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People can consciously think about only a few things at a\ntime. But what determines the kind of things that come to\nmind, among a potentially infinite set of possibilities? Two\nexperiments explored whether the things that come to mind\nare sampled from a probability distribution that combines\nwhat people think is statistically likely and what they think is\nprescriptively good. Experiment 1 found that when people are\nasked about the first quantities that come to mind for\neveryday behaviors and events (e.g., hours of TV that a\nperson could watch in a day), they think of values that are\nproportional to, and intermediate between, what they think is\naverage and what they think is ideal. Experiment 2\nquantitatively manipulated distributions of times people\ndevoted to engaging in a novel hobby (“flubbing”) and the\ncorresponding distributions of goodness of doing this hobby\nfor various amounts of time. The distribution of values that\ncame to mind resembled the mathematical product of the\nstatistical and prescriptive distributions we presented\nparticipants, suggesting that something must be both common\nand good to enter conscious awareness. These results provide\ninsight into the algorithmic process generating people’s\nconscious thoughts and invite new questions about the\nadaptive value of thinking about things that are both common\nand good.
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