Word: consciously
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...relying on unconscious deliberation to make complex decisions - despite an abundance of scientific evidence to the contrary - given that the human brain can reasonably only focus on a few things at a time. Once people have all the necessary information to make a decision, the paper found, too much conscious deliberation could lead to unnecessary attention given to extraneous factors...
...University of New South Wales and the University of Essex in England, and published in the most recent issue of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. It took four experiments to make the point, but Newell's conclusion is that unconscious deliberation is no more effective than conscious deliberation - using lists of pros vs. cons, for example - for making complex decisions, and that if anything, people who deliberate methodically are better off. "If you have to make decisions, you have to do your homework," says Newell. "There is no magic unconscious...
...first was asked to choose one of the apartments immediately after getting information about them; the second group was given four minutes to deliberate before deciding; and the third group was asked to solve anagrams for four minutes before making their choice. (The idea was to distract the students' conscious mind, and allow their unconscious to tackle the apartment decision.) The researchers found that in every case, the students were equally likely to choose Flat B, the only unit with an equal balance of pros and cons...
...expected to replicate the Dutch results in the experiment; that is, he thought the anagram-solving group would be more likely than the others to go with Flat B. When that didn't happen, he redesigned the experiment, giving an additional four minutes of decision-making time to the conscious and unconscious deliberators. But, once again, he got the same result - all the students were equally likely to choose the best apartment...
...which each varied on 12 attributes, such as gas mileage, handling and whether it had a sunroof. Again, one car of the bunch had an equally weighted list of pros and cons. This time unconscious thinkers actually did worse - they were less likely to pick the best car - than conscious thinkers...