A replication, evaluation, and criticism of unconscious thought theory.

Abstract

Modern social psychology has incorporated into the literature a number of theories and effects that were highly counter-intuitive at the time they were introduced, yet have formed a body of literature claiming to demonstrate these effects. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) was developed as a novel take on complex decision-making that aligned with folk wisdom advising people to sleep on it when tasked with an important choice (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). After being exposed to better or worse attributions regarding a number of stimulus items, participants either immediately made a choice, waited 3 minutes, or performed a distraction task. Participants in the last condition performed significantly better, providing a basis for UTT. Following the publication of the original work, a number of replications and nonreplications have been published attempting to pin down the phenomena, with varying degrees of success. To correct methodological shortcomings in other work, 57 participants rated the importance of a number of attributes that were then attached to a number of choice alternatives, then engaged in one of the three thought conditions. When correcting for participant weights, those in the conscious thought condition performed most in alignment with their stated preferences, but the relationship was insignificant. Without correcting for participant weights the effect of the condition was marginally significant, identical to the original results (Dijksterhuis, 2004). This demonstrates that the UTT is not a good basis to go about understanding human cognition.