The Research Of Unconscious Thought In Sport Decision-making

Researchers had proposed that unconscious thought could lead to better decisions than conscious thought in complex decision situation. Dijksterhuis et al. (2009) combined unconscious thought theory with sport situation to solve the problem that the weight of decision information was designed by the experimenters (athletes could process decision information according to their own standards), showed unconscious thought can improve decision-making in sport. Moreover, sport decision-making is the most suitable for the decision behavior research. And it was influenced by decision information and situational factors (such as pressure) Therefore, on the basis of previous studies, the study used decision basketball video as the experimental task, discussed that the effect of unconscious thought (different decision information) and the pressure in sport decision-makingStudy one explored the effect of the mode of thought and decision information on sport decision-making. Experiment 1a adopted 2(the mode of thought) x 2 (decision information) mixed-design to investigate the effect of unconscious thought on basketball decision-making. The results suggested that interaction between the mode of thought and decision information on basketball decision making was significant. The decision-making performance under unconscious thought condition was better than that under conscious thought condition when intuitive decision-making information was provided, while the decision-making performance under unconscious thought condition was as the same as that under conscious thought condition when the analytical decision-making information was provided. Experiment lb adopted 3 (the processing style) one factor between-subject design to investigate the effect of the information processing style on sport decision-making under the condition of unconscious. Global Navon task, Local Navon task and 0-back task were designed as distraction tasks and the basketball decision-making performance under intuitive information condition was examined. The results suggested that the main effect of the processing style was significant. The decision-making performance coupled with global processing style was better than that coupled with local processing style and control condition.Study Two investigated the influence of pressure on the effect of unconscious thought in sport decision-making. This experiment adopted 2 (the mode of thought) x2(the pressure situation) mixed-design to investigate the influence of the mode of thought and the pressure situation on sport decision-making. The results suggested that the interaction between the mode of thought and the pressure situation was significant and the pressure specifically promoted the decision-making under unconscious thought condition.Conclusions were drawn as the followings:the effect of unconscious thought did exist in sport decision-making and intuitive decision information could promote the effect of unconscious thought; the fit between the mode of information processing and the unconscious thought could contribute to the effect of unconscious thought; subjects under the pressure could make better decision-making when they adopt the strategy of unconscious thought.