Mark D. White

Forthcoming from Behavioral and Brain Sciences is the article "Unconscious influences on decision making: A critical review" by psychologists Ben R. Newell (University of New South Wales) and David R. Shanks (University College London):

To what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology (cognition, perception, social behavior) to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view places a heavy explanatory burden on an intelligent cognitive unconscious, with many theories assigning causally effective roles to unconscious influences. This article presents a novel framework for evaluating these claims and reviews evidence from three major bodies of research in which unconscious factors have been studied: multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions under uncertainty. Studies of priming (subliminal and primes-to-behavior) and the role of awareness in movement and perception (e.g., timing of willed actions, blindsight) are also given brief consideration. The review highlights that inadequate procedures for assessing awareness, failures to consider artifactual explanations of “landmark” results, and a tendency to uncritically accept conclusions that fit with our intuitions have all contributed to unconscious influences being ascribed inflated and erroneous explanatory power in theories of decision making. The review concludes by recommending that future research should focus on tasks in which participants' attention is diverted away from the experimenter's hypothesis, rather than the highly reflective tasks that are currently often employed.

As is the practice at BBS, the target article is followed by a number of short comments by invited scholars, in this case including Roy Baumeister and Ap Dijksterhuis (all in the same PDF file).

It's a shame Daniel Kanheman, Timothy D. Wilson, or Jonathan Haidt didn't contribute commentary, as they have all written in support of a strong role for the unconscious in decision-making. Nonetheless, this promises to be a interesting challenge to the current trend in behavioral science away from conscious rational processes in decision-making (a trend which is troubling to a philosopher/economist concerned with processes of ethical judgment!).