In the first of a series of posts, I discuss ideas from participants at the Cheltenham science festival as to what consciousness might be for. Several participants discussed decision making and problem solving, where some different ideas emerged:
Consciousness is for making decisions, otherwise we would be automated. – Chi
My unconscious solves problems when I’m not thinking about it. – Jennifer
Considering Chi’s suggestion, I agree that there’s something important about consciously weighing up the options and considering the alternatives when making a decision. If I’m making a decision about which political party to vote for in an election, for instance, then I want it to be the case that my vote is the outcome of a period of conscious deliberation about each party’s policies. I might feel cheated of having my say if I learned that the night before polling day, that ‘evil neuroscientist’ (who seems to pick up a lot of work in philosophical thought experiments) had snuck in while I slept and planted a chip in my brain that ensured my conscious deliberation had no effect, and instead, where I put my cross on the ballot sheet was determined entirely by unconscious processes.
On the other hand, in support of Jennifer’s suggestion, many of us will be familiar with the notion of ‘plumping’ for a choice, or waking up to a decision that seems to have made itself after sleeping on it, or simply feeling like we’ve solved a problem without directing too much conscious thought at it.
A body of research in cognitive science would seem to lend support to the suggestion that our unconscious mind can solve problems when we don’t consciously think about them. Often referred to as ‘unconscious thought advantage’, the contention of this research is that not only do we frequently make decisions on the basis of unconscious thought processes, but, at least sometimes, we actually make better decisions when recruiting unconscious processes than conscious ones. To illustrate: in an experiment requiring participants to consider a number of cars with different features, those who were unable to consciously deliberate about the long lists of features were better at identifying the optimal car than those who consciously deliberated (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006).
More recently, the car study, and others like it, have come under scrutiny for failing replication attempts, and many (though not all) cognitive scientists are skeptical about the notion of unconscious thought advantage (González-Vallejo et al., 2008; Nieuwenstein and Rijn, 2012). Additionally, a number of other experiments appear to provide independent evidence that the unconscious mind is just not very good at the logical, rule-based processing that these studies investigate, when compared with the conscious mind (Deutsch et al., 2006; DeWall et al., 2008; but also see also Uwe’s post on this for a critical discussion).
But while one might argue that we shouldn’t rely on unconscious processes when making decisions about which is the optimal item among a list of alternatives, it might still be true that unconscious processes have a useful role to play in other cognitive activities. Specifically, research seems to suggest that they can sometimes enhance creative thinking (Ritter and Dijksterhuis, 2014). To see this, consider a study in which participants in one study were set a creative assignment (how many uses can you think of for a paperclip?). One group consciously deliberated about the assignment for three minutes prior to engaging in it, whilst another group were engaged in a task which occupied conscious processing, but still allowed for unconscious deliberation, before moving onto the creative assignment. Surprisingly, perhaps, those in the unconscious deliberation condition were judged to have produced more creative outputs than those who consciously deliberated prior to the assignment – although it should be noted that the advantage in the unconscious condition was only observed when participants deliberate for three minutes (Yang et al., 2012). The advantage observed in this study may well be rather specific to the particular task at hand, and so we shouldn’t infer that we’ll see enhanced creativity after three minutes of occupying conscious processing in any other creative pursuit. We may be a long way from devising stable and reliable methods to exploit this apparent unconscious advantage across all domains of creative activity. But if these results are reliable, then we might be slightly closer to understanding why we sometimes experience ‘eureka’ moments – coming up with an idea, or a solution to a problem, when we’re not directing conscious attention to it.
So, Chi and Jennifer’s suggestions aren’t obviously in tension. Perhaps different aspects of decision making and problem solving are distributed across both conscious and unconscious processes.