The deliberation without-attention effect: evidence for an artifactual interpretation

ABSTRACT—Proponents of unconscious-thought theory assert that letting the unconscious ‘‘mull it over’ ’ can enhance decisions. In a series of recent studies, research-ers demonstrated that participants whose attention was focused on solving a complex problem (i.e., those using conscious thought) made poorer choices, decisions, and judgments than participants whose attention was dis-tracted from the problem (i.e., those purportedly using unconscious thought). We argue that this finding, rather than establishing the existence of a deliberation-without-attention effect, is explained more compellingly in terms of the well-established distinction between on-line and memory-based judgments. In Experiment 1, we reversed the recent finding by simply changing participants ’ on-line processing goal from impression formation to memoriza-tion. Experiment 2 provided a replication and further established that some cognitive effort appears necessary to produce both the original pattern of results and its reversal, suggesting that such judgments are ultimately a product of conscious, rather than unconscious, thinking. Martin Luther King, Jr., astutely noted, ‘‘Nothing pains some people more than having to think’ ’ (1963/1981, p. 14). Uncon-scious-thought theory (UTT; Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) appears to offer solace to such individuals. According to UTT, when it comes to making complex decisions, conscious reasoning requiring cognitive effort is maladaptive; ‘‘uncon-scious thinking,’ ’ defined as effortless deliberation in the absence of attention directed at the problem domain, produces superior judgments.1 The evidence purportedly supporting this deliberation-without-attention effect derives from a para-digm that assumes that unconscious thought predominates when attention is diverted from a decision task via distraction (Dijk-sterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & van Baaren, 2006). However, we propose that the deliberation-without-attention effect is an artifact that can be explained more simply in terms of on-line and memory-based judgments (Hastie &amp