关键词: 无意识思维, 有意识思维, 决策, 创造性

Abstract: It is traditionally considered that as human higher mental processes, thought belongs to conscious category. When confronted with a complex decision, people are accustomed to solving problems with deliberation. Nevertheless, a growing number of research have suggested the opposite: it is quite likely that applying unconscious thought leads to a better decision than conscious thought, breaking the traditional opinion “where there is conscious thought, there is a good result”. Unconscious thought refers to object-relevant or task-relevant cognitive or affective thought processes that occur while conscious attention is directed elsewhere. Then the Unconscious Thought Theory was put forward on this basis. The Unconscious Thought Theory suggests that unconscious thought and conscious thought have different characteristics, and these different characteristics make each mode preferable under different circumstances. Specifically, there are six different processing characteristics between them, including capacity, weighting, rules, bottom-up versus top-down and convergence versus divergence process and so on. Subsequently, it was detected that unconscious thought was preferable to conscious thought in the perspective of decision-making tasks, but also in attitude formation and change, creatively solving problems, moral judgment, prediction of football competition and discovery of complex rules and so on. However, a few researchers had failed to replicate the beneficial effect of unconscious thought, and provided alternative explanations. Some opponents admitted the existence of unconscious thought, but they thought the main reason for unconscious thought effects was that conscious thought was limited in the previous studies. They did not support the view that unconscious thought was better at solving complex problems than conscious thought. What’s more, some researchers completely denied that there was unconscious thought. They pointed out that unconscious thought actually belonged to a kind of conscious thought on the basis of on-line judgment. According to the views above mentioned, researchers who considered that unconscious thought actually existed, turned to looked for some mediation variables of influencing unconscious thought effect. That is to say, only with the variables, unconscious thought could show more advantage effects than conscious thought. Some studies found that the variables such as thinking time, the difficulty of distraction task, mindset and the difficulty of decision-making tasks could influence the unconscious thought effects; some researchers further discovered that unconscious thought was goal-directed. It might lead to the changes in memory presentation, and the unconscious thought existed in the neural mechanism which differed from that of conscious thought. In a word, the key of current studies has transformed from debating whether unconscious thought existed or whether unconscious thought owned more advantages than conscious thought to exploring the processing mechanism of unconscious thought. However, as a new research field, there are a large mount of important problems remain to be further explored. In addition, the current future research in this field should pay more attention on these aspects. First of all, it is necessary to shed more light on how to improve unconscious thought paradigm and looking for more mediators influencing on unconscious thought effect; secondly, how unconscious thought works and when and how the unconscious transfers its information to consciousness; thirdly, the styles of unconscious thought processing information should be explored in future studies; finally, researchers ought to study the application of unconscious thought under the real and risky task situation as well.

Key words: unconscious thought, conscious thought, decision making, creativity