A Study Of The Global Processing In Unconscious Thought

It is traditionally considered that as human higher mental processes, thought belongs to conscious category. When confronted with a complex decision, people are accustomed to solving problems with deliberation. Nevertheless, a growing number of research have suggested the opposite:it is quite likely that applying unconscious thought (UT) leads to a better decision than conscious thought (CT), breaking the traditional opinion "where there is conscious thought, there is a good result". Research concerning UT has become one of the hot topics in the field of social cognition. Currently, the focus of relevant studies has transformed from whether UT exists, or the relative merits of CT versus UT to exploring the processing mechanism of UT. Previous research has shown that UT processed information differently to CT in capacity, weighting, rule and convergence-versus-divergence etc., and both also have different neural mechanisms. But so far, no research explores the styles of UT processing information. The basic styles of processing information include global processing and local processing. Both of them have important influence on information processing. Studies showed that CT had a tendency to process information via local processing style. Accordingly, whether UT uses global processing style to process information? The present study adopts classic UT paradigm to test the Unconscious Thought Effect, and further explore the style of UT processing information.The study consists of three section with ten experiments in total. In Section One, through phone purchase task, the research explored the effectiveness of classic UT paradigm (Experiment1). Section Two explored the influence of the prime of global or local processing style upon UT processing information. Regarding both Global Navon task and Local Navon task as distraction tasks, the study compared UT performance differences in evaluating simple task (Experiment2), global or local report task (Experiment3), person-memory task (Experiment4) and similar and dissimilar task (Experiment5) under these two conditions. On the basis of these experiments, the study investigated the prime of global or local processing style affecting on UT processing information. In Experiment6, blue and red were used in the prime of global or local processing style to eliminate the possibility of distraction tasks'difficulty influencing UT processing information. In Section Three, the study investigated how UT integrated partitioned information. Presenting information in two sessions, the study further explored the global processing style of UT via manipulating the individual or overall characteristics of information in the two sessions (Experiment7and Experiment8). In addition, this section ruled out possible influencing factors including differences in the distributions of positive/negative attributes (Experiment9) in the first and second sessions and on-line judgment (Experiment10).The main findings of this study are as follows:(1) UT tends to global processing style, indicating that UT integrates information according to its global characteristics.(2) The style of UT processing information can be influenced by the prime of local processing style rather than that of global processing style, indicating that unconscious thought can be significantly impacted by the simultaneous conscious processes.(3) UT can integrate partitioned information according to global characteristics, while CT shows recency effect when integrating partitioned information, indicating that UT can integrate information from a wider range of periods, while CT cannot.