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Ghiselin
In most people’s view, the unconscious produces truly
creative or unique thoughts. It seems that creative insight results from a process in which some initial conscious thought is followed by a period during which the problem is put to rest,
consciously at least. After this period without conscious thought, a solution or idea presents itself, called process of incubation. -
H.A. Simon
Decision theorists have long recognized that people use different decision strategies under different circumstances. For
example, under some circumstances, people aim merely to
satisfice. -
Miller (Capacity principle)
Research which points out that conscious processing capacity is very low compared with the processing capacity of the entire human system. Conscious capacity is limited, and generally consciousness cannot do more than one thing at a time. -
Klayman and Ha; Snyder and Swann 1978
Research on positive-test strategy has convincingly demonstrated how powerful biased information-processing strategies sometimes are. -
Beginning research on unconscious cognition
In the early 20th century there were some articles written about this social psychology. But not yet about the concept Unconscious cognition Writing articles about this concept started about 30 years ago,there was an increasing amount of research on this topic coming up these years. -
Wilson and Schooler
Research on unconscious thought, they realized that the unconscious does not suffer from low capacity. -
Wilson et al.(Weighting principle)
Conscious thought leads people to put disproportionate weight on attributes that are accessible, plausible,
and easy to verbalize and therefore too little weight on other attributes. -
Sloman
Argued that strategic thought processes are inherently hierarchical, whereas automatic processes are not. Limited processing capacity, so with conscious thinking increases schema use. Conclusion: People stereotype more when they think conscious. -
Dijkersterhuis and van Knippenberg
Additional experiments corroborated the idea that conscious thought works top-down: Conscious thought leads people to concentrate on a stereotype and stereotypecongruent information, thereby making stereotype-incongruent information less accessible and harder to recall. -
Claxton
The distinction between rule-based and associative thinking largely maps onto the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious. During conscious thought, one can deal with logical problems that require being precise and following rules strictly, whereas during unconscious thought,one cannot. Unconscious thought does not conform to rules. -
Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Damasio
A person can develop accurate gut feelings before one is able to verbalize the basis of this intuition. -
Bettman et al.( bottom-up-versus-top-down principle)
He used a metaphor to to charachterize the development of preferences. ‘‘Consumer preference formation may be more like architecture, building some defensible set of values, rather than like archaeology, uncovering values that are already there’’ Which means approximately that the unconscious works bottom-up, and the conscious works top-down or schematically. -
Carlson and Russo (predecisional distortion)
People often quickly form a prejudgment that works as an expectancy, biasing the interpretation of information processed later. This effect has been shown a number of times, and occurs even when people are warned not to make such a prejudgment. -
Betsch, Plessner, Schwieren, and Gutig
Unconscious thought can give rough, but accurate estimates on the basis of numbers, but does not engage in real mathemathics. That is, the unconscious can deal with numbers to some extent, but not by doing mathematics. -
Experiment 1,2,3,4,5 Dijksterhuis
Experiment with the results that unconscious thinkers performed significantly better on evaluating things than the conscious thinkers and the immediate choosers. Most Unconscious thinkers made an holistic judgment, conscious thinkers based their decisisions on one or two attributes. Outcome is that holistic judgment leads to better quality of decision making. Also longer unconscious thinker leads to better decisions than shorter unconscious thinking. -
Dijksterhuis and Bos
Several experiments are done, which tested the hypothesis that conscious thought leads to more stereotyping than unconscious thought does. After several experiments with using persons memory paradigm, the hypothesis was accepted. -
Dijksterhuis, Smith, van Baaren and Wigboldus
The more complex a problem is (and the more expensive a purchase is), the more people consciously think before they act. This is intuitively logical, but the deliberation-without-attention hypothesis shows that people should do the reverse. -
Nordgren and Dijksterhuis
Quick judgment were clearly more consistent over time than judgments that were made after conscious reasoning. Also conscious reasoning did not lead to better judgments. Reason for this is 'Decisional noise' -
Dijksterhuis and Meurs (convergence-versus-divergence principle)
Resultsof experiments: Consciousness generates thoughts or ideas in a very focused and convergent way, whereas the unconscious is more divergent, which increases the probability of generating creative and unusual ideas. When one generates thoughts, ‘‘conscious thought'' stays firmly under the searchlight, unconscious thought ventures out to the dark and dusty nooks and crannies.
of the mind’’ -
Dijksterhuis et al. (deliberation-without-attention effect)
States that conscious thought is good when things are simple, and becomes worse as the complexity of the decision problem increases. -
Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT)
The first time that Unconscious thought theory was presented under this name by Dijksterhuis and Nordgren. It's a theory about human tought, which distinguishes two modes of thought: unconscious and conscious. Which decision making strategy is better depends on the situation. -
Status now
Unconscious thought is mostly superior to conscious thought, but this superiority of unconscious processes does not pertain to the earlier stage of information acquisition.At that stage, conscious processes are superior.
The superiority of conscious encoding leads us to what we call
the ‘‘best of both worlds’’ hypothesis: Complex decisions are best when the information is encoded thoroughly and consciously, and the later thought process is delegated to the unconscious. -
Future study
Topics of future study:
Whether it is possible that unconscious thought suffers more from poor encoding than conscious thought, so that unconscious thought would lose its superiority under such conditions.
Role of intentions or goals, which decision making strategy is the best for this kind of decisions?
It is necessary to do more research about how unconscious thought works and how the unconscious transfers its information to consciousness.