The Unconscious Executive
How unconscious processes improve
decision-making. Conscious deliberation, it turns out, does not always lead to
the best outcomes.
What strategy do you use when
making complex decisions? Do you burn the midnight oil to carefully weigh the
pros and cons of each alternative? Or do you take your mind off the decision
and follow the age-old wisdom of
"sleeping on it"?
“Careful consideration of all the options can be done by our
unconscious mind”
Both decision-making methods have
strengths and weaknesses, says Harvard Business School postdoctoral fellow
Maarten Bos. Our conscious mind is pretty good at following rules, but our
unconscious mind—our ability to "think without attention"—can handle
a larger amount of information. Studying the unconscious mind offers exciting
new avenues for research, including creativity, decision making, and sleep.
Research by Bos and his colleagues
suggests that unconscious thought supports the kind of mental organization
needed for making complex decisions. In addition, unconscious thought might be
more dependable than conscious thought when we are low on energy. Preliminary
research also indicates that using odor or sound cues during sleep might
activate our unconscious mind and improve creativity and innovation.
Bos, a social psychologist, conducts
his research at HBS, in close collaboration with Harvard Medical School. In
addition to researching sleep, creativity, and decision making, he studies
influence, persuasion, voice and facial categorization, and communication.
Martha Lagace: What do you mean by unconscious thought?
Maarten Bos: We define unconscious thought as a goal-dependent,
deliberative process in the absence of conscious attention. Most people
attribute a lot of their actions to a conscious process, but there are scores
of processes that operate unconsciously. Getting dressed in the morning, for
example, is largely an unconscious process. So is driving to work—many people
get to work without entirely remembering how their drive was and what they saw
on the road.
Lots of processes are automated and
therefore very efficient. Our research shows thinking and deciding can also
often be left successfully to the unconscious mind.
Here is an example of unconscious
thought. Imagine you are listening to a song and can't remember the name of the
artist. You try to think hard, but are still unable to come up with it. So you
tell yourself, "I'll stop thinking about it, and it will come to me in a
minute." This is fascinating. In fact, there is an automatic process that
continues to work on your question in the back of your mind. We call that
process "unconscious thought."
Unconscious thought can do more than
just help you remember facts. It actually has the power to fuel the creative
process. Have you ever found yourself struggling with the wording while writing
a paper, but after taking time away from it, you're able to quickly find the
right words? This is your unconscious mind at work.
While our conscious mind is focused
on other matters, our unconscious mind can process the relevant information we
need to make important decisions.
Q:
As you highlight in an article about one of your research studies,
"sleeping on it" is good folk wisdom for making decisions. Yet people
often feel the need to carefully ponder all options and thus choose rationally.
What does your research suggest about trying to navigate these two seemingly
contradictory views?
A:
Yes, there seems to be a discrepancy. People think, on the one hand, they
should carefully consider all options before making a decision, but on the
other hand, we say that we should 'sleep on our decisions.' My colleagues and I
think both are true, and that careful consideration of all the options can be
done by our unconscious mind.
Both conscious and unconscious
thought have strengths and weaknesses. There are decisions where we believe conscious
thought outperforms unconscious thought. For example, when a decision requires
application of very strict, mathematical rules, we hypothesize that conscious
thought is beneficial. But when it comes to integrating a large amount of
information, we think unconscious thought, which gives rougher
estimates, is more beneficial (see our article in Science
for more information).
In recent work,
we combined both conscious and unconscious thought and showed exactly that:
Conscious thought was very good at selecting options that conformed to a
certain decision rule. Since the study was about apartment selection, our
participants had been told not to choose an apartment on the ground floor, for
instance. It was unconscious thought that proved to be good at selecting
options with the best aggregated information. (In the case of this
study, participants were asked to choose an apartment with many positive,
important attributes.) Yet it was the combination of both unconscious and
conscious thought that produced the best results overall. It resulted in
participants choosing options that were both compliant with the decision rule
and had a high number of positive attributes.
Q:
One way you and colleagues have tried to sort out the mechanisms of conscious
or unconscious thought yielding better results in particular decisions has been
by running experiments that alter blood glucose levels. Could you tell us more
about that?
A:
We ran experiments
where we manipulated the amount of sugar people ingested in a three-hour time
period. We showed that while giving people a drink with sugar helps conscious
thought—not a strange finding, considering our brain is fueled by
glucose—surprisingly, unconscious thought performs better when people receive a
drink without sugar in it. It seems that unconscious thought is not as
dependent on glucose as conscious thought.
Other research conducted by
[Mareike] Wieth and [Rose] Zacks has shown people are very good at making
intuitive decisions at times when they are not at their best according to their
circadian clock. In this research participants showed greater insight and creative
problem-solving performance during nonoptimal times of day compared to optimal
times of day. It seems that conscious thought sometimes gets in the way of
making good decisions.
Q:
You and your colleagues also study sleep and creative performance, as you write
in an article in the Journal of Sleep Research. You take the interesting
tack of studying odor. Why?
A:
We used odor as a cue to reactivate thoughts about a task. This cue has the
potential to increase information processing during sleep—a finding with
powerful practical applications.
First, the cue is paired with a
task, then the cue is repeated during sleep. To give an example: Imagine that
you are reading materials for an important meeting right before you go to
sleep. While you are reading, a cue is produced—either a smell is dispersed in
the room or a distinct sound is played. Then during the night, that same cue is
produced. The cue reactivates the reading you did before going to sleep and
improves your memory of the information. This strategy could potentially act as
a study aid for students and professionals alike.
So far, though, we have only found
results for creativity. People were given instructions for a creativity task,
paired with a cue, before they went to sleep. Those participants who were given
the same cue at night were more creative the next morning.
Q:
What are you working on next?
A:
These are very exciting times. There is so much to do! One question we are
investigating is which sleep phases are most sensitive to these conditioned
cues I just mentioned. Replaying a cue all night might make the cue less
effective. (Imagine putting on cologne in the morning. After about 20 seconds
you don't smell it anymore because you've gotten used to it.) We don't know if
this replaying affects the effectiveness of the cue. We also don't know if
people get used to sounds or music in the same way. If we find out in which
sleep phase these cues are most effective, then we may learn more about memory
processing during sleep. We also need to do more research to find out if sleep
quality is adversely affected by the cues, but no results so far indicate that
sleep is disrupted.
“We could tap into the vast potential of the unconscious,
while we’re comfortably sleeping in our beds”
Another route we're investigating is
whether this cue-activated boost works for decision making like it did for
creativity. Creativity can be a very divergent process, while decision making
is a more convergent process. We don't know for sure if sleep works the same,
or as beneficially, for both of these processes.
I'm also working on various other
lines of research that are less related to sleep. But whether it's sleep
research (with Harvard Medical School's Robert Stickgold and Harvard Kennedy
School's Todd Rogers, HBS PhDOB'08), influence and persuasion research (with my
main collaborator at HBS, professor Amy Cuddy), voice analysis research (with
Amy Cuddy and Cornell's Tanzeem Choudhury and her student Mashfiqui Rabbi),
decision-making research (with Radboud University's Ap Dijksterhuis and
Kellogg's Loran Nordgren), creativity research (with Harvard Psychology's
Adrian Ward and Catalyst's Anna Beninger), or body posture research (with Amy
Cuddy and MIT's Ehsan Hoque), almost all the research I do is about the
unconscious and cognitive performance, and I really think it's fascinating
stuff.
I'll leave you with this. We sleep
about a quarter to a third of our lives. Imagine how powerful it would be if we
could make that time more useful? If the reactivation works the way we think it
does—and the way our data show it works—then the applications are endless. We
could tap into the vast potential of the unconscious, while we're comfortably
sleeping in our beds.
Martha Lagace is a freelance writer for Harvard Business School
Working Knowledge. She doubles as a doctoral student at Boston University
studying social anthropology.http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6872.html?wknews=07112012
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