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John M. Grohol, PSYD
PsychCentral.com
LiveScience.com John M. Grohol, Psyd
psychcentral.com
livescience.com Mon Oct 26, 11:27 pm ET
We're often told, "You should sleep on it" before you make an important
decision. Why is that? How does "sleeping on it" help your decision-making
process?
Conventional wisdom suggests that by "sleeping on it," we clear our minds and
relieve ourselves of the immediacy (and accompanying stress) of making a
decision. Sleep also helps organize our memories, process the information of
the day, and solve problems. Such wisdom also suggests that conscious
deliberation helps decision making in general. But new research (Dijksterhuis
et al., 2009) suggests something else might also be at work - our unconscious.
Previous research suggests that sometimes the more consciously we think about a
decision, the worse the decision made. Sometimes what's needed is a period of
unconscious thought - equivalent to "sleeping on it" according to the
researchers - in order to make better decisions. Here's how they study this
phenomenon:
"[... In a] typical experiment demonstrating this effect, participants choose
between a few objects (e.g., apartments), each described by multiple aspects.
The objects differ in desirability, and after reading the descriptions,
participants are asked to make their choice following an additional period of
conscious thought or unconscious thought. In the original experiments,
unconscious thinkers made better decisions than conscious thinkers when the
decisions were complex."
The researchers suggest that unconscious thought, contrary to the way many of
us think about it, is an active, goal-directed thought process. The primary
difference is that in unconscious thought, the usual biases that are a part of
our conscious thinking are absent. In unconscious thought, we weigh the
importance of the components that make up our decision more equally, leaving
our preconceptions at the door of consciousness.
So this is all fine and good, but how you do take laboratory findings and adapt
them to a real-world experience to show that unconscious thinkers think better
(e.g., with less distortions or biases)? One way to do this is to look at
sports, because our weighting of different components is done beforehand and
individually - not as an artificial variable manipulated by the researchers.
Each week over a period of 6 weeks, the researchers took 352 undergraduates
from the University of Amsterdam and asked them to predict the outcome of four
different upcoming soccer matches. Participants expertise about soccer was
measured, and then they were asked to predict the result of each of the four
upcoming soccer matches.
"[Then] participants were divided into three experimental conditions. In the
immediate condition, participants saw the four matches on the computer screen
and were asked to provide their answers in 20 s[econds].
"In both the conscious-thought and the unconscious-thought conditions,
participants saw the four matches on the computer screen for 20 s[econds] and
were told they would have to predict the outcomes later on.
"Conscious-thought participants were told they had an additional 2 min to think
about the matches. Unconscious-thought participants were told they would do
something else for 2 min and performed a two-back task designed to occupy
conscious processing."
A second experiment was conducted on another group of undergraduates to
replicate the findings and understand more about the underlying process.
What did they find?
"These experiments demonstrate that among experts, unconscious thought leads to
better predictions of soccer results than either conscious thought or quick,
immediate guesses.
"Experiment 2 sheds light on why this may be so: Unconscious thinkers seem to
be better at using the appropriate information to arrive at their estimates.
Unconscious thinkers who had more accurate knowledge about the single best
prediction criterion (world ranking) made better predictions. This was not true
for conscious thinkers or for immediate decision makers."
Just to emphasize this finding - if you're an expert and you had extra time to
think about your decision in the area of your expertise (conscious thinker) or
had to make a quick decision, you made worse decisions than those who were
unconscious thinkers. The researcher hypothesize that conscious thought can
lead to poor weighting in decision-making - the more you think about something,
the more your biases interfere with good decision-making.
Unconscious thinkers in this experiment appear to weight the relative
importance of diagnostic information more accurately than conscious thinkers
did.
As always, these results must be taken with a grain of salt. The experiment was
conducted only on undergraduates and may not generalize to other age groups or
people with different educational backgrounds. Furthermore, other research has
not found a significant performance difference between unconscious thinkers and
conscious thinkers, and unconscious thought is not always the mode to rely on
when faced with a complex decision (e.g., you can't use this for gambling and
certain kinds of information).
But for certain kinds of decisions - those that are complex and where you have
some expertise - "sleeping on it" may be more helpful than spending minutes or
hours of conscious thought on it. The brain makes good unconscious decisions,
when we let it.
Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing
about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the
intersection of technology and psychology since 1992. This article was provided
by PsychCentral.com.