Unconscious influences on decision making: A critical review

To what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology (cognition, perception, social behavior) to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view plac...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Behavioral and brain sciences 2014-02, Vol.37 (1), p.1-19
Main Authors: Newell, Ben R., Shanks, David R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Awareness
Behavior
Blindness
Cognitive ability
Consciousness
Decision Making
Emotions
Humans
Judgment
Models, Psychological
Motion detection
Nervous system
Neurosciences
Reviews
Social behavior
Social interactions
Target Article
Uncertainty
Unconscious (Psychology)
Visual perception
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Summary:To what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology (cognition, perception, social behavior) to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view places a heavy explanatory burden on an intelligent cognitive unconscious, with many theories assigning causally effective roles to unconscious influences. This article presents a novel framework for evaluating these claims and reviews evidence from three major bodies of research in which unconscious factors have been studied: multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions under uncertainty. Studies of priming (subliminal and primes-to-behavior) and the role of awareness in movement and perception (e.g., timing of willed actions, blindsight) are also given brief consideration. The review highlights that inadequate procedures for assessing awareness, failures to consider artifactual explanations of “landmark” results, and a tendency to uncritically accept conclusions that fit with our intuitions have all contributed to unconscious influences being ascribed inflated and erroneous explanatory power in theories of decision making. The review concludes by recommending that future research should focus on tasks in which participants' attention is diverted away from the experimenter's hypothesis, rather than the highly reflective tasks that are currently often employed.
ISSN:0140-525X
1469-1825
DOI:10.1017/S0140525X12003214