Conscious versus Unconscious - Essay Example

? Conscious thought versus unconscious thought Conscious thought versus unconscious thought Conscious thought, is defined as the thought processes that an individual is aware and has the ability to introspect on. For instance when asked a question, when you have the ability to report on the thoughts you used to give the answer, then those thought are considered to conscious thoughts. In contrast when an individual has thoughts that he/she finds it impossible to introspect on then that is unconscious thought. Conscious thought is performed on objects or tasks that fall within one’s attention. Conscious thought processes any form of information using strict rules. It relies heavily on schemas so as to process incoming information efficiently and is generally poor at weighting the significance of decision factors. On the other hand, unconscious thought relates to performing tasks outside one’s attention. It is notable that unconscious thought does not rely on heuristics or schemas largely because of its high capacity making it be unsusceptible to bias. Unconscious thought is notably good at weighting aspects of decision objects, and usually processes any information using association and is goal dependent. Proponents of the unconscious thought suggest that we should refrain from thinking and simply let the unconscious thought decide what to do when faced with complex decisions. Through a series of studies the proponents have demonstrated that decisions are enhanced when people’s attention is redirected from conscious deliberation. Thinking about reasons on judgments made by an individual has got detrimental effects for instance in a certain study participants were requested to think about some of the reasons for either liking or disliking the various types of jam demonstrated less concurrence of their judgments with professionals than did the control participants. In a second study, control participants to recall significant information about courses and were actually more likely to enroll for highly rated courses as compared to the participants who were asked to think about what they feel towards the courses. It can thus be concluded that thinking about reasons behind decisions or judgments may lead to the deviation from consensual or expert judgments. Interestingly, the deleterious effects of thinking about reasons extend beyond subjective judgments about the taste of jam or significant aspects about college courses. In another study aimed at studying how thinking about reasons affected the predictions of the outcomes of a basketball game. The participants who were requested to think of the reasons of their judgments performed worse in predicting the winners of college basket ball games as compared to those who were requested to make their judgments based on gut or intuition. These studies provided evidence of the possible harmful effects of thinking that come with thinking about reasons in order to make judgment. It has been suggested that thinking of one’s options even when one is not explicitly instructed to cogitate reasons for the decision, has the potential to distort the quality of decisions when it comes to complex tasks. In the previous study of the deleterious effects as pertains to conscious thought. Felix (2008) conducted studies on examining if unconscious thought performs better than conscious thought when it comes to complex tasks. The first 3 studies, which actually used agnate methodology, participants were assigned to one of the three conditions randomly. It could be a condition of conscious thought, immediate condition, and unconscious thought condition. The participants with the immediate condition had to make their decision immediately after watching all the aspects of the interest object. The participant s of conscious thought were required to think about target object for a short period of time. That is for experiment one and two, three minutes and for the third experiment four minutes. As for the unconscious thought group, they were given a detracting task to finish immediately after presentation of the aspects, for a similar short period as the individuals in conscious thought group. The task differed across the three studies, each of the task was complex and involved the processing of a huge amount of information. In each of the tasks, one target object of the target objects in the study, was made to show the best option (meaning that most of its aspects or attributes were good) while at the same time another of the target objects reflected the worst option (meaning that most of its aspects or attributes were wrong). There was inclusion in each of the studies filler objects that actually had a balance between the negative attributes and the positive attributes. Notably, the participants within the unconscious group condition demonstrated a much higher or greater differentiation between the unattractive and attractive objects (Thorsteinson, & Withrow, 2009). What this means is that, there was a significant difference in ratings of attractiveness between the unattractive object and the attractive object. In the subsequent studies possible explanations were examined fro the results of these studies and, and it was revealed that the unconscious thought members or participants had a more polarized recognition of aspects or attributes. This meant that there was better recognition of positive attributes of the good target and negative aspects or attributes for the worse target. The unconscious group also showed a greater clustering in memory meaning that traits that were similar were likely to be remembered in their order. This shows that the conscious thought performs badly in complex decisions largely because of its limited capacity, engaging in top-down processing which actually relies heavily on expectancies and schemata and below optimal weighting of issues. It is overt that the conscious thought is is limited in capacity and only a small amount of data o information can be held within our consciousness as compared to the much larger unconscious. It is also clear that the conscious thought interferes with optimal issue weighting essentially because it focuses on salient and plausible aspects/attributes which in many instances do not determine an individual’s judgment. It is also notable that the conscious mind tends to rely more on expectancies and schemata because of the reduced demands on consciousness and rather performs well on basic/simple teaks because of its precision and following of rules (American Psychological Association, 2004). In order to also be able to decipher whether the conscious mind/thought performs better in simple tasks and that the unconscious mind/thought performs better in complex tasks, Dijksterhuis (2006) performed several studies which they called “deliberation-Without-Attention” effect. In the first study, participants of conscious thought performed rather poorly on a complex task and significantly well on a simple one. Then the participants of the unconscious thought performed equally well on both the complex and the simple tasks. In the second study the effects of first study were replicated only that this time round the ratings were of four cars which were the target objects, rather than a choice among them. In the third study, a positive relationship was established between the extent/amount of conscious processing for simple products and satisfaction with the purchases. And also a negative relationship between the satisfaction with purchases and the extent/amount of conscious processing as relates to complex products. The fourth study was conducted in a real or natural environment whereby shoppers in a store with simple products were compared to shoppers with the complex products. For the shoppers at the less complex store of products, satisfaction and conscious thought with purchases was related positively. These measures were negatively related to the shoppers at the complex products store. These studies revealed strong evidence for the advantages/benefits of unconscious thought in making complex decisions. In yet another study (study had a similar set up like the previous ones) but in this case there was inclusion of a recall measure. The idea was to assess the ability of participants to recall vital information after they introspect. It was found out that the participants had poorer ability to remember the important information (Waroquier, Marchiori, Klein, & Cleeremans, 2010). It was extrapolated to the conscious thought group and found to have a similar effect on these group of individuals). In an experiment conducted a total of one hundred and fifty three students were selected with seventy one men and eighty two students. The participants were to make attractiveness decisions about four apartments and to remember as many attributes as possible. The sample was counter balanced such that half of the individuals remembered the apartment attributes before making a decision on the attractiveness of the aspects of attributes. The other half judged the attractiveness of the apartment, followed by recalling the apartment attributes. The participants were randomly allocated conditions in a two ( order: make decision before remembering, or recalling before decision) * four (mode of thought: immediate decision, reasons, conscious thought, unconscious thought) * Four (apartments) mixed design, with the very final factor as within subjects. The outcomes were as follows. The ratings of attractiveness of apartments were identical across the mode of thought conditions. The order of the decision and recall tasks affected participants in the unconscious thought condition. Where the decisions preceded recall, the difference in ranking between the worst and the best was bigger than when recall preceded decision for the unconscious thought conditionality. Hence, when the decision making preceded recall, it can be concluded that the unconscious thought is more effective than the conscious thought when it comes to making complex decision making. Recently, two studies were conducted to find out whether limitations of memory may be able to explain why the conscious thought performs poorly. A conscious thought condition was set with forty eight attributes were scribbled on paper and availed to participants as they discussed for 4 minutes. The performance in this condition was compared to an immediate condition and an unconscious thought condition. There was no statistically significant difference found among the conditions. The participants who were in the immediate condition made the biggest number of right choices (eighty percent), this was followed by the unconscious thought condition (sixty three percent) and the conscious thought (fifty percent). This study did not have a conscious thought condition where participants depended on their memory for the aspects/attributes, making it to be very hard to determine the significance of providing all attribute information. Newell et al (2009) covered this issue in their following experiment. In this experiment they included a conscious thought condition (where the participants were to depend on their ability to remember). They also included an immediate condition, unconscious thought condition and a conscious thought with data or information condition (the participants were given an information board with all the attributes as concerns the options while they discussed). The conscious thought with data or information condition and the conscious thought condition made decisions at rates that were similar meaning that there were no memory difficulties. It was concluded that thinking too much about a decision resulted into a dilution effect because less important information received excessive attention. This proved that the unconscious thought is better than the conscious thought. An interesting observation is that with the use of a memory aid the memory limitation are overcome and enables the participants of a study to record the attributes that are critical to their decision and disregard the attributes that they considered to be less significant to their decisions. Also reviewing information or taking notes can allow a participant to be able to make up or compensate for the limited ability of conscious thought. In conclusion, in the case where a high number of factors is to be considered (as demonstrated by the number of characteristics or attributes), which actually leads to a complex decision, the unconscious thought process will result into a better decision performance than conscious thought. There is enough evidence documented demonstrating the deleterious effects of asking individuals in a study to provide reasons for the choices they make. Requiring a participant to give reasons would make them give considerable thought to the decisions and may impair decision making as regards to the unconscious thought condition. Providing reasons actually makes the participants to focus more on the information and consequently end up focusing on some information that is not necessarily significant when it comes to distinguishing among options while making decisions. References Acker, F. (2008). New findings on unconscious versus conscious thought in decision making: Additional empirical data and meta analysis. Judgment and Decision Making, 3. Retrieved from http://journal.sjdm.org/jdm71128.pdf American Psychological Association (2004). Think different: The merits of unconscious thought in preference development and decision making, 87, 5, 586–598. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.87.5.586 Newell, B. R., Wong, K. Y., Cheung, J. C. H., & Rakow, T. (2009). Think, blink, or sleep on it? The impact of modes of thought on complex decision making. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 707–732. Payne, J. W., Samper, A., Bettman, J. R., & Luce, M. F. (2008). Boundary conditions on unconscious thought in complex decision making. Psychological Science,19, 1118–1123. Todd, T. J., & Withrow, S. (2009). Does unconscious thought outperform conscious thought on complex decisions a further examination. Judgment and decision making, 4, 235 – 247. Waroquier, L., Marchiori, D., Klein, O., & Cleeremans, A. (2010). Is it better to think unconsciously or to trust your first impression? A reassessment of unconscious thought theory. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1, 111- 118. doi:10.1177/1948550609356597 Read More