TESTING ADVANTAGE OF INTUITIVE THINKING IN COMPLEX TASK: DESIGNING AN EXPERIMENT

IN UTT PARADIGM

Róbert HanákInstitute of Experimental Psychology,

Slovak Academy of Sciences (SLOVAKIA)

UNCONSCIOUS THOUGH THEORY (UTT)

• Recently, intuition has been receiving more attention as a rational decision strategy. This view is reflected also in the Unconscious Though Theory (UTT), which posits that for complex problems it is more advisable to rely on intuitive, unconscious processes. However, some of the previous studies were not able to confirm the advantage of unconscious thought.

• Tasks used in experiment examining UTT are typically choice of apartments, roommates or products, such as cars. Therefore the main aim of this paper is to present newly designed task that could be used for testing in UTT paradigm. It presents work in developing new problem area for UTT testing – enterprise evaluation. Comparing results obtained with tasks from different domains would help to enlighten some of the reasons, why unconscious though advantage failed to be demonstrated in so many studies.

INTUITION AS RATIONAL DECISION STRATEGY

• In our everyday life we make hundreds of decisions – sometimes we are not even aware that we are making one. Common experience suggests that we can make decisions in two ways – either deliberately, analytically, weighting all pros and cons or intuitively, automatically, based on our inner gut feelings what feels right. Usually, these two strategies are referred to as “rational” and “intuitive”, but is it always a case that deliberative (and thus more rational) decision is better than intuitive?

Typical experiment in UTT paradigm

• Participants are usually assigned into one of three conditions: 1) immediate decision (participants have to decide and evaluate immediately after presentation of information); 2) conscious decision (participants are given few minutes to thing about information before they decide); and 3) unconscious decision (participants are distracted for a few minutes before they decided).

• Each choice is described by 12 attributes, for a total 48 pieces of information. Information are presented about each alternative individually (but in block per apartment), alternatives were presented in each trial in a random order.

• One alternative is the most attractive (with 8 positive and 4 negative attributes) and one alternative is the worst (with 8 negative and 4 positive attributes). The two other alternative serve as fillers with neutral attractiveness (6 positive and 6 negative attributes). A specific description of attributes has to be designed so that the most important attributes are not extremely negative or extremely positive

CONSTRUCTING ENTETRPRISE TASK :

• Participants: Total of 152 managers and administrative workers participated in the study. The mean age of the sample was 30.87 (SD=9.91), women were overrepresented (64.6 % vs. 35.4 %). The range of the years in their field ranged from 1 to 35 years.

RESULTS:Identifying the most important dimensions

Dimensionsmean weight in

Evaluation 1 (time stress)

mean weight in Evaluation 2 (no

time stress)

mean weight between

Evaluation 1 and 2

Price 11.21 10.07 10.64Profitability 8.41 7.48 7.95

Potential market 7.31 7.08 7.19Existing competition 5.80 5.26 5.53

Payback period 5.06 4.83 4.94Duration of demand 4.49 4.59 4.54

Appearance 4.38 4.28 4.33Functional

performance 4.04 4.38 4.21

Size of investment 3.71 4.23 3.97Function 3.96 3.79 3.87Durability 3.94 3.68 3.81Legality 4.07 3.39 3.73

Cost of production 3.39 3.96 3.67

CONCLUSION

• New design of UTT experiment based on “real” weight of specific dimensions will minimize effect of different individual weighting, which is, in fact, far from perfect academic predictive validity. But this improvement will make more addressed experiment with minimal distortions. We hope that results of this new experiment will bring new argument to discussion about advantages of unconscious thinking.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

• This work was supported by Centre of Excellence at Slovak Academy of Sciences: Centre for interdisciplinary research and strategies in society – CESTA III/2/2011.

REFERENCES

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