Conscious Thought and Rational Norms.

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Automatic, unconscious processes are frequently assumed to be responsible for the systematic patterns of apparently irrational behavior documented by cognitive psychologists. However, some recent experiments suggest that deliberate conscious thought actually lead to poorer decisions in complex choice situations. The purpose of this research is to understand what conditions result in automatic / deliberative decision making resulting in superior performance and the sources of these performance advantages.Two sets of experiments will investigate these questions from two opposite directions. Several studies will examine recent experimental evidence for the efficacy of "unconscious thought" processes. These experiments ask: (1) is the apparent unconscious thought advantage found in these recent experiments normatively and psychologically real? And, if so, (2) what are the cognitive mechanisms underlying this unconscious thought advantage; and (3) does this advantage extend to choice situations involving inter-temporal trade-offs and moral dimensions?A second set of experiments starts with biases observed in conscious judgment, and asks whether similar biases in information processing influence the automatic processes engaged by subliminal images. When participants are exposed to masked images, presented so briefly that they fail to reach conscious awareness, these images nonetheless can "prime" - i.e., facilitate or interfere with - responses to subsequent clearly visible images. By modifying the content of the subliminal images and the structure of the task, it is possible to ask whether factors that inappropriately bias explicit conscious judgments have similar effects on implicit unconscious priming from subliminal images.This research promises to deepen our understanding of the functions of consciousness, the mechanisms of intuition, and the general relationship between consciousness and rationality. It should help us to better understand the conditions under which, and the mechanisms by which, conscious and unconscious thought processes lead to improved decisions.