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 142
- Downloads 0
In the winning mood: Affect in the Iowa gambling task
The present research aimed to test the role of mood in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara et al., 1994). In the IGT, participants can win or lose money by picking cards from four different decks. They have to learn by...
Error Parsing: An alternative method of implementing social judgment theory
We present a novel method of judgment analysis called Error Parsing, based upon an alternative method of implementing Social Judgment Theory (SJT). SJT and Error Parsing both posit the same three components of error in h...
Welfare effects of nudges: The emotional tax of calorie menu labeling
Traditionally, information has been assumed to never harm consumers, a notion recently challenged. Salience nudges have been argued to evoke negative emotions, therefore acting as “emotional taxes”. I design a hypothetic...
Cultivating credibility with probability words and numbers
Recent research suggests that communicating probabilities numerically rather than verbally benefits forecasters’ credibility. In two experiments, we tested the reproducibility of this communication-format effect. The eff...
The letter versus the spirit of the law: A lay perspective on culpability
The letter of the law is its literal meaning. Here, the spirit of the law is its perceived intention. We tested the hypothesis that violating the spirit of the law accounts for culpability above and beyond breaking the m...