News U Can Use

Imagine you've just paid an expert good money for their verdict and they say
to you: "Can you hang on a couple of minutes whilst I don't think about
this". You'd be forgiven for thinking they've gone silly. They may have. But
another possibility is that you've chosen a shrewd expert who's totally
up-to-speed with the latest decision-making research, says the British Psychological Society's blog

Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues have just shown that people with expertise in football are
better at predicting match outcomes when they spend time not consciously thinking about their predictions.

In an initial experiment, 352 Dutch undergrads were divided into football
experts and non-experts, based on their self-ratings, and they were all
asked to make predictions (home or away win, or draw) about four forthcoming
football matches in the top Dutch league - the Eredivisie. The students were
shown the four pairs of competing teams for twenty seconds, and then one
third of them were asked to make immediate predictions; one third were asked
to think consciously for two minutes before making their predictions; and a
final third engaged in a distracting, numerical memory task for two minutes
before making their predictions.

For the non-experts, it didn't make any difference to their success whether
or not they were able to spend time considering their predictions - they
were correct between forty and fifty per cent of the time regardless. By
contrast, the experts' predictions were significantly more accurate when
they were distracted for two minutes, compared with when they made an
instant or a considered prediction (approx 60 vs. 50 per cent accuracy). In
other words, the experts were most accurate when they spent time not
thinking consciously about the problem at hand.

This may seem bizarre but it's entirely consistent with Dijksterhuis's
Unconscious Thought Theory and with the folk wisdom that says it's a good
idea to sleep on a problem. According to Dijksterhuis's theory, the
subconscious is sometimes less prone to the biases that afflict the
conscious mind, thus ensuring that an expert gives due weight to the most
important factors.

This was borne out in a second experiment, much like the first, in which
students predicted the outcomes of World Cup football matches. Again,
distracted experts made the most accurate predictions. This time, however,
the researchers also asked participants to estimate the teams' world
rankings - apparently this is the most reliable predictor for the outcomes
of World Cup matches. For experts who spent time consciously considering
their match predictions, there was no correlation between their knowledge of
team rankings and their prediction accuracy. By contrast, for the experts
who spent time not thinking about their predictions, there was a correlation
between their ranking knowledge and predictive accuracy. Not consciously
thinking about the problem at hand seemed to ensure that experts paid due
attention to the most important factor affecting match outcomes.

The researchers warned that subconscious thought is not always superior to
conscious thought. But they concluded: "Our results mean that unconscious
thought may well be helpful in more situations than some people currently
think."
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