Your unconscious brain is better at processing information than you are. Here's Ap Dijksterhuis:
We gave our subjects information pertaining to a choice--for example, which of four apartments was the most attractive, or which of four cars was the best. They had three options: They could make a choice immediately; they could take time for conscious deliberation; or they could figuratively sleep on it--that is, engage in unconscious thought. The subjects who chose the third option were first given information about the decision in question and then given information about an unrelated task, to occupy their conscious minds while their unconscious minds processed the relevant information.When the unconscious thinkers were asked to choose one of the alternatives, they made better decisions, almost without exception, than the subjects who decided immediately or those who consciously deliberated. Their decisions were better from a normative perspective (more rationally justifiable), from a subjective perspective (more likely to produce post-choice satisfaction), and from an objective perspective (more accurate, as in predictions of soccer-match outcomes).
The moral? Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision--but don't try to analyze the information. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it for a day or two. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.
For more on this type of research, read this book. (It's like Blink, only better.)
Comments (5)
Posted by: Mustafa Mond, FCD | February 1, 2007 12:28 PM