Unconscious vs. Conscious Thought in Causal Decision Making

Unconscious vs. Conscious Thought in Causal Decision Making Stefan Mangold (smangol@uni-goettingen.de) York Hagmayer (yhagmay@uni-goettingen.de) Department of Psychology, University of Gottingen, Gosslerstr. 14, 37073 Gottingen, Germany Abstract Recently, Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT, Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) claimed that unconscious processing of in- formation yields better decisions. Related studies showed that deliberate reasoning resulted in worse choices than uncons- cious reasoning. Causal reasoning is often considered to be a form of deliberate, rule-based reasoning (Sloman, 1996) and causal decision making is assumed to involve inferring the potential consequences of different actions from mental caus- al models (Sloman & Hagmayer, 2006). Therefore, better choices would be expected after deliberation. Two experi- ments investigated causal decision making using the UTT pa- radigm. It turned out that more effective actions were chosen, when participants were asked to deliberate rather than to turn their attention to another task or to decide immediately. These results add to other findings indicating that the superiority of unconscious thought may be limited to specific decision mak- ing situations. Keywords: Causal reasoning; unconscious thought theory, decision making Introduction When receiving a diagnosis of cancer a difficult period with many important decisions lies ahead for many patients. One important decision is which of the available treatment op- tions should be pursued. Each option (e.g., chemotherapy, radiation therapy, endocrine therapy) has many pros and cons and entails substantial consequences for the patient‟s wellbeing and survival. Until very recently the recommen- dation would have been to resort to deliberate decision mak- ing given such a complex problem. Now there is increasing evidence suggesting that it may be better not to consciously work on a problem, but to distract oneself for some time and then make a choice without any further thought. For exam- ple, in a study conducted by Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, and van Baaren (2006), participants were more likely to choose the best out of four cars (i.e., the car having the highest number of positive attributes) after a period of dis- traction than after a period of deliberate thought. These find- ings led to the development of Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT, Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). Unconscious Thought in Decision Making Unconscious thought theory assumes that unconscious processes, which continue to work on a problem while the conscious attention is directed somewhere else, are better suited to adequately weight and integrate the given informa- tion than conscious deliberation. According to UTT there are several more specific reasons for the inferior decision performance after a period of conscious deliberation. First, the capacity of conscious working memory is restricted in terms of limited storage and sequential processing. Uncons- cious processing is assumed to have no such restrictions (cf. Evans, 2008). Second, while conscious thought is guided by expectancies, rules and schemas, which lead to increased stereotyping and biased representations of the information given, unconscious thought “slowly integrates information to form an objective summary judgment” (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006, p. 98). A third advantage of unconscious thought is its ability to automatically weight different attributes according to their relative importance. Conscious thinking is assumed to disturb this process because it “leads people to put disproportionate weight on attributes that are accessible, plausible, and easy to verbalize” (ibid., p. 100). Decisions based on unconscious thought are also assumed to be better than decisions made immediately after receiving all relevant information. During information acquisition a mental representation of the object at hand is formed. While this representation is the only basis for decisions made im- mediately, the representation is actively changed during unconscious thought resulting in an improved performance (see Dijksterhuis, 2004; Strick, Dijksterhuis, & van Baaren, 2010 for more details). Predictions of UTT have been supported by numerous studies on a variety of choice topics (e.g. Dijksterhuis et al., 2006; Lerouge, 2009). However, there are also some contra- dictory findings (e.g., Newell, Wong, Cheung, & Rakov, 2009). One interesting finding by Payne, Samper, Bettman, and Luce (2008) was that deliberate thought turned out to be as successful as unconscious thought when decision makers could determine the time for deliberation themselves. These findings indicate that unconscious thought may not be gen- erally better than deliberation. Causal Reasoning in Decision Making Many important decisions concern interventions into causal systems, for example, medical treatments to improve health or political interventions to stimulate economic growth. Sloman and Hagmayer (2006) have argued that people tend to construct mental causal models when a decision is made with respect to a causal system. First, a causal model of the choice situation is constructed that represents the causal mechanisms relating options (i.e., available courses of ac- tion), outcomes, and payoffs. Second, possible interventions are implemented in the model and consequences are pre- dicted by mental simulation. Finally, the option resulting in the best overall outcome is chosen. The crucial advantage of causal reasoning in decision making is that it allows envi-