Gut
Decisions May Not Be Smart
By DEIRDRE VAN DYK
- It was this last bit of advice sleep on it espoused in a paper by
Dutch researchers and published in the journal Science in 2006, that
really irked Ben Newell, a researcher himself at the University of New
South Wales in Australia. That paper suggested that people might be
better off relying on unconscious deliberation to make complex decisions
despite an abundance of scientific evidence to the contrary given
that the human brain can reasonably only focus on a few things at a time.
Once people have all the necessary information to make a decision, the
paper found, too much conscious deliberation could lead to unnecessary
attention given to extraneous factors.
- Newell's answer to the Science paper is called "Think, Blink or
Sleep on It? The Impact of Modes of Thought on Complex Decision
Making," co-authored with colleagues at the University of New South
Wales and the University of Essex in England, and published in the most
recent issue of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. It took
four experiments to make the point, but Newell's conclusion is that
unconscious deliberation is no more effective
than conscious deliberation using lists of pros vs. cons,
for example for making complex decisions, and that if anything,
people who deliberate methodically are better
off. "If you have to make
decisions, you have to do your homework," says Newell. "There
is no magic unconscious."
|
