Exploring the roles of the unconscious in information search behaviors

Abstract

Increasing evidence from psychodynamic research suggests the unconscious influences our daily decisions. For information science, it is important to understand how the unconscious plays roles in information seeking. The current study uses subliminal psychodynamic activation to investigate how information searching may be influenced by textual messages that appear below the threshold of conscious awareness. Twenty-four college students participated in a controlled laboratory experiment, each searching freely on the Internet for needed information and saving useful sources for three search tasks. Each participant was systematically assigned to one of four subliminal psychodynamic activation conditions, with no or one of three different subliminal messages, “People walking”, “Mommy and I are one” and “I am enlightened”, each of which was displayed for 0.02 second every four seconds. Results show that users exposed to “People walking” had a higher effectiveness and higher efficiency in saving useful webpages than those exposed to “Mommy and I are one”. Results also show that search tasks influenced search behaviors regardless of subliminal psychodynamic activation conditions, which can be explained by task types. Our findings shed light on the underexplored area of the unconscious in information search and calls for future research along this line of research.