., those purportedly using unconscious thought). We argue that this finding, rather than establishing the existence of a deliberation-withoutattention effect, is explained more compellingly in terms of the well-established distinction between on-line and memory-based judgments. In Experiment 1, we reversed the recent finding by simply changing participants' on-line processing goal from impression formation to memorization. Experiment 2 provided a replication and further established that some cognitive effort appears necessary to produce both the original pattern of results and its reversal, suggesting that such judgments are ultimately a product of conscious, rather than unconscious, thinking.