"Psychologist questions merit of serious thought"

The headline is misleading, but it's great Friday blog-fodder. Psychologists ask: at what point does conscious thought become detrimental to problem-solving? When is it better to...stop thinking? In the Guardian:

"Tough problems best left to the unconscious mind"

Here's a suggestion for the next time you need to make a complicated decision: stop thinking. According to a new study, thinking too hard about a problem leads to poor choices - difficult decisions are best handled by our unconscious minds. While most people are happy to buy a new set of towels without much thought, they are unlikely to buy a new car or house without some serious thought. But Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, argues that we might be getting these methods of decision-making the wrong way around...

He asked volunteers to pick their favourite car from a list of four based on a set of four attributes including fuel consumption and passenger leg room. He gave them four minutes to think about their decision and most people chose the car with the most plus points. When Dr Dijksterhuis made the experiment more complex - 12 attributes rather than four - people could only identify the best car a quarter of the time. This result was no better than choosing at random.

However, when the researchers distracted the participants after showing them the cars (by giving them puzzles to do before asking participants to make their choices), more than half picked the best car. "Conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products," wrote Dr Dijksterhuis in a paper, published today in Science.

(Er, weren't the distracted participants making the "best" choices? Is distraction a good thing?)

The problem with thinking about things consciously is that you can only focus on a few things at once. In the face of a complex decision this can lead to giving certain factors undue importance. Thinking about something several times is also likely to produce slightly different evaluations, highlighting inconsistencies...

He added that unconscious thinking does not seem to suffer the capacity limit: "It has been shown that during unconscious thought large amounts of information can be integrated into a evaluative summary judgment."

Jonathan Schooler of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver told Science that, while the new study builds on evidence that too much reflection is detrimental in some situations, he is not yet ready to dispense with conscious thought when it comes to complex decisions. "What I think may be really critical is to engage in [conscious] reflection but not make a decision right away," he said.

Dr Dijksterhuis said that when an important decision comes up he gathers together the relevant facts and gives it all of his attention at first. Then, he told Science: "I sit on things and rely on my gut."

We aren't told enough about this research to evaluate it. I know lots of people who stop thinking about things. I can't say that I'm always impressed with the results...

But I won't think about this too seriously, right now. I'll just sit on it for awhile...