The Effects Of Similar Or Dissimilar Distractions On Unconscious Decision-making

Unconscious-thought refers to the cognitive or emotional thinking process associated with a task or goal that occurs when the individual's attention points to other unrelated objects.The study found that compared with conscious-thought,unconscious-thought has advantages in creative problem solving,persuasion,moral judgment,talent selection and decision making.However,recent studies have shown that the similarity between distractions and experimental tasks can affect the effects of unconscious-thought.Specifically,when the distraction is similar to the experimental task,it will hinder the processing of unconscious-thought,while the distraction is not similar to the experimental task,it will facilitate the processing of unconscious-thought.However,the experimental task of this study(thinking about the novelty use of paper clips)is too simple,and there may be conscious-thought processing in the information output process,so the experimental results may be caused by other factors.In addition,decision-making tasks are often used as experimental tasks in the classical study of unconscious--thought.Decision tasks are more complex than creative problem solving.Therefore,this study uses decision-making tasks to explore whether it is beneficial for individuals to make better decisions when distractions are not similar to decision-making tasks.This study consists of three experiments.Experiment 1 adopts the hypothetical mobile phone purchase task as the decision task,presents the information of four mobile phones to the participants,and asks them to evaluate the four mobile phones separately.In order to control the similarity between the distraction and the decision task,the dissimilar distraction adopts the R-rotation task of the space class,and the similar distraction task adopts the reading task of the speech class.The experimental results show that compared with the similar distractions,the participants can choose the best mobile phone under the dissimilar distraction conditions.In order to control the influence of the distraction difficulty on the unconscious thinking processing result,the speech and space 1-back distraction task were adopted.The stimuli presentation process of this task is completely consistent,and the speech and space are distinguished only by the different guide words.The experimental results show that compared with the similar distracting tasks,the subjects can choose the bestmobile phone under the dissimilar distraction conditions.Experiment 3 turns the decision task into a roommate selection task,and only replaces the cell phone information in experiment 2 with the roommate information,and the other processes are completely consistent with experiment 2.The results further revealed that compared with similar distracting tasks,subjects with dissimilar distracting tasks were able to select the best roommates.The above experimental results show that when the distracting task is not similar to the decision task,it is beneficial for the individual to make better decisions.