Preference Reversal Between Unconscious Thought And Conscious Thought

Previous research on multiattribute choice, both in the fields of traditional decision-makingresearch and newly emerged unconscious decision-making research, suggests that the influence ofa product attribute is determined by its relative importance. However, some later research suggeststhat the influence of an attribute may differ from its assessed importance because the manner inwhich people evaluate alternatives puts greater weight on some types of attributes compared toother types of attributes. According to this approach, the effective weight of an attribute isdetermined by assessed importance plus other influences. A series of studies have supported theidea that emotion plays an important role in the unconscious thought process. And the superiordecision performance of unconscious thought may be because it somehow uses the affective toneof the information better than conscious thought does. Nevertheless, this hypothesis has notbeen experimentally validated yet. The present study aimed to examine the relative influence of anattribute is determined to a greater extent by its ease of evoking emotion versus its assessedimportance under the conditions of conscious thought and unconscious thought.This study combined the paradigms of unconscious thought study and multiattribute choiceresearch, using an affect-priority option--which had high values on the affect-rich (but lessimportant) attributes but low values on the affect-poor (but more important) attributes--and animportance-priority option--which offered the opposite trade-off, namely, it had low values on theaffect-rich (but less important) attributes but high values on the affect-poor (but more important)attributes--as stimulus materials. Preference differences under different process conditions (aconscious thought condition, an unconscious thought condition and an immediate condition) wereinvestigated. According to analyses, this study reached conclusions as follows:Firstly, unconscious thought attached more weight to affective information than consciousthought, that is, unconscious thought affected more by attribute affect.secondly, conscious thought put more weight to important information than unconsciousthought, that is, conscious thought affected more by attribute importance.