Selection of Decision Strategies After Conscious and Unconscious Thought

It is commonly assumed that the use of simple, non-compensatory strategies is especially pronounced in memory-based decisions, where information costs are high. At the same time, there is evidence that in memory-based decisions, a compensatory processing of attributes is facilitated when the processing occurs unconsciously rather than consciously. We applied a strategy classification approach—developed in research on non-compensatory heuristics—to test two key tenets of unconscious thought theory: the capacity principle and the weighting principle. Participants memorized attribute information about cars and were subsequently either directed to or diverted from thinking consciously about their preferences between the cars (conscious versus unconscious thought). Then, participants indicated in pair-wise choices which car they would prefer and were classified (based on their choices) as using either one of two compensatory strategies (equal weight or weighted additive) or a non-compensatory strategy (lexicographic heuristic). In line with the capacity principle, the number of participants best described by a compensatory strategy (the equal-weight strategy) tended to be higher after unconscious thought than after conscious thought, whereas the number of participants best described by the lexicographic heuristic tended to be lower. Inconsistent with the weighting principle, participants in the unconscious thought condition were better described by the equal-weight strategy than by the weighted-additive strategy. In Experiment 2, in which participants were not instructed to form an impression while learning the attribute information, the use of the equal-weight strategy was not more prevalent after unconscious thought. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.