Self Comes to Mind

remarkable study by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis. 4 To appreciate the importance of the results, we need to describe the setting. Dijksterhuis asked the normal subjects of his experiment to make purchasing decisions in two different conditions. In one condition, they applied mostly conscious deliberation; in the other, as a result of manipulated distraction, they could not deliberate consciously.
    There were two kinds of items to purchase. One consisted of trivial household items, such as toasters and hand towels; the other consisted of big-ticket items, such as cars or houses. For either kind, the subject was given ample information about the pros and cons of each item, a sort of consumer report complete with price tag. Such information would have come in handy when asked to pick the “best” possible item for purchase. But when decision time came, Dijksterhuis allowed some subjects to study the item information for three minutes before making a choice, while he denied that privilege to the others and distracted them during those same three minutes. For both kinds of items, trite and nontrite, subjects were tested in both conditions, with an attentive three-minute study or with a distraction.
    What would you predict regarding the quality of decisions? A perfectly reasonable prediction would be that when it comes to the trivial household items, subjects would make good picks in either conscious or unconscious deliberation, given the low import and complexity of the problem. Deciding between two toasters, even if you are fussy, is hardly rocket science. But, regarding the big-ticket items—like which four-door sedan to buy—one would expect that the subjects allowed to study the information would make the more successful decisions.
    The results were surprisingly different from these predictions. Decisions made without conscious predeliberation fared better for both kinds of item but especially for the big-ticket items. The superficial conclusion is as follows: if you are buying a car or a house, get acquainted with the facts, but then don’t fret and worry about minute comparisons along the matrix of possible advantages or disadvantages. Just do it. So much for the glories of conscious deliberation.
    Needless to say, the intriguing results should not discourage anyone from conscious deliberation. What they do suggest is that nonconscious processes are capable of some sort of reasoning, far more than they are usually thought to be, and that this reasoning, once it has been properly trained by past experience and when time is scarce, may lead to beneficial decisions. In the circumstances of the experiment, the attentive, conscious pondering that goes on, especially with the big-ticket items, does not yield the best result. The high number of variables under consideration and the restricted space of conscious reasoning—restricted by the limited number of items that can be attended to at any given time—reduce the probability of making the best choice given the limited time window. The unconscious space, on the contrary, has a far larger capacity. It can hold and manipulate many variables, potentially producing the best choice in a small window of time.
    Besides what it tells us about nonconscious processing in general, the Dijksterhuis study points to other important issues. One regards the amount of time needed for a decision. Perhaps you could pick the absolute best restaurant for tonight if you had all afternoon to examine the latest food reviews, the cost of items on the menus, and the locations, and compare these to your preferences, your mood, and the state of your bank account. But you do not have the entire afternoon. Time counts, and you must apportion only a “reasonable” amount of time to the decision. Reasonableness depends, of course, on the importance of the matter you are deciding. Given that you do not have all the time in the world and rather than making a huge investment in massive computation, a few shortcuts are in order. And the good news is that past emotional records will help you with the shortcuts and that our cognitive unconscious is a good provider of such records.
    All this goes to say that I very much like the notion that our cognitive unconscious is capable of reasoning and has a larger “space” for operations than the conscious counterpart. But a critical element for the explanation of these results relates to the subject’s prior emotional experience with items