A Study Of Unconscious Thought Driven By Intrinsic Motivation

When faced with a complex problem,the conventional wisdom is that hard thinking helps solve the problem.But recent research suggests the opposite.Research has found that unconscious thought is superior to conscious thought in processing complex problems.The study of unconscious thought has broken the traditional idea that “hard thinking will lead to good results”,and has become one of the hot issues in the field of social cognition in recent years.In the fields of persuasion,moral judgment,talent selection and creative problem solving,the superiority effect of unconscious thought over conscious thought has been found.However,some researchers did not repeat the effect of unconscious thought,and questioned the study of unconscious thought.In response to skepticism,proponents of unconscious thought research looked for mediating variables that influenced the effects of unconscious thought.Research shows that the variables such as target type,thinking pattern,information presentation mode and difficulty of decision-making task all affect the information processing by unconscious thought.Studies have also shown that the unconscious thought,guided by external goals,will actively process information.However,some studies have shown that the method of providing extrinsic goals to participants before distracting tasks only activates the individual’s extrinsic motivation,but not the intrinsic motivation.Compared with extrinsic motivation,intrinsic motivation makes individuals more active and persistent in completing tasks.In this study,we combined the unconscious thought paradigm with the thought suppression paradigm to investigate whether intrinsic motivation is more facilitating to the processing of information by unconscious thought than extrinsic motivation.This study adopts the paradigm of unconscious thought.In Experiment 1,participants were asked to rate four different mobile phones.After the presentation of mobile phone information,the participants were asked to perform thought suppression to stimulate their intrinsic motivation.After the thought suppression,some participants were asked to spend 3 minutes trying to think about the attribute information about the mobile phone,and the other participants were asked to perform the 2-back task for the same time.At the end of the three minutes,all the participants were asked to rate the quality of the four mobile phones.Participants in the intrinsic motivation unconscious thought group were better able to distinguish between the best and worst mobile phones than those in the intrinsic motivation conscious thought group.In order to exclude the possibility that the participants had obtained the answer to the thought suppression stage,the extrinsic motivation unconscious thought group and the extrinsic motivation conscious thought group was added in Experiment 2.Extrinsic motivation was elicited by telling the participants before the distraction task that the more accurate the rating of the phone,the better the reward.The results also showed that the intrinsic motivation unconscious thought group was better able to distinguish between the best phone and the worst phone.To further investigated the results of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,In Experiment 3,participants in the thought suppression group were added as the baseline.Meanwhile,the experimental material was changed from cell phones to roommates,and the participants were asked to rate four imaginary roommates.Participants in the intrinsic motivation unconscious thought group were better able to distinguish between the best and worst roommates.The results of this study indicate that,compared with extrinsic motivation,intrinsic motivation is more facilitating to the processing of information by unconscious thought.