A Study On Whether The Emergence Of Results Produced By Unconscious Thinking Can Be Planned

Common sense and life experience have instructed us that we should think twice beforetaking actions when faced with problems, which also means thinking thoroughly before makingdecisions. However, recent studies show that it is not always the case. Dijksterhuis et al proposedthat there were two distinct thinking patterns of human mind——conscious thought andunconscious thought. Both of them can exert their best performance under appropriatecircumstances, which are conscious thought is good for solving simple decision problems whileunconscious thought does better in dealing with complex problems, i.e. unconscious thought effect.The paradigm of unconscious thought includes three stages: the presentation of information(conscious thought stage), unconscious thought stage, and answering stage (conscious thought).But in previous researches on unconscious thought, participants are in a passive state during theunconscious thought stage. Nothing is known about the time span of unconscious thought(distraction task), which leads to the unawareness of participants on when to produce the results ofunconscious thought, not to mention the presence of these results to consciousness. Therefore, thewaiting process to present these results which participants produce early causes them graduallyfade away. Then the problem of how to present the results of unconscious thought to consciousnesseffectively becomes one of the most significantly problems in researches on unconscious thought.Some improvements were made on the paradigm employed by previous researches in order toinvestigate whether the production and emergence of unconscious thought results can be plannedwhen participants are informed of precise distraction time (study1); as well as whether individualscan deal with problems according to the degree of urgency in unconscious thought condition whenseveral tasks are presented and its whether its results can be planned and controlled(study2). Wedrew the following conclusions based on the two studies:first, when individuals know the precise time that unconscious thought takes, they canactively plan the production and emergence of unconscious thought results, such as:(1) when theinformed and actual distraction time are the same, the finding that the performance of unconsciousthought is better than that of not knowing the distraction time and interrupting distraction timesupports our conclusions that the results of unconscious thought will not emerge before planningand they do emerge successfully when the emergence and production are planned;(2) when the actual distraction time is longer than the informed time, its unconscious thought effect is better thanthat of the other two groups, which indicates that individuals can control the time of emergenceactively, i.e. they can postpone its emergence.Second, when several problems need to be solved, individuals can arrange and planappropriately their time and order according to their different importance and urgency.Third, the emergence of unconscious thought results can still be planned even participantshave no idea of the distraction time.