Is thinking over-rated?
A friend who knows our interest in all things related to decision making sent me a link to an article called: Blinded By Science: What Were We Thinking?
Cleverly written and worth a look . . . but it won’t change your mind about the power and value of your intellect. Here’ s a snip that lays out the argument . . .
I’ll spare you as many of the details as I can, but what appears to have happened is that said researchers assembled a crowd of typical Dutch shoppers, sending home, one would imagine, the ones whose shoulder-slung panpipes and Caucasian dreadlocks marked them as liable to freak out in a laboratory setting and put them through a series of tests to see how they make buying decisions. In one test, the volunteers were split into two groups and asked to choose among four cars. One group was given much more elaborate descriptions of the cars than the other group. Then half of the members of each group spent four minutes in a quiet room, carefully considering their choices. The rest were forced to spend four minutes doing anagram puzzles, in Dutch—which can’t be much of a picnic even if you speak Dutch—to distract their conscious minds.
After the test subjects were dismissed and the research team crunched all the numbers, a startling truth emerged: “Conscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among simple products, whereas unconscious thinkers were better able to make the best choice among complex products.”
Thinking, in other words, the mysterious art that made superstars out of nobodies like Ludwig Wittgenstein, Garry Kasparov, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, can safely be engaged in only when one is shopping for a new umbrella. Unless you’re prepared to end up owning a car that a chimpanzee would be embarrassed to drive around the ring of a failing circus, you’re better off leaving vehicle buying, along with the rest of life’s more involved decisions, to the unconscious, that vast, silent Siberia of gray matter that until the very last year of the 19th century nobody even knew existed. [emphasis added]
Like I said, not likely to change your mind about your mind. If you’re a gut instinct type (there are more technical names for decision preferences), you’ll nod vigorously. If you’re an INTJ, you’ve already stopped reading because you know it’s hogwash.
Technorati Tags: Decision Making, MBTI, Thinking