HT, Patna 12/8/2008
Snap decisions ‘are not a good idea’
IF YOU think that trusting your instincts may help you make better decisions, think again, for a new study has revealed that snap decisions are likely to be worse than ones based on clear thinking.
Previous studies have claimed that making subconscious snap decisions is actually more reliable in certain situations than using rational thought processes. Now a team at New South Wales University has come to the opposite conclusion.
In the study, participants were given the choice of making decisions based on snap or conscious deliberations – the researchers found that it’s the conscious deliberation that resulted in the best choice, even in complex situations.
Lead researcher Ben Newell said that there’s a belief that unconscious thought involved in a snap decision could be better at making choices than those based on conscious effort, but this did not appear to be the case.
"Claims that we make superior ‘snap’ decisions by trusting intuition or through the power of unconscious thought have received a great deal of attention in the media. At best these sort of headlines are misleading. At worst, they are outright dangerous.
"We found little evidence of the superiority of unconscious thought for complex decisions. Our study suggests that unconscious thought is more susceptible to irrelevant factors, such as how recently information has been seen rather than how important it is," he was quoted by "The Independent’ as saying.
The study has been published in the ‘Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology’.
