Different Approaches to Demonstrating Unconscious Decision Making - Essay Example

Discuss and evaluate the different approaches to demonstrating unconscious decision making Decision making has become an inevitable part of a person`s daily life on all the levels-private, social, and even global. For our ancestors the myriad of decisions we are forced to make now on a daily basis would be very difficult to imagine. The emergent technology along with incredible economic development turned an average person into a business machine which has to react instantly to be effective at work and at home. The abundance of choice of education opportunities makes people active decision makers from very young age. Today people are first of all consumers and each shopping means that hundreds of decisions have to be made between sometimes very similar alternatives. Elections also serve as the basis of democracy in the world offering citizens to choose their authorities themselves (Ranyard et al., 1999). In simple words decision making presupposes choosing between two or more alternatives in the course of problem solving. In the process of decision making probable advantages and disadvantages of each solution are weighed with the final target to minimize losses while increasing benefits. Different researchers explain decision making as either logical operations or emotional processes emphasizing either rational or irrational ground of decision making (Schacter et al., 2009). Though it may seem that unconscious decision making is a useless and ineffective process in serious situations because it is not rational and does not appeal to logic many researchers starting from Freud claim that it is unconsciousness that helps people to take a number of serious decisions some which are vital. All in all psychologists agree that decision making is a critical psychological function that is why more and more scientific attention is directed to determining its mechanisms. It is particularly interesting how opposite and often conflicting motivational and emotional tendencies are regulated and reconciled in human mind in the moment of decision making. For rational and irrational decisions different principles and mechanisms are applicable. Conscious decision making presupposes flow of consciousness which embraces attention, recognition, memory, and final analysis (Kissin, 1986). Conscious thought must be guided by a person who has to pay his/her attention to the certain object. At the same time unconscious decision making is based on poorly studied mechanisms because the concept of unconscious was shaped recently (if there is a possibility to study such processes well at all). However, in this context unconscious decision making proves to be an effective and important mechanism managed by powerful internal laws and people often do not notice at all how frequently they use unconscious though because of its effectiveness. There are several basic approaches that allow suggesting that unconscious decision making can be more fruitful and more appropriate than conscious. Whitehed who was one of the first psychologists studying this issue expressed his opinion regarding this issue in the following way: “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we’re doing. The precise opposite is the case” (1991). The researcher was one of the first who paid attention to the possibilities of the unconscious mind but many other psychologists followed Freud`s and Whitehead`s steps. Thus, for most people unconscious decision making is a well-known and reliable method though they sometimes do not know its right scientific definition and the whole concept resembles some magic ritual for them. For instance, incubation is one of the most popular methods of unconscious decision making, it refers to the process during which a person dealing with a serious problem decides to consciously ignore or postpone analysis of the problem and engages into some non-related activity (Sio & Ormerod, 2009). The mechanism is quite clear nevertheless: while a person ignores deliberately the problem the subconscious mind comes up with the decision after some period of time after all information being processed even that was not noticed by the conscious mind. This method is directly related to creativity, intuition, and the concept of insight and is widely used by artistic people. It is also estimated that the amount of time dedicated to incubation increases the final odds making the solution more reliable (Sio & Ormerod, 2009). Incubation is often regarded as a stage in creativity process, when the idea is made up and there is a need to give it some form, and is accepted in artistic circles. Another variation of incubation, the method which is as also commonly used among old and young, is taking decision after dreaming. The possibilities of the human brain to modulate answers on the research questions when the conscious mind is totally deactivated provoked interest of many scientists for decades. William Dement, a professor in Stanford, was one of the first who decided to conduct a practical experiment in this direction recruiting his own five hundred students to it. The participants were given three “brain teasers” tasks which they looked through before going to beds. They were asked to check if their dreams were related to the problems they were supposed to solve. It was revealed that eighty seven students had the dreams connected to the problematic issues and seven received ready-made solutions. It is interesting that several participants could not recognize the hints on the solutions in their dreams while the professor knew they were right from the description (Dement, 1974). Derride Barret also conducted a similar study but asked the participants to think and to dream of their real problems in life or at work. As a result it was revealed that half of the participants had dreams which showed the problem only and a quarter of participants reported having a solution in these dreams. The researcher was also investigating whether this principle can be really applicable to the scientists who make valuable inventions such as Nobel Prize laureates. For example, many people know these myths that Mendeeleev had a dream in which he saw the periodic table elements. Derride revealed that in all the spheres regardless of whether it is math, art or business there is a high possibility to receive a hint or a solution in a dream if this solution can be shaped in some visual form (for example a piece of art or a molecular formula). The researcher also concluded that finding solutions in dreams is possible for those tasks which require extravagant and non-trivial outcomes, in other words where traditional approach will not give results (Deride, 1993). There was also an attempt to conduct the following experiment with “incubating” solutions of the tasks that were given to people through the media. The participants were shown some puzzle on TV and were asked to report if they had any relevant dreams. Schatzman who was conducted this study confirmed that he received numerous right replies and numerous descriptions of the dreams in which people could not recognize the hint on the solution properly (Schatzman, 1984, 1986). However, one of the most prominent and recent studies in this direction was the unconscious thought theory (UTT) elaborated by Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren. It suggests that the unconscious mind can operate without awareness of the conscious mind, and that the unconscious thought is the basis for complex solutions where a big amount of data has to processed. The authors exemplify their understanding of the unconscious thought with a basic choice of vacation destination. People are used to compare prices and landscapes but then suddenly the one clear and final thought pops into mind out of nowhere (Dijksterhuis, 2004). So why does unconscious decision making work? First advantage of unconscious decision making over conscious is processing capacities of unconscious and conscious minds respectively. First and foremost difference is the quantity of information that can be analyzed. As we all know, it is very difficult to pay attention to several different issues simultaneously that is why it is needless to say that there is always a limit in processing capacities of the conscious mind. It was estimated that conscious mind can operate with 40-45 bits of information per second which is roughly equal to reading a small sentence. However, much depends on the degree of experience and the complexity of the task. Nevertheless, compared to processing capacity of unconscious mind it is still very little. Only vision that is considered a purely physiological unconscious mechanism is capable of processing more than 10 billion bits of information while both minds can deal with 11,200,000 bits (Dijksterhuis, 2004). So it is obvious that the abilities of the conscious mind are limited and many variables cannot be analyzed simultaneously which will certainly affect the final decision. In general a person can take into account only seven plus or minus two variables when making a final decision (Dijksterhuis, 2004). There are several experiments that were conducted on this issue and all of them proved the truthfulness and the reliability of the hypothesis. In the experiment conducted by Wilson and Schooler the participants were asked to assess different studying courses and choose one. They were divided into three groups: the first group had little time to think over the problem, the second group had as much time as they needed to make a conscious and well-weighed decision. It turned out that the abundance of time prevented the participants from considering all the facts (Wilson & Schooler, 1991). Another crucial factor of making wise decision is the ability to analyze information, to think in simplier words. The conscious and the unconscious minds have different methods of processing information. When the conscious mind is overloaded with information or emotions it can have problems with analytical thinking. For example, the conscious mind will process the information from the person who is yelling poorly because of emotional pressure but if the fact of irritation is taken into account and the factual information is separated from emotional, the processing will give better results. Unconscious on the one hand is not limited by the amount of information and its form and is capable of integrating large amounts of information. The study of Bowers et al., proves that subconscious is capable of giving right answers and processing information when it concerns guessing words. In the course of the experiment the participants had to reveal the word after giving subtle hints and associations on the principle word (thus, for the word fruit there can be red ad bowl) and most successive guesses of the participants coincided with the real words (1990). Thus, it is not a secret to scientific minds that unconscious decision making can be as effective a conscious and in many cases even more effective. Common people use this method unintentionally and are not aware of its real applicability. Incubation for example, postponing conscious analysis of the information and receiving unconscious decision is often regarded as intuition or insight. Dreaming can also be regarded as a approach of unconscious decision making because most experiments conducted on this topic revealed high probability of answers received in dreams. The explanation of this phenomenon is simple: unconscious mind is not limited in volume of information. It means that when the conscious mid can take into account only five-seven variables the unconscious mind can operate with thousands. Moreover, the unconscious mind is capable of processing information in non-trivial ways rejecting well-established algorithms inapplicable in many serious situations, So many scientists agree that for vital decisions it is unconscious mind that has to create a solution while minor decisions must be taken with the help of the conscious mind. References Bowers, K. S., Regehr, G., Balthazard, C., & Parker, K. (1990). Intuition in the context of discovery. Cognitive Psychology, 22, 72–110. Dement, William (1974) Problem Solving. p. 98-102 in Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Deirdre, B. (1993). The Committee of Sleep: A study of dream incubation for problem solving. Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams, 3, 115-123 Dijksterhuis, A. (2004). Think different: the merits of unconscious thought in preference development and decision making, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(5). Kissin, B. (1986). Conscious and unconscious programs in the brain, New York: Plenum Publishing. Ranyard, R., Crozier, W., & Svenson, O. (1999). Decision making: cognitive models and explanations. New York: Routledge. Schacter, D., Gilbert, D., & Wegner, D. (2009). Psychology. Chicago: Worth Publishers Schatzman, Morton. (1984) Dreams and problem solving. International Medicine, 4, p. 6-9. Sio, U, & Ormerod, T. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review, Psychological Bulletin. Wilson, T. D., & Schooler, J. W. (1991). Thinking too much: Introspection can reduce the quality of preferences and decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 181–192. Whitehead, A. N. (1911). An introduction to mathematics. New York: Henry Holt. Read More