When faced with a major decision, such as buying a car or a house, it's best to do your homework, and then forget about it for a while and let your unconscious churn through the options.
According to the results of a novel study published today in the journal Science, unconscious deliberation may lead to a more satisfying choice than mere conscious deliberation alone, at least for major decisions.
Conscious deliberation is fine for the less important, more mundane everyday choices like deciding which shampoo or towels to buy, but not for bigger decisions, the report indicates.
Four investigators in the department of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, confirmed the value of what they call the "deliberation-without-attention" hypothesis in a series of studies on consumer choice — both in the lab setting, as well as in real life among shoppers in department stores.
For example, in a car-shopping experiment, participants read a complex series of facts about cars they were considering purchasing. Immediately afterwards, they were given puzzles to keep their conscious selves busy.
After working on the puzzles, this group of purchasers reported greater satisfaction with their car choice than did subjects who were given no puzzles and had to decide what car to purchase immediately after consciously pondering the facts.
But for making simple decisions, such choosing between different sets of towels, conscious deliberations were all that was needed to make satisfying choices.
There are several possible reasons why conscious thought sometimes leads to poor judgment, the researchers say. Consciousness has a "low capacity" causing individuals to consider only a subset of relevant information and they may inappropriately weight the importance or relevance of this information.
In contrast, the human subconscious has a higher capacity to integrate more information, which can lead to better choices.
First author Dr. Ap Dijksterhuis told Reuters Health: "The take-home message is that when you have to make a decision, the first step should be to get all the information necessary for the decision. Once you have the information, you have to decide, and this is best done with conscious thought for simple decisions, but left to unconscious thought — to 'sleep on it' — when the decision is complex."
The novel finding from these studies is the "idea that we can think unconsciously and that unconscious thought is actually superior to conscious thought for complex decisions," the researcher added.
