Abstract
Common wisdom and scientific evidence suggest that good decisions require conscious deliberation. But growing evidence demonstrates that not only conscious but also unconscious thoughts influence decision-making. Here, we hypothesize that both consciously and unconsciously acquired memories guide decisions. Our experiment measured the influence of subliminally and supraliminally presented information on delayed (30–40 min) decision-making. Participants were presented with subliminal pairs of faces and written occupations for unconscious encoding. Following a delay of 20 min, participants consciously (re-)encoded the same faces now presented supraliminally along with either the same written occupations, occupations congruous to the subliminally presented occupations (same wage-category), or incongruous occupations (opposite wage-category). To measure decision-making, participants viewed the same faces again (with occupations absent) and decided on the putative income of each person: low, low-average, high-average, or high. Participants were encouraged to decide spontaneously and intuitively. Hence, the decision task was an implicit or indirect test of relational memory. If conscious thought alone guided decisions (= H0), supraliminal information should determine decision outcomes independently of the encoded subliminal information. This was, however, not the case. Instead, both unconsciously and consciously encoded memories influenced decisions: identical unconscious and conscious memories exerted the strongest bias on income decisions, while both incongruous and congruous (i.e., non-identical) subliminally and supraliminally formed memories canceled each other out leaving no bias on decisions. Importantly, the increased decision bias following the formation of identical unconscious and conscious memories and the reduced decision bias following to the formation of non-identical memories were determined relative to a control condition, where conscious memory formation alone could influence decisions. In view of the much weaker representational strength of subliminally vs. supraliminally formed memories, their long-lasting impact on decision-making is noteworthy.
Highlights
Decision-making is the cognitive process of collectively integrating relevant knowledge to determine the optimal option among several possibilities
Income decisions were biased toward the wage category of supraliminally presented occupations, and this bias was either increased or reduced by subliminal encoding, depending on whether subliminal and supraliminal occupations were identical or not
Identical subliminal and supraliminal occupations added up, yielding the strongest observed bias on income decisions, whereas non-identical occupations canceled each other out, leaving no clearly discernible or even a numerically inverted decision bias. This finding speaks to the power and longevity of subliminally encoded memories because at least 30 min passed between subliminal encoding and decision-making
Summary
Decision-making is the cognitive process of collectively integrating relevant knowledge to determine the optimal option among several possibilities. Unconscious cognition might be most relevant in situations where decisions have to be made intuitively, for example if a deliberate analysis of decision alternatives and their possible consequences is not possible (Betsch and Gloeckner, 2010; Zander et al, 2016). We ask if intuitive decisions benefit from unconscious knowledge, i.e., from memories that were formed outside of awareness. Are decisions and choices exclusively determined by conscious information, or do humans integrate all available conscious and unconscious knowledge while making decisions? We further explored whether such subliminally acquired unconscious knowledge would interact with later encoded supraliminal information in guiding decision-making
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