The Impact Of Thought Modes On Vividness Different Modes Of Thought Hypothesis

The more vivid the information is, the more easily can the judgment be affected. It is a common sense in advertisement and broadcasting. However, many experiments showed that this effect did not always happen. It happened in some experiments sig-nificantly, but didn’t happen in the others including the ones with contrary effect. So the effect of vividness of information in judgment making is uncertain as known. To investigate the reason of this phenomenon will help understanding the mechanism of vividness effect.We presented participants with the information of four fictional mobiles. In con-scious thought conditions, participants consciously thought about what to do for3minutes and then made their decisions. In unconscious thought conditions, partici-pants were distracted for3minutes, and next made their decisions.The outcome shows that vividness affects judgments differently under two mo-des of thought. In conscious thought conditions, judgments are affected significantly by vividness. In unconscious thought conditions, judgments are not affected by viv-idness significantly. Compared to conscious thought, unconscious thought can lead to better judgments on the quality of the phones in three experiments.The main findings of this study are as follows:(1) In conscious thought condition, increasing the vividness of the positive infor-mation of the three worse-quality phones enhanced the proportion that participants chose one of the three phones as the best phone, that is, enhanced proportion of bad judgments. But in unconscious thought condition, the proportion stayed the same, re-gardless of the vividness. Furthermore, in the high vividness condition, the accuracy of judgment in unconscious thought condition was better than that in conscious thought condition.(2) In conscious thought condition, vividness influenced the scores of the phones significantly. With the same quality, the phone with higher vividness information got a higher score than the other phone. But in the unconscious thought condition, there was no difference between the scores of the two phones with the same quality when vividness changed. Furthermore, in unconscious thought condition, participants could differentia the high quality phones and the low quality phones significantly, but in conscious thought condition, participants could not make it.(3) Making the amount of information of the high vividness phones and low viv-idness phones the same and using the same design as the second experiment, the third experiment leads to the same results as the second experiment. So the results of the first and second experiments were not due to the difference of information amount but vividness.