A Theory of Unconscious Thought.

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Abstract

We present a theory about human thought named the unconscious-thought theory (UTT). The theory is applicable to decision making, impression formation, attitude formation and change, problem solving, and creativity. It distinguishes between two modes of thought: unconscious and conscious. Unconscious thought and conscious thought have different characteristics, and these different characteristics make each mode preferable under different circumstances. For instance, contrary to popular belief, decisions about simple issues can be better tackled by conscious thought, whereas decisions about complex matters can be better approached with unconscious thought. The relations between the theory and decision strategies, and between the theory and intuition, are discussed. We end by discussing caveats and future directions.

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Most cited references 35

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A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice

Herbert Simon (1955)

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Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy.

A Bechara, H. Damasio, D. Tranel … (1997)

Deciding advantageously in a complex situation is thought to require overt reasoning on declarative knowledge, namely, on facts pertaining to premises, options for action, and outcomes of actions that embody the pertinent previous experience. An alternative possibility was investigated: that overt reasoning is preceded by a nonconscious biasing step that uses neural systems other than those that support declarative knowledge. Normal participants and patients with prefrontal damage and decision-making defects performed a gambling task in which behavioral, psychophysiological, and self-account measures were obtained in parallel. Normals began to choose advantageously before they realized which strategy worked best, whereas prefrontal patients continued to choose disadvantageously even after they knew the correct strategy. Moreover, normals began to generate anticipatory skin conductance responses (SCRs) whenever they pondered a choice that turned out to be risky, before they knew explicitly that it was a risky choice, whereas patients never developed anticipatory SCRs, although some eventually realized which choices were risky. The results suggest that, in normal individuals, nonconscious biases guide behavior before conscious knowledge does. Without the help of such biases, overt knowledge may be insufficient to ensure advantageous behavior.

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Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious.

M Epstein (1994)

Cognitive-experiential self-theory integrates the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious by assuming the existence of two parallel, interacting modes of information processing: a rational system and an emotionally driven experiential system. Support for the theory is provided by the convergence of a wide variety of theoretical positions on two similar processing modes; by real-life phenomena--such as conflicts between the heart and the head; the appeal of concrete, imagistic, and narrative representations; superstitious thinking; and the ubiquity of religion throughout recorded history--and by laboratory research, including the prediction of new phenomena in heuristic reasoning.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Perspect Psychol Sci

Title: Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science

ISSN: 1745-6916

ISSN (Print): 1745-6916

Publication date (Electronic): Jun 2006

Volume: 1

Issue: 2

Affiliations

[1 ] Social Psychology Program, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands a.j.dijksterhuis@uva.nl.

[2 ] Social Psychology Program, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Article

Publisher Item ID: 1/2/95

DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-6916.2006.00007.x

PubMed ID: 26151465

SO-VID: 4bb93df9-947b-4a05-a760-97e3e2ed435e

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