Word: consciously
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From there, the ultra-rich fan out. The length of time that one has had a fortune will probably shape one's behavior. Apprentices (five years or less of experience with moola) are cautious and self-conscious; journeymen (six to 14 years) have gotten used to their millions and learned to buy expensive toys; masters (15 years plus) have learned to steer their portfolios and amass greater sums. In addition, there are at least five different wealth personalities, from wrestlers, who are conflicted about their exalted financial status, to directors, who feel they've earned every penny, thank...
...students to choose between only two cars, which were equally attractive. Both cars had pros and cons, but neither car was measurably better than the other; the key was the order in which students received the information. Students were again divided into three groups: the instant deciders, the conscious deliberators and the unconscious deliberators. These groups were then each subdivided into two groups. One received positive information about one car or the other first; one received the positive information last...
This time, researchers found a significant difference in who picked which car. Students in the unconscious deliberation group who heard positive attributes after the negative ones, tended to pick the car they heard about last. In the conscious deliberation group, however, the order in which information was presented had no effect on which car students chose. When people are distracted, they tend to forget what they've just been told, says Newell. When they try to recall the information, the thing they remember best is the last positive information they heard - a phenomenon that researchers call the "recency effect...
Newell admits that his own experiments have their limitations. Using hypothetical scenarios about fictional apartments and cars can tell researchers only so much. "People are not really engaging in these decisions," Newell says. Even so, researchers understand the pathways in which conscious decisions are made, but have no way of understanding the unconscious, so he says, "It's overly bold to recommend that as a way of making decisions...
...course, not every decision requires you to write a dissertation about its options. Making a gut decision is a perfectly respectable way to, say, choose your lunch. There are other decisions, however, that feel like gut decisions - ones we make quickly and without much apparent conscious thought - that may involve more higher-order thinking, or experience, than we realize. Newell offers the example of a doctor he knows, who insists he can make patients' diagnoses based on gut decisions. "But that doctor has 20 to 30 years of experience, and has in the past employed deliberate decision-making. So maybe...