Our unconscious can make correct decisions
Summary
- In a neurological study by Ap Dijksterhuis, at teh university of Amsterdam, he showed that the unconscious mind can make decisions that are better than conscious thought.
References
Quotes
"One of my favorite neurological studies was lead by Ap Dijksterhuis, at the University of Amsterdam. In the study, participants were given information about four cars and then were asked to pick which car they would buy. Researchers are usually a tricky bunch, and this study was no exception. They made one of the four cars significantly more attractive than the others, to see if participants could identify it as the best. They split the participants into two groups. The first group received information about 4 features per car, and the second received significantly more information—12 features per car—for a total of either 16 or 48 features in total.
Each of those groups was, again, split into two. Before participants were asked to pick a car, each of each group’s participants were then either given four minutes to closely study the features of the car or given a series of totally unrelated word scramble puzzles to focus on for four minutes. This second group was seemingly at a disadvantage to figure out which car was the best, because they had no time to consciously think about which car was best.
So who fared better?
Here’s where the study gets fascinating. With just four options per car, participants who could consciously think about their choices performed much better. That’s not all that surprising: with just a few options, it was pretty easy for them to deduce which model is the best. But when participants had twelve options to consider for each of the four cars—forty-eight options to weigh in total—the group that could only unconsciously process the options outperformed the group who had four full minutes to think deeply about which car was best. And here’s the kicker: they outperformed the conscious group by a massive margin; the conscious thought group picked the right car 23 percent of the time, while the unconscious thought group picked the right car 60 percent of the time"