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The tendency of unconscious thought toward global processing style
Consciousness and Cognition 53 (2017) 14–22
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Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
The tendency of unconscious thought toward global processing style Jiansheng Lia,b, Fan Wanga, Mowei Shenc, Gang Fana,b, a b c
MARK
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Department of Psychology, Northwest Normal University, 730070, China Criminal Psychology Testing Technology Research Center, Gansu Institute of Political Science and Law, 730070, China Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, 310028, China
AR TI CLE I NF O
AB S T R A CT
Keywords: Unconscious thought Decision making Processing style
This study explored whether unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally. In three experiments, a Navon task was used to activate global or local processing styles. Findings showed that in the unconscious-thought groups, those performing the local Navon task presented a poorer decision-making performance when compared to those performing the global Navon task (Experiment 1); participants reported that their judgments were made based on partial attributes (Experiment 2), and evaluated a target individual mainly based on information consistent with stereotypes (Experiment 3). These results showed that when presented with distracter tasks, conscious thought activates local processing, which impairs its ability to process information globally. However, this impairment would not happen if global processing were activated instead. This study provides support to the idea that unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally.
1. Introduction Every day individuals are faced with complex decisions, and concentrated deliberation is believed to be necessary in adequate decision-making. As Confucius said, “Think twice before action.” However, this belief has been challenged by recent research suggesting that thought processes for complex decision-making can be carried out without conscious attention, and unconscious thought can sometimes lead to better decision outcomes than conscious thought (e.g., Abadie, Waroquier, & Terrier, 2013; Dijksterhuis, 2004; Hasford, 2014; Li et al., 2014, 2016). Unconscious thought is defined as “object-relevant or task-relevant cognitive or affective thought processes that occur while conscious attention is directed elsewhere” (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006, p. 96). On this basis, Dijksterhuis and Nordgren (2006) developed the Unconscious Thought Theory. In a study by Dijksterhuis (2004), participants were presented with information about four apartments, one of which was objectively the best apartment, another was objectively the worst apartment, and the final two were of medium attractiveness. One group of participants was given three minutes to carefully consider the positive and negative attributes of the four apartments (conscious thought group), whereas the other group was required to complete a distractor task for the same length of time (unconscious thought group). After the experiment, both groups of participants were asked to evaluate the four apartments. The focus of the study was on whether the participants were able to differentiate between the attractive apartment and the unattractive apartment. Dijksterhuis subtracted the scores given to the unattractive apartments from the scores given to the attractive apartment, and used the difference scores as the dependent variable. The results indicated that compared to participants who engaged in conscious
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Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China. E-mail address: [email protected] (G. Fan).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.05.005 Received 20 December 2016; Received in revised form 9 May 2017; Accepted 26 May 2017 1053-8100/ © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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thought, participants who engaged in unconscious thought could more easily differentiate between the attractive apartment and the unattractive apartment. The researcher concluded that the underlying reasons for these experimental results were as follows: (1) Conscious thought has a low processing capacity, while unconscious thought is relatively free from this constraint (Dijksterhuis, 2004); (2) Conscious thought tends to overestimate the importance of particular attributes (for example, information that is easy to express verbally), whereas unconscious thought often adds weight to the comparable significance of numerous attributes (Bos, Dijksterhuis, & van Baaren, 2011). Subsequently, other researchers began to discover the advantage of unconscious thought over conscious thought in other domains, including creative problem-solving (Yang, Chattopadhyay, Zhang, & Dahl, 2012; Zhong, Dijksterhuis, & Galinsky, 2008), artificial grammar learning (Li, Zhu, & Yang, 2014; Mealor & Dienes, 2012), and integration of temporally partitioned information (Li et al., 2014). More importantly, Creswell and colleagues employed fMRI to compare the brain activation of participants in conscious thought, unconscious thought, and immediate decision conditions (Creswell, Bursley, & Satpute, 2013). Their results showed that the participants’ right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left intermediate visual cortex were activated during information presentation, and these regions continued to be activated during a two-back distracter task completed after the information was presented. In addition to differences in capacity and weighting, researchers have also found that unconscious thought and conscious thought have the following differences in processing characteristics: (1) Rule principle: conscious thought follows stringent rules in order to perform precise calculations, whereas unconscious thought provides rough estimates (Ric & Muller, 2012); (2) Convergence-versusdivergence principle: conscious thought and its memory search are convergent functions, while unconscious thought tends to be more divergent (Dijksterhuis & Meurs, 2006); (3) Bottom-up-versus-top-down principle: conscious thought, which is guided by expectations and schemata, works in a top-down manner, whereas unconscious thought, which slowly integrates information to make objective summary judgments, works in a bottom-up fashion (Bos & Dijksterhuis, 2011). Based on these differences, unconscious thought and conscious thought are applicable to different circumstances (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). In addition to the differences in processing mechanisms, the question of whether other major differences exist between conscious and unconscious thought in terms of information processing methods is worthy of further elaboration. Global and local processing are two different information-processing styles with a great impact on information processing. Compared to local processing, global processing is more closely related to psychological distance, creativity, and similarity focus. Liberman and Förster (2009) employed the Navon letter discrimination task to activate either the global or local processing styles, followed by the completion of estimation tasks with respect to time, space, social distance, and hypotheticality. The results showed that compared to local processing, participants primed with global processing made larger estimates for psychological distances. Förster and Denzler (2012) used visual, haptic, auditory, olfactory, or gustatory objects to activate either the global or local processing style, after which participants were asked to generate names for cartoons. The study results showed that participants primed with global processing generated more creative names compared to those primed with local processing. Förster (2009) first used the Navon task to activate either the global or local processing style. Then, participants were shown two segments of TV shows, and were asked to find the similarities and dissimilarities between the two video clips. The results indicated that participants primed with global processing generated more similarities between the two video clips, whereas participants primed with local processing generated more dissimilarities. In addition, it has been suggested that manipulating the scope of perceptual attention can correspondingly change the scope of conceptual attention (Derryberry & Tucker, 1994), and hence influence global-local processing style (Förster, Liberman, & Kuschel, 2008). Specifically, when perceptual attention stimulates local features, this activates a low-level semantic network and its associates, which triggers local processing. On the other hand, when perceptual attention stimulates global features, this activates a high-level semantic network and its associates, leading to the activation of global processing (Förster & Dannenberg, 2010). Research has found that conscious thought processing tends to adopt a local processing style (e.g., Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010; Baumeister, Masicampo, & Vohs, 2011; Dijkstra, van der Pligt, van Kleef, & Kertsholt, 2012; Gollwitzer, 1999; Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011). Conscious thought is closely related to the formulation of specific plans. Masicampo and colleagues found that when unfulfilled goals were activated, as long as participants were allowed to engage conscious thought in the formulation of specific plans related to goal completion, goal-related cognitive activity could be reduced drastically, even if the participants were unable to fulfill their goals. Gollwitzer (1999) also found that implementation intention involves using conscious thought to formulate specific plans to translate general, abstract intentions into specific actions. More importantly, Dijkstra and his colleagues conducted four experiments and showed that when given a task to select artwork, participants in the conscious thought condition were more concerned with the details of the artwork and ignored the overall characteristics (compared to participants in an immediate decision-making condition), resulting in a decline in decision quality. Hence, the researchers suggested that conscious thought tends to adopt a local processing style in the processing of information. This experiment highlights the question of whether unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally. Lerouge (2009) suggested that compared to a featural mind-set, a configural mind-set facilitate the processing of information by unconscious Thought. Moreover, Dijksterhuis (2004) pointed out that unconscious thought will cause memory representation to become more polarized, which implies that more positive attributes will be stored in the representation of objectively better alternatives. Conversely, more negative attributes will be stored in the representation of objectively worse alternatives. Unconscious thought will also lead to greater clustering of memory representations, which involves classifying various pieces of information (Dijksterhuis, 2004). Most importantly, Abadie and his colleagues found that unconscious thought is based on the processing of gist memory and not verbatim memory (Abadie et al., 2013). A configural mind-set, polarization, clustering, and gist representation, are closely related to global processing style (e.g., Evans, 2008; Friedman & Förster, 2002; Förster & Dannenberg, 2010; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995). In addition, creativity research has also shown that when solving complex problems (e.g. Duncker’s candle 15
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problem), unconscious thought facilitates the discovery of interrelations between problems and the generation of creative solutions for problem-solving (e.g., Higgins & Chaires, 1980; Maier, 1931). As a result, this study explored the hypothesis that unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally. This study examined whether unconscious thought tends to adopt a global processing style by comparing the impact of global and local processing on unconscious thought. The research paradigm of unconscious thought includes three stages: information input, thinking stage (unconscious or conscious thought), and output (Dijksterhuis, 2004). In this paradigm, unconscious thought mainly takes place during the thinking stage and this is achieved when participants complete the distracter tasks on a conscious level (for example, the two-back task). In addition, research has shown that conscious thought and unconscious thought are not two independent systems, but are mutually influential (e.g., Evans, 2008; Kahneman & Frederick, 2002; Reber, 1993). Dual-process theories have also proposed that, despite our ability to reach automatic decisions and judgments, this process is also monitored and modified by conscious thought (Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Evans, 2008). A meta-analysis also indicated that distracter tasks can influence the processing of unconscious thought (Strick et al., 2011). Furthermore, McMahon and colleagues found that when the distracter task involved listening to music or solving word search puzzles, unconscious thought outperformed conscious thought. However, when the distracter task involved solving anagram puzzles, there was no difference in the performance of conscious and unconscious thought (McMahon, Sparrow, Chatman, & Riddle, 2011). Therefore, if unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt a global processing style, then the activation of local processing style through distracter tasks at the conscious level may interfere with the global processing of unconscious thought, while the activation of global processing style will not generate such interference. This study used a Navon task to activate both global and local processing styles. This task involves the use of a large character made out of small characters. The participants in this study were asked to either respond to large letters and ignore small letters, or vice versa (Navon, 1977). Studies have shown that performing the Navon large-letter (global) task on a perceptual level can activate superordinate concepts and their neighboring concepts in the semantic network, thereby activating the global processing style. In contrast, performing the Navon small-letter (local) task on a perceptual level can activate subordinate concepts and their neighboring concepts in the semantic network, thereby activating the local processing style (e.g., Förster, 2009; Förster & Dannenberg, 2010). Therefore, if unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally, then it would work better than conscious thought in processing information in the large letter condition. However, in the small-letter task, unconscious thought would not show any advantages over conscious thought. 2. Experiment 1 This experiment adopted a classic experimental paradigm of unconscious thought, except that the type of distracter task was manipulated. We introduced a local and a global Navon task as distracter tasks in the conditions involving unconscious thought in order to investigate the effect of the Navon task on unconscious thought. If unconscious thought has a tendency toward the global processing style, then, in the global Navon condition, unconscious thought will outperform conscious thought. However, in the local Navon condition, unconscious thought will not have an advantage over conscious thought. 2.1. Method 2.1.1. Participants and design A total of 66 students (24 women and 42 men) participated in this experiment and received a financial reward. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an Unconscious-Local condition (22 participants: 9 women and 13 men), an UnconsciousGlobal condition (21 participants: 9 women and 12 men), and a Conscious-Thought condition (23 participants: 6 women and 17 men). This experiment adopted a single-factor, between-subjects design. Thought type was set as the between-subjects variable and included three levels: conscious thought, unconscious-global thought, and unconscious-local thought. The dependent variable was the difference between the objective ratings of the best mobile phone and the worst mobile phone made by participants. 2.1.2. Materials and procedure The experimental materials were the same as those used by Zhou and colleagues (Zhou, Zhou, Li, & Zhang, 2015). All the participants received information about 4 mobile phones, each with 12 attributes, and were asked to form an impression of them. One phone was the best (8 positive and 4 negative attributes), another one was the worst (4 positive and 8 negative attributes), and the remaining 2 phones fell in between (6 positive and 6 negative attributes). Attributes were presented in a random order, one at a time, for 5 s each. After all the information was presented, participants were randomly allocated to one of the three conditions. In the Conscious-Thought condition, which was based on the methods described by Dijksterhuis (2004), participants were asked to think about their impression of the phones for three minutes. On the other hand, participants in the Unconscious-Local and Unconscious-Global condition were distracted for 3 min with a Navon task (Navon, 1977), in which a large character made out of small characters was presented in each trial. Each hierarchical letter was presented for 500 ms, followed by a blank screen for another 500 ms. In the Unconscious-Global condition, participants were asked to determine if the large character made of small characters was an H or L. In the Unconscious-Local condition, participants were asked to judge if the small characters making up the large character were an H or L. Finally, all the participants rated their impression of each phone (with scores ranging from 0 representing “very bad” to 100 indicating “very good”). This measurement indicated not only which phone the participants evaluated as the best, but also to what extent participants were able to differentiate between the best and worst phones (Dijksterhuis, 2004). 16
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Fig. 1. Difference between attitude toward the best object and attitude toward the worst object varied as a function of thought condition in Experiment 1. Error bars represent the average standard errors.
2.2. Results Difference scores were calculated by subtracting the attitude toward the unattractive phone from the attitude toward the attractive phone. This relative preference reflects the participants’ ability to differentiate between the best and worst phones (Dijksterhuis, 2004). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) of a single factor showed a significant effect for thought type, F(2, 65) = 4.09, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.19. As shown in Fig. 1, the participants in the Unconscious-Global condition (M = 18.57, SD = 14.53) showed significantly better decision-making than those in the Conscious-thought condition (M = 7.74, SD = 19.34), t(42) = 2.08, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.09, and Unconscious-Local conditions (M = 5.27, SD = 13.89), t(41) = 3.07, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.19. However, no significant difference was found in decision-making performance between the Unconscious-Local and Conscious-Thought conditions, t(43) = 0.49, p > 0.05. These results suggested that on a perceptual level, the local Navon task activated local processing, which impaired the global processing of information by unconscious thought; in turn, this affected the quality of decision-making. On the other hand, the global Navon task activated global processing, which did not interfere with unconscious thought processing information globally. Hence, these results suggest that unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt global processing style.
3. Experiment 2 The aim of this experiment was to further explore whether in the local Navon task, unconscious thought groups tended to adopt a global processing style. With reference to Dijksterhuis’s (2004) method, the participants were not only requested to rate the mobile phones, but were also asked to report if their rating was based on a global impression of the phone or on partial attributes. If the participants in the Unconscious-Local condition adopted a local processing style when distracted by the local Navon task, they would report that their ratings were more predominantly based on partial attributes instead of a global perspective, compared to the participants distracted by the global Navon task.
3.1. Method 3.1.1. Participants and design A total of 84 students (58 women and 26 men) participated in this experiment and received a financial reward. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an Unconscious-Local condition (17 women and 11 men), an Unconscious-Global condition (21 women and 7 men), and a Conscious-Thought condition (20 women and 8 men); there were 28 participants in each condition. This experiment adopted a single-factor, between-subjects design. Thought type was set as a between-subject variable with three different levels: conscious thought, unconscious-global thought, and unconscious-local thought. The dependent variable was decision-making performance measured as the difference between the objective ratings of the best and worst phones.
3.1.2. Procedure The procedure for Experiment 2 was almost identical to Experiment 1 except that after completion, participants answered a question related to their rating of the phones. Specifically, after evaluating the four phones, the following question was presented on screen: “When you were rating the four phones, was it based on one or a few phone attributes, or was it based on the majority of phone attributes?”. Two answers options were presented at the bottom of the screen, which were “Based on a more global impression” and “Based on partial attributes.” The participants were asked to choose by a keypress. 17
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3.2. Results The difference between the ratings of the best and the worst phone was calculated and ANOVA revealed significant differences in the decision-making performance of participants in the various thought conditions, F(2, 83) = 3.41, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.08. The difference in decision-making performance between the participants under the Unconscious-Global condition (M = 17.00, SD = 19.83) and those in the Conscious-Thought condition (M = 7.21, SD = 22.54) reached borderline significance, t(54) = 1.73, p = 0.09, η2 = 0.06; and decision-making performance was significantly better in the Unconscious-Global than in the UnconsciousLocal condition (M = 3.89, SD = 15.60), t(54) = 2.75, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.12. In contrast, There was no significant difference in decision-making performance between the Unconscious-Local condition and Conscious-Thought condition, t(54) = 0.64, p > 0.05. These results were found to be consistent with those from Experiment 1. In this experiment, we also calculated the percentage of participants in each group reporting that their evaluations were based on a global impression. A total of 54% of the participants in the Conscious-Thought condition and 71% in the Unconscious-Global condition based their evaluations on global information, while the percentage of participants that utilized global information for their evaluation only accounted for 39% in the Unconscious-Local condition group. There was a significant difference in the use of global information between the two unconscious thought conditions, χ2(1, N = 28) = 5.85, p < 0.05. Furthermore, the coefficient of the correlation between global information use and decision-making performance was 0.24 (p < 0.05). This indicated that the participants who stated that their evaluations were based on a global impression showed a higher ability to distinguish the best and the worst phones. These results showed that participants performing the local distracter task in the unconscious thought had a tendency to process information locally, whereas those performing the global Navon task in the unconscious thought tended to adopt a global processing style. 4. Experiment 3 By changing the experimental task, Experiment 3 was designed to further compare the global and local Navon tasks, and to investigate whether unconscious thought tends to process information locally when distracted by a local task. This experiment references the person-memory paradigm (Bos & Dijksterhuis, 2011), and participants were initially provided with a physical description of a target person (in this case, a senior citizen), and subsequently received numerous behavioral descriptions of the target person, including both expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information. Studies have shown that compared to expectancy-incongruent information, expectancy-congruent information can be recalled more easily (Devine, 1989; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1995). Therefore, when a local processing style is adopted, judgments will be formed based predominantly on expectancy-congruent information. Whereas when global processing is adopted, both expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information will be used. If unconscious thought tends to process information locally when distracted by a local task, participants in the Unconscious-Local condition will mainly depend on expectancy-congruent information to form their impression of the target person, while those in the Unconscious-Global condition will form their impression of the target person by integrating both expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information. 4.1. Method 4.1.1. Participants and design A total of 75 students (46 women and 29 men) participated in this experiment and received a financial reward. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an Unconscious-Local condition (25 participants: 18 women and 7 men), an UnconsciousGlobal condition (25 participants: 13 women and 12 men), and a Conscious-Thought condition (25 participants: 15 women and 10 men). This experiment included 2 variables: thought type (conscious thought, unconscious-global thought, and unconscious-local thought) and stereotype consistency (consistent and inconsistent). Thought type served as a between-subject variable and stereotype consistency was the within-subject variable. The dependent variables were the participant ratings of the attributes and their results on the memory task. 4.1.2. Material and procedure A total of 24 pieces of information describing the behavior of a senior citizen were obtained from the pretest, from which 12 were stereotype-congruent (6 about amiability and 6 about difficulty in mobility), 6 were stereotype-incongruent (3 about stupidity and 3 about impatience), and 6 were irrelevant to the stereotype of senior citizens. Participants were informed ahead of time that the experiment was based on impression formation. When the experiment officially started, participants learned that Mr. Wang was a retired senior citizen living at home, and were asked to form an impression of him. The 24 pieces of information about Mr. Wang were then randomly presented in succession to participants; the presenting time for each information piece was 5 s. Participants were randomly assigned to the three conditions after the presentation of all the information. Participants in the Conscious-Thought condition were permitted to deliberate on their impression of Mr. Wang for 6 min. Those in the Unconscious-Local and Unconscious-Global conditions were required to complete a local or global Navon task identical to that used in Experiment 1 for 6 min. At the end of the experiment, all the participants were asked to evaluate their impression of Mr. Wang by rating six dimensional attributes (with scores ranging from 0 indicating “not at all descriptive” to 100 indicating “very descriptive”), which included two 18
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Fig. 2. Scores in the impressions of Mr. Wang: Stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent attribute dimensions serving as the dependent variable of thought condition in Experiment 3 (stereotype-irrelevant dimensions were subtracted). Error bars represent the average standard errors.
stereotype-congruent attributes (amiable and with challenged mobility), two stereotype-incongruent attributes (stupid and impatient), and two attributes that were irrelevant to the stereotype of senior citizens, as baseline dimensions. This evaluation was followed by a recall task in which participants were asked to list the information previously presented on Mr. Wang in as much detail as possible on a piece of paper within 3 min. 4.2. Results Following the methodology of Bos and Dijksterhuis (2011), the score serving as the indicator of stereotype-congruence was obtained by subtracting the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-irrelevant attributes from the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-congruent attributes. Similarly, the score serving as the indicator of stereotype-incongruence was obtained by subtracting the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-irrelevant attributes from the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-incongruent attributes. Using a 3 (thought type) × 2 (stereotype congruence) ANOVA for mixed designs, a significant two-way interaction was found, F (2,72) = 7.91, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.18. As shown in Fig. 2, the ratings provided by the global-task-distracted participants (M = 29.08, SD = 25.38), the local-task-distracted participants (M = 26.96, SD = 28.25), and the conscious-thought participants (M = 23.24, SD = 26.57) were not significantly different on the stereotype-congruent attribute dimension (F < 1); however, the ratings of the global-task-distracted participants (M = 26.14, SD = 19.54) were significantly higher than those of the local-task-distracted participants (M = 2.10, SD = 29.13), t(48) = 3.43, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.20, and also higher than those of the conscious-thought participants (M = −10.10, SD = 30.70), t(48) = 4.87, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.33, on the stereotype-incongruent attribute dimension. These results showed that participants in the Unconscious-Local and Conscious-Thought conditions evaluated Mr. Wang based on stereotypecongruent information, whereas the participants in the Unconscious-Global condition used stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent attributes. Another dependent variable was defined by counting the number of stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent attributes that each participant recalled correctly and calculating their percentage over the total number of attributes (Bos & Dijksterhuis, 2011). Using a 3 (thought type) × 2 (stereotype congruence) ANOVA, a significant two-way interaction was found, F(2,72) = 1.84, p = 0.07, η2 = 0.05. However, as shown in Fig. 3, on the stereotype-congruent attribute dimension, the recall task scores of the global-task-distracted participants (M = 0.33, SD = 0.13), the local-task-distracted participants (M = 0.31, SD = 0.12), and the conscious-thought participants (M = 0.32, SD = 0.13) were not different (ts < 1). In contrast, on the stereotype-incongruent
Fig. 3. Scores in the recall task: Stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent information (percentage of presented information) serving as the dependent variable of thought condition in Experiment 3. Error bars represent the average standard errors.
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attribute dimension, the recall scores of the global-task-distracted participants (M = 0.33, SD = 0.17) were significantly higher than those of the local-task-distracted participants (M = 0.22, SD = 0.15), t(48) = 2.53, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.12, and higher than those of the conscious-thought participants (M = 0.21, SD = 0.17), t(48) = 2.52, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.12. Both the evaluation ratings of the impression of Mr. Wang and the recall task results illustrated that participants in the Unconscious-Local and Conscious-Thought conditions relied on stereotypes and were prone to local processing style, while those in the Unconscious-Global condition were relatively less reliant on stereotypes and more prone to global processing style. Thus, the results from this experiment supported the idea that unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt a global processing style. 5. General discussion The results of this study suggest that when unconscious thought processes information, it uses global or local processing according to the type of Navon task. The findings of the three experiments suggest that local processing can impair unconscious thought processing information globally, but no interference occurs if global processing style is activated. These results support the findings on the tendency of unconscious thought to adopt a global processing style in order to process information. Of critical importance is that our findings reflect the principles pertaining to unconscious thought, rather than some uncontrolled factors which are irrelevant to unconscious thought. An alternative explanation is that the low performance in the unconscious-local condition was due to the difference of task difficulty, that is, the local task was easier than the global task, thus the residual attention could engage in the thought processes, enabling the participants to think more consciously. However, the Navon task performance data in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 did not support this explanation. In Experiment 1, there was no significant difference between the error rates of the global (M = 0.10, SD = 0.08) and local (M = 0.09, SD = 0.07) Navon task, t(41) = 0.54, p = 0.60. In Experiment 2, there was also no significant difference between the error rates of the global (M = 0.09, SD = 0.08) and local (M = 0.11, SD = 0.07) Navon task, t(54) = 1.04, p = 0.30. Similarly, in Experiment 3, there was no significant difference between the error rates of the global (M = 0.07, SD = 0.06) and local (M = 0.07, SD = 0.07) Navon task, t(48) = 0.16, p = 0.87. In addition, participants responded more slowly to the local characters (608 ms in Experiment 1, 591 ms in Experiment 2 and 544 ms in Experiment 3) than the global characters (518 ms in Experiment 1, 514 ms in Experiment 2 and 481 ms in Experiment 3), ts < 4.08, ps < 0.01, η2 < 0.26, indicating that the local task was harder than the global task. Another interpretation of the experimental results is that the local distracter task was more difficult than the global distracter task, which reduced the cognitive resources available for unconscious thought in the local distracter condition. This would have caused the participants to perform more poorly compared to the Unconscious-Global group. McMahon and colleagues examined the impact of task difficulty on unconscious thought processing using listening to music as a distracter task (McMahon et al., 2011). Under the easy condition, the participants were only required to listen to music, while participants in the difficult condition had to listen to music and write down lyrics ending in “T”. Their experimental results showed that among participants engaged in unconscious thought, those in the easy condition performed better than those in the difficult condition. However, the difference between the two groups did not reach statistical significance. More importantly, a recent research conducted by Srinivasan and colleagues revealed that distraction tasks on the perception level, global or local, impacted on the information integration by unconscious thought, whereas the difficulty level of these tasks was irrelevant to such integration process (Srinivasan, Mukherjee, Mishra, & Kesarwani, 2013). However, the study found that attentional scope could have an impact on unconscious thought processing; specifically, that a broader attentional scope was more beneficial to unconscious thought. Their results support our view that unconscious thought has a greater tendency toward global processing. Finally, the results of Experiment 3 indicated that participants in the Unconscious-Local group performed their evaluations based predominantly on stereotype-congruent information, whereas participants in the Unconscious-Global group used both stereotypecongruent and -incongruent information. This result cannot be fully explained by claiming that the Unconscious-Global group had more cognitive resources available than the Unconscious-Local group. Taken together, our results cannot be explained by task difficulty. However, future studies will be needed, involving distracter tasks of the same difficulty in the activation of global or local processing styles, in order to eliminate the influence of distracter task difficulty on the experimental results. This study also extended current research on the processing style of unconscious thought. UTT states that unconscious and conscious thought are two relatively independent processes, showing different characteristics in terms of the principles of capacity, weighting, rules, and convergence and divergence; and they are applicable under difference circumstances (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). This study found that unconscious thought processes information based on a global impression, adopting a global processing style. These findings support the UTT and help to deepen our understanding of the information processing mechanism of unconscious thought. The current study further provided the new evidence that unconscious thought can be significantly impacted by the simultaneous conscious processes (McMahon et al., 2011). To our knowledge, unconscious thought has appeared to be immune to what we do consciously in previous research. A recent meta-analysis, however, indicated that the distracter task tends to significantly impact on the processing of unconscious thought (Strick et al., 2011). The current study furthered the analysis by demonstrating that unconscious thought is influenced by the simultaneous conscious processes, even a low-level perceptual task which is irrelevant to the main task. This finding suggests a two-way interaction between conscious processes and unconscious processes during thinking, not only unconscious thought can affect the conscious decision, but also conscious task can affect the unconscious thought. How they affect each other is a very intriguing question which is worth further investigation. This study also provided new evidence supporting unconscious thought as an off-line judgment. Lassiter and colleagues argued that unconscious thought formed an on-line judgment when participants were presented information (Lassiter, Lindberg, GonzálezVallejo, Bellezza, & Phillips, 2009). If this argument is valid, an on-line judgment is formed once information is presented, and 20
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changes from a distracter task should not affect the results of this on-line judgment. This study, however, found that when compared to the local Navon task, the global Navon task was more conducive for unconscious thought to process information. This result strongly refuted the argument of unconscious thought as on-line judgment; instead, the study supports the idea that information will continue to be processed on an unconscious level after the presentation of information. Future studies need to use different distracter tasks activating global or local processing to test the findings of this study. We adopted the Navon task as a distracter task. However, research on global and local processing styles has shown that color, mood, approach/avoidance, and power could trigger global or local processing style in individuals (e.g., Friedman & Förster, 2002; Mehta & Zhu, 2009; Moskowitz & Ignarri, 2009; Smith & Trope, 2006). Further studies are recommended to set up the abovementioned variables as distracter tasks to further test the findings of this study. For example, the color green may initiate global processing style, whereas local processing style could be activated by the color red. Distracter tasks could use the classic unconscious thought paradigm (the two-back task) and the background of the task could be changed to either red or green. Based on this study’s findings, when compared to the two-back task with a green background, the red background would impair unconscious thought in processing information. In conclusion, unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt a global processing style in order to process information. Conscious thought in the local Navon task activates local processing, which impairs unconscious thought in processing information. On the other hand, in the global Navon task, information-processing is not affected. Acknowledgement This research is supported by the Foundation for Natural Science Foundation of Gansu Province (1506RJYA120), Scientific research project of Gansu Province (2015A-004), the Gansu Provincial Social Science Foundation (YB027), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31560281). References Abadie, M., Waroquier, L., & Terrier, P. (2013). Gist memory in the unconscious-thought effect. Psychological Science, 24, 1253–1259. Baumeister, R. F., & Masicampo, E. J. (2010). Conscious thought is for facilitating social and cultural interactions: How mental simulations serve the animal-culture interface. Psychological Review, 117, 945–971. Baumeister, R. F., Masicampo, E. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2011). Do conscious thoughts cause behavior? Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 331–361. Bos, M. W., & Dijksterhuis, A. (2011). Unconscious thought works bottom-up and conscious thought works top-down when forming an impression. Social Cognition, 29, 727–736. Bos, M. 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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
The tendency of unconscious thought toward global processing style Jiansheng Lia,b, Fan Wanga, Mowei Shenc, Gang Fana,b, a b c
MARK
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Department of Psychology, Northwest Normal University, 730070, China Criminal Psychology Testing Technology Research Center, Gansu Institute of Political Science and Law, 730070, China Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, 310028, China
AR TI CLE I NF O
AB S T R A CT
Keywords: Unconscious thought Decision making Processing style
This study explored whether unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally. In three experiments, a Navon task was used to activate global or local processing styles. Findings showed that in the unconscious-thought groups, those performing the local Navon task presented a poorer decision-making performance when compared to those performing the global Navon task (Experiment 1); participants reported that their judgments were made based on partial attributes (Experiment 2), and evaluated a target individual mainly based on information consistent with stereotypes (Experiment 3). These results showed that when presented with distracter tasks, conscious thought activates local processing, which impairs its ability to process information globally. However, this impairment would not happen if global processing were activated instead. This study provides support to the idea that unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally.
1. Introduction Every day individuals are faced with complex decisions, and concentrated deliberation is believed to be necessary in adequate decision-making. As Confucius said, “Think twice before action.” However, this belief has been challenged by recent research suggesting that thought processes for complex decision-making can be carried out without conscious attention, and unconscious thought can sometimes lead to better decision outcomes than conscious thought (e.g., Abadie, Waroquier, & Terrier, 2013; Dijksterhuis, 2004; Hasford, 2014; Li et al., 2014, 2016). Unconscious thought is defined as “object-relevant or task-relevant cognitive or affective thought processes that occur while conscious attention is directed elsewhere” (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006, p. 96). On this basis, Dijksterhuis and Nordgren (2006) developed the Unconscious Thought Theory. In a study by Dijksterhuis (2004), participants were presented with information about four apartments, one of which was objectively the best apartment, another was objectively the worst apartment, and the final two were of medium attractiveness. One group of participants was given three minutes to carefully consider the positive and negative attributes of the four apartments (conscious thought group), whereas the other group was required to complete a distractor task for the same length of time (unconscious thought group). After the experiment, both groups of participants were asked to evaluate the four apartments. The focus of the study was on whether the participants were able to differentiate between the attractive apartment and the unattractive apartment. Dijksterhuis subtracted the scores given to the unattractive apartments from the scores given to the attractive apartment, and used the difference scores as the dependent variable. The results indicated that compared to participants who engaged in conscious
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Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China. E-mail address: [email protected] (G. Fan).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.05.005 Received 20 December 2016; Received in revised form 9 May 2017; Accepted 26 May 2017 1053-8100/ © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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thought, participants who engaged in unconscious thought could more easily differentiate between the attractive apartment and the unattractive apartment. The researcher concluded that the underlying reasons for these experimental results were as follows: (1) Conscious thought has a low processing capacity, while unconscious thought is relatively free from this constraint (Dijksterhuis, 2004); (2) Conscious thought tends to overestimate the importance of particular attributes (for example, information that is easy to express verbally), whereas unconscious thought often adds weight to the comparable significance of numerous attributes (Bos, Dijksterhuis, & van Baaren, 2011). Subsequently, other researchers began to discover the advantage of unconscious thought over conscious thought in other domains, including creative problem-solving (Yang, Chattopadhyay, Zhang, & Dahl, 2012; Zhong, Dijksterhuis, & Galinsky, 2008), artificial grammar learning (Li, Zhu, & Yang, 2014; Mealor & Dienes, 2012), and integration of temporally partitioned information (Li et al., 2014). More importantly, Creswell and colleagues employed fMRI to compare the brain activation of participants in conscious thought, unconscious thought, and immediate decision conditions (Creswell, Bursley, & Satpute, 2013). Their results showed that the participants’ right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left intermediate visual cortex were activated during information presentation, and these regions continued to be activated during a two-back distracter task completed after the information was presented. In addition to differences in capacity and weighting, researchers have also found that unconscious thought and conscious thought have the following differences in processing characteristics: (1) Rule principle: conscious thought follows stringent rules in order to perform precise calculations, whereas unconscious thought provides rough estimates (Ric & Muller, 2012); (2) Convergence-versusdivergence principle: conscious thought and its memory search are convergent functions, while unconscious thought tends to be more divergent (Dijksterhuis & Meurs, 2006); (3) Bottom-up-versus-top-down principle: conscious thought, which is guided by expectations and schemata, works in a top-down manner, whereas unconscious thought, which slowly integrates information to make objective summary judgments, works in a bottom-up fashion (Bos & Dijksterhuis, 2011). Based on these differences, unconscious thought and conscious thought are applicable to different circumstances (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). In addition to the differences in processing mechanisms, the question of whether other major differences exist between conscious and unconscious thought in terms of information processing methods is worthy of further elaboration. Global and local processing are two different information-processing styles with a great impact on information processing. Compared to local processing, global processing is more closely related to psychological distance, creativity, and similarity focus. Liberman and Förster (2009) employed the Navon letter discrimination task to activate either the global or local processing styles, followed by the completion of estimation tasks with respect to time, space, social distance, and hypotheticality. The results showed that compared to local processing, participants primed with global processing made larger estimates for psychological distances. Förster and Denzler (2012) used visual, haptic, auditory, olfactory, or gustatory objects to activate either the global or local processing style, after which participants were asked to generate names for cartoons. The study results showed that participants primed with global processing generated more creative names compared to those primed with local processing. Förster (2009) first used the Navon task to activate either the global or local processing style. Then, participants were shown two segments of TV shows, and were asked to find the similarities and dissimilarities between the two video clips. The results indicated that participants primed with global processing generated more similarities between the two video clips, whereas participants primed with local processing generated more dissimilarities. In addition, it has been suggested that manipulating the scope of perceptual attention can correspondingly change the scope of conceptual attention (Derryberry & Tucker, 1994), and hence influence global-local processing style (Förster, Liberman, & Kuschel, 2008). Specifically, when perceptual attention stimulates local features, this activates a low-level semantic network and its associates, which triggers local processing. On the other hand, when perceptual attention stimulates global features, this activates a high-level semantic network and its associates, leading to the activation of global processing (Förster & Dannenberg, 2010). Research has found that conscious thought processing tends to adopt a local processing style (e.g., Baumeister & Masicampo, 2010; Baumeister, Masicampo, & Vohs, 2011; Dijkstra, van der Pligt, van Kleef, & Kertsholt, 2012; Gollwitzer, 1999; Masicampo & Baumeister, 2011). Conscious thought is closely related to the formulation of specific plans. Masicampo and colleagues found that when unfulfilled goals were activated, as long as participants were allowed to engage conscious thought in the formulation of specific plans related to goal completion, goal-related cognitive activity could be reduced drastically, even if the participants were unable to fulfill their goals. Gollwitzer (1999) also found that implementation intention involves using conscious thought to formulate specific plans to translate general, abstract intentions into specific actions. More importantly, Dijkstra and his colleagues conducted four experiments and showed that when given a task to select artwork, participants in the conscious thought condition were more concerned with the details of the artwork and ignored the overall characteristics (compared to participants in an immediate decision-making condition), resulting in a decline in decision quality. Hence, the researchers suggested that conscious thought tends to adopt a local processing style in the processing of information. This experiment highlights the question of whether unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally. Lerouge (2009) suggested that compared to a featural mind-set, a configural mind-set facilitate the processing of information by unconscious Thought. Moreover, Dijksterhuis (2004) pointed out that unconscious thought will cause memory representation to become more polarized, which implies that more positive attributes will be stored in the representation of objectively better alternatives. Conversely, more negative attributes will be stored in the representation of objectively worse alternatives. Unconscious thought will also lead to greater clustering of memory representations, which involves classifying various pieces of information (Dijksterhuis, 2004). Most importantly, Abadie and his colleagues found that unconscious thought is based on the processing of gist memory and not verbatim memory (Abadie et al., 2013). A configural mind-set, polarization, clustering, and gist representation, are closely related to global processing style (e.g., Evans, 2008; Friedman & Förster, 2002; Förster & Dannenberg, 2010; Reyna & Brainerd, 1995). In addition, creativity research has also shown that when solving complex problems (e.g. Duncker’s candle 15
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problem), unconscious thought facilitates the discovery of interrelations between problems and the generation of creative solutions for problem-solving (e.g., Higgins & Chaires, 1980; Maier, 1931). As a result, this study explored the hypothesis that unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally. This study examined whether unconscious thought tends to adopt a global processing style by comparing the impact of global and local processing on unconscious thought. The research paradigm of unconscious thought includes three stages: information input, thinking stage (unconscious or conscious thought), and output (Dijksterhuis, 2004). In this paradigm, unconscious thought mainly takes place during the thinking stage and this is achieved when participants complete the distracter tasks on a conscious level (for example, the two-back task). In addition, research has shown that conscious thought and unconscious thought are not two independent systems, but are mutually influential (e.g., Evans, 2008; Kahneman & Frederick, 2002; Reber, 1993). Dual-process theories have also proposed that, despite our ability to reach automatic decisions and judgments, this process is also monitored and modified by conscious thought (Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Evans, 2008). A meta-analysis also indicated that distracter tasks can influence the processing of unconscious thought (Strick et al., 2011). Furthermore, McMahon and colleagues found that when the distracter task involved listening to music or solving word search puzzles, unconscious thought outperformed conscious thought. However, when the distracter task involved solving anagram puzzles, there was no difference in the performance of conscious and unconscious thought (McMahon, Sparrow, Chatman, & Riddle, 2011). Therefore, if unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt a global processing style, then the activation of local processing style through distracter tasks at the conscious level may interfere with the global processing of unconscious thought, while the activation of global processing style will not generate such interference. This study used a Navon task to activate both global and local processing styles. This task involves the use of a large character made out of small characters. The participants in this study were asked to either respond to large letters and ignore small letters, or vice versa (Navon, 1977). Studies have shown that performing the Navon large-letter (global) task on a perceptual level can activate superordinate concepts and their neighboring concepts in the semantic network, thereby activating the global processing style. In contrast, performing the Navon small-letter (local) task on a perceptual level can activate subordinate concepts and their neighboring concepts in the semantic network, thereby activating the local processing style (e.g., Förster, 2009; Förster & Dannenberg, 2010). Therefore, if unconscious thought has a tendency to process information globally, then it would work better than conscious thought in processing information in the large letter condition. However, in the small-letter task, unconscious thought would not show any advantages over conscious thought. 2. Experiment 1 This experiment adopted a classic experimental paradigm of unconscious thought, except that the type of distracter task was manipulated. We introduced a local and a global Navon task as distracter tasks in the conditions involving unconscious thought in order to investigate the effect of the Navon task on unconscious thought. If unconscious thought has a tendency toward the global processing style, then, in the global Navon condition, unconscious thought will outperform conscious thought. However, in the local Navon condition, unconscious thought will not have an advantage over conscious thought. 2.1. Method 2.1.1. Participants and design A total of 66 students (24 women and 42 men) participated in this experiment and received a financial reward. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an Unconscious-Local condition (22 participants: 9 women and 13 men), an UnconsciousGlobal condition (21 participants: 9 women and 12 men), and a Conscious-Thought condition (23 participants: 6 women and 17 men). This experiment adopted a single-factor, between-subjects design. Thought type was set as the between-subjects variable and included three levels: conscious thought, unconscious-global thought, and unconscious-local thought. The dependent variable was the difference between the objective ratings of the best mobile phone and the worst mobile phone made by participants. 2.1.2. Materials and procedure The experimental materials were the same as those used by Zhou and colleagues (Zhou, Zhou, Li, & Zhang, 2015). All the participants received information about 4 mobile phones, each with 12 attributes, and were asked to form an impression of them. One phone was the best (8 positive and 4 negative attributes), another one was the worst (4 positive and 8 negative attributes), and the remaining 2 phones fell in between (6 positive and 6 negative attributes). Attributes were presented in a random order, one at a time, for 5 s each. After all the information was presented, participants were randomly allocated to one of the three conditions. In the Conscious-Thought condition, which was based on the methods described by Dijksterhuis (2004), participants were asked to think about their impression of the phones for three minutes. On the other hand, participants in the Unconscious-Local and Unconscious-Global condition were distracted for 3 min with a Navon task (Navon, 1977), in which a large character made out of small characters was presented in each trial. Each hierarchical letter was presented for 500 ms, followed by a blank screen for another 500 ms. In the Unconscious-Global condition, participants were asked to determine if the large character made of small characters was an H or L. In the Unconscious-Local condition, participants were asked to judge if the small characters making up the large character were an H or L. Finally, all the participants rated their impression of each phone (with scores ranging from 0 representing “very bad” to 100 indicating “very good”). This measurement indicated not only which phone the participants evaluated as the best, but also to what extent participants were able to differentiate between the best and worst phones (Dijksterhuis, 2004). 16
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Fig. 1. Difference between attitude toward the best object and attitude toward the worst object varied as a function of thought condition in Experiment 1. Error bars represent the average standard errors.
2.2. Results Difference scores were calculated by subtracting the attitude toward the unattractive phone from the attitude toward the attractive phone. This relative preference reflects the participants’ ability to differentiate between the best and worst phones (Dijksterhuis, 2004). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) of a single factor showed a significant effect for thought type, F(2, 65) = 4.09, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.19. As shown in Fig. 1, the participants in the Unconscious-Global condition (M = 18.57, SD = 14.53) showed significantly better decision-making than those in the Conscious-thought condition (M = 7.74, SD = 19.34), t(42) = 2.08, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.09, and Unconscious-Local conditions (M = 5.27, SD = 13.89), t(41) = 3.07, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.19. However, no significant difference was found in decision-making performance between the Unconscious-Local and Conscious-Thought conditions, t(43) = 0.49, p > 0.05. These results suggested that on a perceptual level, the local Navon task activated local processing, which impaired the global processing of information by unconscious thought; in turn, this affected the quality of decision-making. On the other hand, the global Navon task activated global processing, which did not interfere with unconscious thought processing information globally. Hence, these results suggest that unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt global processing style.
3. Experiment 2 The aim of this experiment was to further explore whether in the local Navon task, unconscious thought groups tended to adopt a global processing style. With reference to Dijksterhuis’s (2004) method, the participants were not only requested to rate the mobile phones, but were also asked to report if their rating was based on a global impression of the phone or on partial attributes. If the participants in the Unconscious-Local condition adopted a local processing style when distracted by the local Navon task, they would report that their ratings were more predominantly based on partial attributes instead of a global perspective, compared to the participants distracted by the global Navon task.
3.1. Method 3.1.1. Participants and design A total of 84 students (58 women and 26 men) participated in this experiment and received a financial reward. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an Unconscious-Local condition (17 women and 11 men), an Unconscious-Global condition (21 women and 7 men), and a Conscious-Thought condition (20 women and 8 men); there were 28 participants in each condition. This experiment adopted a single-factor, between-subjects design. Thought type was set as a between-subject variable with three different levels: conscious thought, unconscious-global thought, and unconscious-local thought. The dependent variable was decision-making performance measured as the difference between the objective ratings of the best and worst phones.
3.1.2. Procedure The procedure for Experiment 2 was almost identical to Experiment 1 except that after completion, participants answered a question related to their rating of the phones. Specifically, after evaluating the four phones, the following question was presented on screen: “When you were rating the four phones, was it based on one or a few phone attributes, or was it based on the majority of phone attributes?”. Two answers options were presented at the bottom of the screen, which were “Based on a more global impression” and “Based on partial attributes.” The participants were asked to choose by a keypress. 17
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3.2. Results The difference between the ratings of the best and the worst phone was calculated and ANOVA revealed significant differences in the decision-making performance of participants in the various thought conditions, F(2, 83) = 3.41, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.08. The difference in decision-making performance between the participants under the Unconscious-Global condition (M = 17.00, SD = 19.83) and those in the Conscious-Thought condition (M = 7.21, SD = 22.54) reached borderline significance, t(54) = 1.73, p = 0.09, η2 = 0.06; and decision-making performance was significantly better in the Unconscious-Global than in the UnconsciousLocal condition (M = 3.89, SD = 15.60), t(54) = 2.75, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.12. In contrast, There was no significant difference in decision-making performance between the Unconscious-Local condition and Conscious-Thought condition, t(54) = 0.64, p > 0.05. These results were found to be consistent with those from Experiment 1. In this experiment, we also calculated the percentage of participants in each group reporting that their evaluations were based on a global impression. A total of 54% of the participants in the Conscious-Thought condition and 71% in the Unconscious-Global condition based their evaluations on global information, while the percentage of participants that utilized global information for their evaluation only accounted for 39% in the Unconscious-Local condition group. There was a significant difference in the use of global information between the two unconscious thought conditions, χ2(1, N = 28) = 5.85, p < 0.05. Furthermore, the coefficient of the correlation between global information use and decision-making performance was 0.24 (p < 0.05). This indicated that the participants who stated that their evaluations were based on a global impression showed a higher ability to distinguish the best and the worst phones. These results showed that participants performing the local distracter task in the unconscious thought had a tendency to process information locally, whereas those performing the global Navon task in the unconscious thought tended to adopt a global processing style. 4. Experiment 3 By changing the experimental task, Experiment 3 was designed to further compare the global and local Navon tasks, and to investigate whether unconscious thought tends to process information locally when distracted by a local task. This experiment references the person-memory paradigm (Bos & Dijksterhuis, 2011), and participants were initially provided with a physical description of a target person (in this case, a senior citizen), and subsequently received numerous behavioral descriptions of the target person, including both expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information. Studies have shown that compared to expectancy-incongruent information, expectancy-congruent information can be recalled more easily (Devine, 1989; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1995). Therefore, when a local processing style is adopted, judgments will be formed based predominantly on expectancy-congruent information. Whereas when global processing is adopted, both expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information will be used. If unconscious thought tends to process information locally when distracted by a local task, participants in the Unconscious-Local condition will mainly depend on expectancy-congruent information to form their impression of the target person, while those in the Unconscious-Global condition will form their impression of the target person by integrating both expectancy-congruent and expectancy-incongruent information. 4.1. Method 4.1.1. Participants and design A total of 75 students (46 women and 29 men) participated in this experiment and received a financial reward. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an Unconscious-Local condition (25 participants: 18 women and 7 men), an UnconsciousGlobal condition (25 participants: 13 women and 12 men), and a Conscious-Thought condition (25 participants: 15 women and 10 men). This experiment included 2 variables: thought type (conscious thought, unconscious-global thought, and unconscious-local thought) and stereotype consistency (consistent and inconsistent). Thought type served as a between-subject variable and stereotype consistency was the within-subject variable. The dependent variables were the participant ratings of the attributes and their results on the memory task. 4.1.2. Material and procedure A total of 24 pieces of information describing the behavior of a senior citizen were obtained from the pretest, from which 12 were stereotype-congruent (6 about amiability and 6 about difficulty in mobility), 6 were stereotype-incongruent (3 about stupidity and 3 about impatience), and 6 were irrelevant to the stereotype of senior citizens. Participants were informed ahead of time that the experiment was based on impression formation. When the experiment officially started, participants learned that Mr. Wang was a retired senior citizen living at home, and were asked to form an impression of him. The 24 pieces of information about Mr. Wang were then randomly presented in succession to participants; the presenting time for each information piece was 5 s. Participants were randomly assigned to the three conditions after the presentation of all the information. Participants in the Conscious-Thought condition were permitted to deliberate on their impression of Mr. Wang for 6 min. Those in the Unconscious-Local and Unconscious-Global conditions were required to complete a local or global Navon task identical to that used in Experiment 1 for 6 min. At the end of the experiment, all the participants were asked to evaluate their impression of Mr. Wang by rating six dimensional attributes (with scores ranging from 0 indicating “not at all descriptive” to 100 indicating “very descriptive”), which included two 18
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Fig. 2. Scores in the impressions of Mr. Wang: Stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent attribute dimensions serving as the dependent variable of thought condition in Experiment 3 (stereotype-irrelevant dimensions were subtracted). Error bars represent the average standard errors.
stereotype-congruent attributes (amiable and with challenged mobility), two stereotype-incongruent attributes (stupid and impatient), and two attributes that were irrelevant to the stereotype of senior citizens, as baseline dimensions. This evaluation was followed by a recall task in which participants were asked to list the information previously presented on Mr. Wang in as much detail as possible on a piece of paper within 3 min. 4.2. Results Following the methodology of Bos and Dijksterhuis (2011), the score serving as the indicator of stereotype-congruence was obtained by subtracting the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-irrelevant attributes from the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-congruent attributes. Similarly, the score serving as the indicator of stereotype-incongruence was obtained by subtracting the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-irrelevant attributes from the mean of the scores for the two stereotype-incongruent attributes. Using a 3 (thought type) × 2 (stereotype congruence) ANOVA for mixed designs, a significant two-way interaction was found, F (2,72) = 7.91, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.18. As shown in Fig. 2, the ratings provided by the global-task-distracted participants (M = 29.08, SD = 25.38), the local-task-distracted participants (M = 26.96, SD = 28.25), and the conscious-thought participants (M = 23.24, SD = 26.57) were not significantly different on the stereotype-congruent attribute dimension (F < 1); however, the ratings of the global-task-distracted participants (M = 26.14, SD = 19.54) were significantly higher than those of the local-task-distracted participants (M = 2.10, SD = 29.13), t(48) = 3.43, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.20, and also higher than those of the conscious-thought participants (M = −10.10, SD = 30.70), t(48) = 4.87, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.33, on the stereotype-incongruent attribute dimension. These results showed that participants in the Unconscious-Local and Conscious-Thought conditions evaluated Mr. Wang based on stereotypecongruent information, whereas the participants in the Unconscious-Global condition used stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent attributes. Another dependent variable was defined by counting the number of stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent attributes that each participant recalled correctly and calculating their percentage over the total number of attributes (Bos & Dijksterhuis, 2011). Using a 3 (thought type) × 2 (stereotype congruence) ANOVA, a significant two-way interaction was found, F(2,72) = 1.84, p = 0.07, η2 = 0.05. However, as shown in Fig. 3, on the stereotype-congruent attribute dimension, the recall task scores of the global-task-distracted participants (M = 0.33, SD = 0.13), the local-task-distracted participants (M = 0.31, SD = 0.12), and the conscious-thought participants (M = 0.32, SD = 0.13) were not different (ts < 1). In contrast, on the stereotype-incongruent
Fig. 3. Scores in the recall task: Stereotype-congruent and stereotype-incongruent information (percentage of presented information) serving as the dependent variable of thought condition in Experiment 3. Error bars represent the average standard errors.
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attribute dimension, the recall scores of the global-task-distracted participants (M = 0.33, SD = 0.17) were significantly higher than those of the local-task-distracted participants (M = 0.22, SD = 0.15), t(48) = 2.53, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.12, and higher than those of the conscious-thought participants (M = 0.21, SD = 0.17), t(48) = 2.52, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.12. Both the evaluation ratings of the impression of Mr. Wang and the recall task results illustrated that participants in the Unconscious-Local and Conscious-Thought conditions relied on stereotypes and were prone to local processing style, while those in the Unconscious-Global condition were relatively less reliant on stereotypes and more prone to global processing style. Thus, the results from this experiment supported the idea that unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt a global processing style. 5. General discussion The results of this study suggest that when unconscious thought processes information, it uses global or local processing according to the type of Navon task. The findings of the three experiments suggest that local processing can impair unconscious thought processing information globally, but no interference occurs if global processing style is activated. These results support the findings on the tendency of unconscious thought to adopt a global processing style in order to process information. Of critical importance is that our findings reflect the principles pertaining to unconscious thought, rather than some uncontrolled factors which are irrelevant to unconscious thought. An alternative explanation is that the low performance in the unconscious-local condition was due to the difference of task difficulty, that is, the local task was easier than the global task, thus the residual attention could engage in the thought processes, enabling the participants to think more consciously. However, the Navon task performance data in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 did not support this explanation. In Experiment 1, there was no significant difference between the error rates of the global (M = 0.10, SD = 0.08) and local (M = 0.09, SD = 0.07) Navon task, t(41) = 0.54, p = 0.60. In Experiment 2, there was also no significant difference between the error rates of the global (M = 0.09, SD = 0.08) and local (M = 0.11, SD = 0.07) Navon task, t(54) = 1.04, p = 0.30. Similarly, in Experiment 3, there was no significant difference between the error rates of the global (M = 0.07, SD = 0.06) and local (M = 0.07, SD = 0.07) Navon task, t(48) = 0.16, p = 0.87. In addition, participants responded more slowly to the local characters (608 ms in Experiment 1, 591 ms in Experiment 2 and 544 ms in Experiment 3) than the global characters (518 ms in Experiment 1, 514 ms in Experiment 2 and 481 ms in Experiment 3), ts < 4.08, ps < 0.01, η2 < 0.26, indicating that the local task was harder than the global task. Another interpretation of the experimental results is that the local distracter task was more difficult than the global distracter task, which reduced the cognitive resources available for unconscious thought in the local distracter condition. This would have caused the participants to perform more poorly compared to the Unconscious-Global group. McMahon and colleagues examined the impact of task difficulty on unconscious thought processing using listening to music as a distracter task (McMahon et al., 2011). Under the easy condition, the participants were only required to listen to music, while participants in the difficult condition had to listen to music and write down lyrics ending in “T”. Their experimental results showed that among participants engaged in unconscious thought, those in the easy condition performed better than those in the difficult condition. However, the difference between the two groups did not reach statistical significance. More importantly, a recent research conducted by Srinivasan and colleagues revealed that distraction tasks on the perception level, global or local, impacted on the information integration by unconscious thought, whereas the difficulty level of these tasks was irrelevant to such integration process (Srinivasan, Mukherjee, Mishra, & Kesarwani, 2013). However, the study found that attentional scope could have an impact on unconscious thought processing; specifically, that a broader attentional scope was more beneficial to unconscious thought. Their results support our view that unconscious thought has a greater tendency toward global processing. Finally, the results of Experiment 3 indicated that participants in the Unconscious-Local group performed their evaluations based predominantly on stereotype-congruent information, whereas participants in the Unconscious-Global group used both stereotypecongruent and -incongruent information. This result cannot be fully explained by claiming that the Unconscious-Global group had more cognitive resources available than the Unconscious-Local group. Taken together, our results cannot be explained by task difficulty. However, future studies will be needed, involving distracter tasks of the same difficulty in the activation of global or local processing styles, in order to eliminate the influence of distracter task difficulty on the experimental results. This study also extended current research on the processing style of unconscious thought. UTT states that unconscious and conscious thought are two relatively independent processes, showing different characteristics in terms of the principles of capacity, weighting, rules, and convergence and divergence; and they are applicable under difference circumstances (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006). This study found that unconscious thought processes information based on a global impression, adopting a global processing style. These findings support the UTT and help to deepen our understanding of the information processing mechanism of unconscious thought. The current study further provided the new evidence that unconscious thought can be significantly impacted by the simultaneous conscious processes (McMahon et al., 2011). To our knowledge, unconscious thought has appeared to be immune to what we do consciously in previous research. A recent meta-analysis, however, indicated that the distracter task tends to significantly impact on the processing of unconscious thought (Strick et al., 2011). The current study furthered the analysis by demonstrating that unconscious thought is influenced by the simultaneous conscious processes, even a low-level perceptual task which is irrelevant to the main task. This finding suggests a two-way interaction between conscious processes and unconscious processes during thinking, not only unconscious thought can affect the conscious decision, but also conscious task can affect the unconscious thought. How they affect each other is a very intriguing question which is worth further investigation. This study also provided new evidence supporting unconscious thought as an off-line judgment. Lassiter and colleagues argued that unconscious thought formed an on-line judgment when participants were presented information (Lassiter, Lindberg, GonzálezVallejo, Bellezza, & Phillips, 2009). If this argument is valid, an on-line judgment is formed once information is presented, and 20
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changes from a distracter task should not affect the results of this on-line judgment. This study, however, found that when compared to the local Navon task, the global Navon task was more conducive for unconscious thought to process information. This result strongly refuted the argument of unconscious thought as on-line judgment; instead, the study supports the idea that information will continue to be processed on an unconscious level after the presentation of information. Future studies need to use different distracter tasks activating global or local processing to test the findings of this study. We adopted the Navon task as a distracter task. However, research on global and local processing styles has shown that color, mood, approach/avoidance, and power could trigger global or local processing style in individuals (e.g., Friedman & Förster, 2002; Mehta & Zhu, 2009; Moskowitz & Ignarri, 2009; Smith & Trope, 2006). Further studies are recommended to set up the abovementioned variables as distracter tasks to further test the findings of this study. For example, the color green may initiate global processing style, whereas local processing style could be activated by the color red. Distracter tasks could use the classic unconscious thought paradigm (the two-back task) and the background of the task could be changed to either red or green. Based on this study’s findings, when compared to the two-back task with a green background, the red background would impair unconscious thought in processing information. In conclusion, unconscious thought has a tendency to adopt a global processing style in order to process information. Conscious thought in the local Navon task activates local processing, which impairs unconscious thought in processing information. On the other hand, in the global Navon task, information-processing is not affected. 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