Unconscious Decision Making

Decision making refers to mental processing which leads to the selection of one choice, among several alternatives (Beach, 1993). Currently there is no consensus as to whether decision making occurs unconsciously or consciously. Dijksterhuis (2004) define conscious thought to be a mental state which surrounds awareness; while unconscious thought, a reasoning which occurs while conscious attention is allocated elsewhere (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). The deliberation-without-attention effect explains that unconscious processes are adequately suited for optimal decision making, as it is able to integrate large amounts of information; in comparison to consciousness which is driven by schemas and expectancies (Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren & Van Baaren 2006). Despite these claims, decision making is still highly controversial with researchers (Payne, Samper, Bettman & Luce, 2008) suggesting there is no difference in decision quality between unconscious and conscious processes. This essay, will critically evaluate research, particularly findings concluded by Libet, Gleason, Wright and Pearl (1983) and Dijksterhuis et al. (2006), which suggest that decision making occurs unconsciously.
The Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT, Dijksterhuis & …show more content…
Conscious deliberation produces poor quality decisions as it interferes with the natural weighting process, resulting in suboptimal weighting (Wilson & Schooler, 1991). When participants were asked to rate faces based on different attributes (Levine, Halberstadt and Goldstone, 1996), weighting attribution varied, suggesting that conscious deliberation does lead to inconsistencies. Dijksterhuis et al. (2006) named this “decisional noise”, implying weighting in conscious thought introduced “Noise”, leading to poorer and inconsistent decision