Driven to Distraction: The Impact of Distracter Type on Unconscious Decision Making

Abstract

While there is a variety of wonderful ways to take a break from work, is there a type of distraction that is actually more productive? Studies on the deliberation-without-attention effect (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & Van Baaren, 2006) show that a period of distraction while making complex decisions can actually lead to better decisions than a period of conscious deliberation. Although there are a number of activities that will distract participants from decision-making tasks, we investigated if certain types of distracter tasks are better for demonstrating the deliberation-without-attention effect. Since most people realistically take a break with undemanding forms of activity, we hypothesized that undemanding distracter tasks will yield the best results. In Experiment 1, participants were given a choice between four different cars but before they made their decision they instructed (1) to think consciously about the choices, (2) listen to their own music with a portable digital music player, (3) solve an anagram puzzle, (4) solve a word search puzzle, or (5) just make a decision immediately. In Experiment 2, participants were given a choice among four different applicants for a hypothetical graduate school program and were instructed (1) to think consciously about the applicants, (2) to engage in a listening task with music, or (3) to just listen to the music. As predicted, the participants who were distracted with the easier tasks (listening to music and word search puzzles) made the best decision significantly more often than conscious thinkers and even outperformed participants distracted with more difficult tasks.

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