Sep 24, 2023 03:23 PM
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/what-...on-making/
EXCERPTS: ... Franklin’s advice to Priestley and Darwin’s strategy seem intuitively sensible. When faced with a difficult decision, we should carefully consider the evidence before us, weigh things up, and try to settle on the best course of action. Indeed, the essence of what Franklin called his “moral” or “prudential algebra” is found in many of the formal descriptive and prescriptive approaches to decision making. This advice to rely on explicit, conscious thinking also resonates with our central argument: There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking.
The alternative, delegating decisions to the lower reaches of the iceberg and hoping that the unconscious will decide for us, is, we argue, misguided. As we demonstrate throughout “Open Minded,” evidence for the ghost in the machine helping us to decide when to decide is scant; the idea that ripples of activation in our subconscious mind have impacts on our behavior does not bear scrutiny, and evidence for truly unconscious biases seems difficult to find. Moreover, the study of information leakage shows how acutely sensitive we are to the ways in which we are asked to do things.
And yet a persistent idea in popular conceptions of how the brain and mind work is the notion that thinking can occur outside awareness and that, indeed, harnessing this power of the unconscious brain can lead to better outcomes than striving to think. The argument comes in two guises: that we should go with our gut reaction (blink, or not think) or that we should delegate cognitive activity to an unconscious part of our brain and take a break (sleep on it). Here we explore the evidence for blinking, thinking, and sleeping on it and ask: Is there a “best” way to decide?
[...] The final nail in the coffin for the theory was a large experiment with almost 400 participants that attempted to determine once and for all the circumstances under which not thinking might be better than thinking. ... There was no advantage of unconscious thought. Moreover, a meta-analysis indicated that existing evidence for unconscious thought came from studies with relatively small numbers of participants, thus casting doubt on the reliability of the effect.
[...] To test these ideas Ambady compared four separate groups of participants. One group just made a rating of effectiveness; a second had to count backward in 9s from 1,000 while watching the clips; the third group spent one minute listing the reasons for their ratings following each clip; and the final group sat for one minute between seeing the clip and making their rating (this was a control group to assess whether a simple delay — rather than generating reasons — would have an effect). What happened? The raters who had to report their reasons did much worse than the other three groups, but the immediate, distracted, and delayed groups were all about as accurate as each other. There is certainly no evidence from this experiment that being distracted makes you better — so no support for unconscious thought proponents — but in line with the jams study, it seems that introspection can sometimes hurt. Is this then evidence for an unconscious influence? In reflecting on these results, Nalini Ambady concluded, “The present work does suggest that sometimes it is dangerous to think too much — at least while evaluating others in a familiar domain.” This conclusion echoes Wilson and Schooler’s claim that at times, “the unexamined choice is worth making.” The question is, Why?
The preferred account seems to be that these too-much-thinking effects are consistent with people lacking conscious introspective access into the “true” bases for their attitudes and subsequent choices. But nothing in these experiments necessitates that conclusion. As we’ve seen, the key feature of these studies is that participants who are invited to give elaborate reasons end up with choices that are less aligned with those of someone making an impressionistic choice. While such studies support the idea that preferences are constructed, labile, and influenced by deliberation, they surely do not force the conclusion that some influences on choice lie outside awareness. Moreover, there are precious few studies demonstrating that giving reasons causes people to make objectively worse rather than simply less aligned choices.
Choices made intuitively and ones accompanied by an analysis of reasons are, we contend, accompanied by awareness of the proximal basis for that choice. The fact that this proximal basis might not be the same in the two cases does not imply that the unexamined choice was mediated by an unconscious process. We discussed this idea of a proximal basis for choice in another chapter of our book when discussing diners on a blind date. Your choice of a garlic dish from a menu is driven by the proximal belief that it is healthy. There may also be some distal influence that causes this proximal belief — your mother told you it’s a good source of antioxidants when you were a child — but that has no bearing on your decision in the moment.
But hold on. Are we having our cake and eating it too? We’ve said that there is no evidence here for influences from the depths of the iceberg, but we are still describing some choices as being made intuitively while others are the product of deliberation. Isn’t intuition simply an unconscious process in a different guise?
No. Herbert Simon, the profoundly influential Nobel Prize–winning economist, computer scientist, and psychologist, famously wrote that intuition is “nothing more and nothing less than recognition...”
[...] But what about Paul McCartney and his dream about “Yesterday”? Surely that’s solid (anecdotal) evidence that fully formed solutions can emerge from the unconscious? Well, not really. It turns out that McCartney did not record “Yesterday” for another 18 months after his dream; it took that long to work it up into the classic that it became... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: ... Franklin’s advice to Priestley and Darwin’s strategy seem intuitively sensible. When faced with a difficult decision, we should carefully consider the evidence before us, weigh things up, and try to settle on the best course of action. Indeed, the essence of what Franklin called his “moral” or “prudential algebra” is found in many of the formal descriptive and prescriptive approaches to decision making. This advice to rely on explicit, conscious thinking also resonates with our central argument: There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking.
The alternative, delegating decisions to the lower reaches of the iceberg and hoping that the unconscious will decide for us, is, we argue, misguided. As we demonstrate throughout “Open Minded,” evidence for the ghost in the machine helping us to decide when to decide is scant; the idea that ripples of activation in our subconscious mind have impacts on our behavior does not bear scrutiny, and evidence for truly unconscious biases seems difficult to find. Moreover, the study of information leakage shows how acutely sensitive we are to the ways in which we are asked to do things.
And yet a persistent idea in popular conceptions of how the brain and mind work is the notion that thinking can occur outside awareness and that, indeed, harnessing this power of the unconscious brain can lead to better outcomes than striving to think. The argument comes in two guises: that we should go with our gut reaction (blink, or not think) or that we should delegate cognitive activity to an unconscious part of our brain and take a break (sleep on it). Here we explore the evidence for blinking, thinking, and sleeping on it and ask: Is there a “best” way to decide?
[...] The final nail in the coffin for the theory was a large experiment with almost 400 participants that attempted to determine once and for all the circumstances under which not thinking might be better than thinking. ... There was no advantage of unconscious thought. Moreover, a meta-analysis indicated that existing evidence for unconscious thought came from studies with relatively small numbers of participants, thus casting doubt on the reliability of the effect.
[...] To test these ideas Ambady compared four separate groups of participants. One group just made a rating of effectiveness; a second had to count backward in 9s from 1,000 while watching the clips; the third group spent one minute listing the reasons for their ratings following each clip; and the final group sat for one minute between seeing the clip and making their rating (this was a control group to assess whether a simple delay — rather than generating reasons — would have an effect). What happened? The raters who had to report their reasons did much worse than the other three groups, but the immediate, distracted, and delayed groups were all about as accurate as each other. There is certainly no evidence from this experiment that being distracted makes you better — so no support for unconscious thought proponents — but in line with the jams study, it seems that introspection can sometimes hurt. Is this then evidence for an unconscious influence? In reflecting on these results, Nalini Ambady concluded, “The present work does suggest that sometimes it is dangerous to think too much — at least while evaluating others in a familiar domain.” This conclusion echoes Wilson and Schooler’s claim that at times, “the unexamined choice is worth making.” The question is, Why?
The preferred account seems to be that these too-much-thinking effects are consistent with people lacking conscious introspective access into the “true” bases for their attitudes and subsequent choices. But nothing in these experiments necessitates that conclusion. As we’ve seen, the key feature of these studies is that participants who are invited to give elaborate reasons end up with choices that are less aligned with those of someone making an impressionistic choice. While such studies support the idea that preferences are constructed, labile, and influenced by deliberation, they surely do not force the conclusion that some influences on choice lie outside awareness. Moreover, there are precious few studies demonstrating that giving reasons causes people to make objectively worse rather than simply less aligned choices.
Choices made intuitively and ones accompanied by an analysis of reasons are, we contend, accompanied by awareness of the proximal basis for that choice. The fact that this proximal basis might not be the same in the two cases does not imply that the unexamined choice was mediated by an unconscious process. We discussed this idea of a proximal basis for choice in another chapter of our book when discussing diners on a blind date. Your choice of a garlic dish from a menu is driven by the proximal belief that it is healthy. There may also be some distal influence that causes this proximal belief — your mother told you it’s a good source of antioxidants when you were a child — but that has no bearing on your decision in the moment.
But hold on. Are we having our cake and eating it too? We’ve said that there is no evidence here for influences from the depths of the iceberg, but we are still describing some choices as being made intuitively while others are the product of deliberation. Isn’t intuition simply an unconscious process in a different guise?
No. Herbert Simon, the profoundly influential Nobel Prize–winning economist, computer scientist, and psychologist, famously wrote that intuition is “nothing more and nothing less than recognition...”
[...] But what about Paul McCartney and his dream about “Yesterday”? Surely that’s solid (anecdotal) evidence that fully formed solutions can emerge from the unconscious? Well, not really. It turns out that McCartney did not record “Yesterday” for another 18 months after his dream; it took that long to work it up into the classic that it became... (MORE - missing details)
