How to Make Complex Decisions
Dr Ben Newell: Don't Just Trust Your Gut Feelings or Sleeping on it
Sep 15, 2008
This is the message from Dr Ben Newell, a senior lecturer in cognitive psychology in the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, who has just published a paper on experiments in decision making.
Dr Newell has been researching judgment and decision making for about seven years, and his latest book is Straight Choices: The Psychology of Decision Making.
He said the common perception, encouraged by a study published in Science journal in 2006 by Dutch researchers Dijksterhuis et al, was that unconscious thought was best for making complex decisions, such as buying a house or car.
Thus ‘sleeping on it’ or trusting to your gut feelings.
Dr. Newell says, on the contrary, what’s needed is clear, rational thought.
Think, Blink or Sleep on it?
The paper, Think, blink or sleep on it? The impact of modes of thought on complex decision making, was published in the August 23 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,
It describes four experiments in which participants had to decide complex issues like buying a car or renting a home.
The 71 participants were UNSW students, aged about 20. They each had to decide which of four apartments they would rent, a problem many students face
The students were randomly assigned a mode of thinking - immediate judgment, conscious deliberation or unconscious thought.
They were given information about each of the apartments: rent, closeness to the university, possibility of sharing with others, the level of security of the building, access to public transport, and asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10, how important each of these factors was to them personally.
Then they were told to make their decision.
Despite being given the option of the instant answer (gut feeling) or sleep – in this case thinking about something else to allow the subconscious mind to make the decision – most participants ended up by making conscious decisions after considering their mental list of personal needs and requirements.
The Unconscious Not Better At Decision-Making
“In all experiments the majority of participants chose the option predicted by their own subjective attribute weighting scores, regardless of the mode of thought employed,” Dr. Newell said in the introduction to the paper.
“There was little evidence for the superiority of choices made “unconsciously”, but some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better choices.”
He explained that ‘sleeping on it’ or ‘trusting your gut feelings’ had the reputation for being better for making complex decisions, because the unconscious is thought to better organise the factors to be considered than the conscious mind.
"On the contrary, our research suggests that unconscious thought is more susceptible to irrelevant factors, such as how recently information has been seen rather than how important it is,” he said.
“If conscious thinkers are given adequate time to encode material, or are allowed to consult material while they deliberate, their choices are at least as good as those made 'unconsciously'."
Benjamin Franklin Had it Right
Dr. Newell quotes approvingly Benjamin Franklin’s advice to the scientist Joseph Priestly: “My way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con… when each [factor] is thus considered, separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less liable to make a rash step.”
See also: How to be Happy: It's All in Your Mind
 |
