Expertise effects on immediate, deliberate and unconscious thought in complex decision making

Expertise Effects on Immediate, Deliberate and Unconscious Thought in Complex Decision Making Margaretha W. J. van de Wiel (m.vandewiel@psychology.unimaas.nl) Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands Henny P. A. Boshuizen (els.boshuizen@ou.nl) CELSTEC, Open University, P.O. Box 2960, 6401 DL, Heerlen, The Netherlands Eva W. Meeuwesen (e.meeuwesen@alumni.unimaas.nl) Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands Reinout W. Wiers (r.wiers@uva.nl) Department of Psychology, Roeterstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract In this study we examined the claim that unconscious thought would lead to better choices in complex decision making than immediate and deliberate thought. We doubted whether this would also be true for experts in a domain. Participants were students and experienced real-estate agents with expertise in choosing between houses. In three problems, differing in difficulty and/or task requirements, participants decided upon the best house by rank-ordering and evaluation. No support was found for beneficial effects of unconscious thought, neither for experts, nor for students. In line with our hypothesis we found that experts could take advantage of deliberate thinking in complex decision making. They were also better than students in immediate choices. These results corroborate other studies that question the generalizability of the deliberation-without-attention hypothesis, and provide further evidence that it is helpful to deliberately think when making complex decisions. The advice is to rely on experts or to build expertise, instead of leaving thinking to the uncon- sciousness. Keywords: expertise; task complexity; decision making; unconscious thought; deliberation; intuition. Introduction Imagine you want to buy a house. Probably you have some ideas what it should look like, what it may cost, and where you would like to live. You start orienting yourself and find out what is realistic in the price range you are looking for. If you are lucky, you immediately find what you want and can decide quickly. However, it is more likely that you will have to make some compromises; otherwise you need to take the time to wait for your dream. In case you need to reconsider your wishes, you may set priorities, and evaluate the characteristics of a house against your standards. When comparing several houses you can make lists with pros and cons to help you weigh and choose. In this process you can also ask a real-estate agent for advice, who may integrate his view on the technical details and the possible rearrange- ments. Finally, you can let all information sink in, and take the decision when you feel what to do. This example shows the different types of decision processes that might be involved when buying a house. An immediate process of matching characteristics to criteria has a satisfactory result when the problem is easy, a house meets your wishes or it does not. A deliberate process of listing and weighing pros and cons will be invoked when you are not immediately convinced and the decision is tougher. An unconscious process of information processing, furthermore, might take place when you are indecisive and put the problem at rest. This last option of unconscious information processing has recently received a lot of attention, since Dijksterhuis (2004) found an advantage of this type of processing above immediate decision making and deliberate thinking before deciding. Based on his experiments, he gave the following advice for making complex decisions: “..after a little initial conscious information acquisition, avoid thinking about it consciously. Take your time and let the unconscious deal with it” (pp. 597). This advice has been taken quite seriously in the public media, not the least in The Netherlands. However, scientifically it raised considerable debate. Several researchers failed to replicate the findings of Dijksterhuis (Acker, 2008; Newell, Wong, Cheung, & Rakow, 2009). Attempts to specify the conditions in which the unconscious thought effect would arise (Newell et al., 2009; Payne, Samper, Bettman, & Luce, 2008), as well as a meta-analysis (Acker, 2008), indicated that there was no clear evidence that unconscious thought contributed to better decision making. On the contrary, conscious deliberation about choice alternatives might have been handicapped by the experimental tasks used, so it could not help to make complex decisions. Dijksterhuis and colleagues argued that conscious processing capacity is too small to handle complex