Are complex decisions better left to the unconscious? Further failed replications of the deliberation-without-attention effect
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2009, Vol 4, Issue 6
Abstract
The deliberation-without-attention effect occurs when better decisions are made when people experience a period of distraction before a decision than when they make decisions immediately or when they spend time reflecting on the alternatives. This effect has been explained (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004) by the claim that people engage in unconscious deliberation when distracted and that unconscious thought is better suited for complex decisions than conscious thought. Experiments 1, 2A, and 2B in this study included a dominant alternative and failed to find evidence for this effect. Experiment 3 removed the dominant alternative and manipulated mode of thought within-subjects to eliminate alternative explanations for the failed replication. In all experiments participants did not make better decisions after unconscious thought; decisions were consistently better than chance when made immediately after the encoding of information. Encouraging people not to think about complex decisions appears to be unwarranted.
Authors and Affiliations
Dustin P. Calvillo and Alan Penaloza
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677706
- DOI -
- Views 156
- Downloads 0
Genetic testing and risk interpretation: How do women understand lifetime risk results?
Genetic screening for BRCA1 and BRCA2 gives women the opportunity for early detection, surveillance, and intervention. One key feature of genetic testing and counseling is the provision of personal lifetime risk. However...
Is the call to prayer a call to cooperate? A field experiment on the impact of religious salience on prosocial behavior
While religiosity is positively correlated with self-reported prosociality, observational and experimental studies on the long-hypothesized connection between religion and prosocial behavior have yielded mixed results. R...
Strategies using recent feedback lead to matching or maximising behaviours
One challenge facing humans (and nonhuman animal) is that some options that appear attractive locally may not turn out best in the long run. To analyse this human learning problem, we explore human performance in a dynam...
A new intuitionism: Meaning, memory, and development in Fuzzy-Trace Theory
Combining meaning, memory, and development, the perennially popular topic of intuition can be approached in a new way. Fuzzy-trace theory integrates these topics by distinguishing between meaning-based gist representatio...
Facing expectations: Those that we prefer to fulfil and those that we disregard
We argue that people choosing prosocial distribution of goods (e.g., in dictator games) make this choice because they do not want to disappoint their partner rather than because of a direct preference for the chosen pros...