If you want to better understand customer behavior, you not only need to look at the overt reactions of people what they think they like, but also take into account implicit feelings and judgments. But why is it the case that subconscious mechanisms affect our decisions? We can certainly make better judgments if we think more about our choices consciously and not let our gut feelings take over. I'm going to look at how we use subconscious 'thinking' in this blog post to make choices and whether this is actually a successful technique.
It is also believed that when there is a lot at stake, when we purchase expensive goods, choose a place to live or buy a car, we base our choices primarily on conscious thinking. In comparison, subconscious reasoning is often the key driver of our decisions when searching for cheaper or less important items (we will usually choose an item out of a selection of rivals within seconds, without actively weighing up all of their pros and cons, but rather trusting our intuition). When you think about subconscious thought as quick and relatively simple, and conscious thought as a sluggish, more effortful mechanism that can be used to circumvent the subconscious and more carefully analyze various aspects, this theory definitely makes sense. But does implicit decision-making have more to do than is instantly obvious?
Your friends and family will advise you to spend a fair amount of time considering multiple choices, sleeping on the decision, writing down benefits and drawbacks, and debating them with others if you make an important decision (e.g. buying a house). But research has shown that it might not always be the safest choice to only trust your conscious thoughts.
We assume that thinking hard and explaining choices can contribute to better results, but this is not always the case. An experiment was carried out to assess whether individuals would be happier with random or justified choices. For this, after the experiment , participants were given the choice between several posters that they were allowed to carry. Half of the participants only had to select a poster and take it home, while the other half were asked to write down the reasons why the poster was chosen.
Both were told that the experimenter would not know which poster they chose, so that their choices would not make them feel judged. When asked a few months later about their choices, the spontaneous group not only chose different posters than the deliberation group (posters that were 'only beautiful' instead of those with motivational slogans, etc.), they were also far more pleased with the choice they created. But one might argue that it is not a particularly important decision to choose a poster, and that we can trust our subconscious to make this choice, of course. The following example, however, will explain that when making more critical decisions, we can use our gut feelings as well.
A series of experiments was carried out at the University of Amsterdam to evaluate whether we make better decisions using conscious or sub-conscious decision-making processes, looking at selecting apartments or possible roommates.
For this, 12 pieces of information were shown to participants about each potential apartment (e.g. size, location) or roommate (e.g. tidy, fun). The manner in which the data was presented ensured that a hypothetical 'best option' was always available (one apartment was better than the others). They were either asked to select their favorite immediately (control condition) after showing participants the details, were given 3 minutes to think about their decision and then chose (conscious thought) or were distracted for 3 minutes by a difficult task and then asked to decide (this discouraged conscious thinking and was therefore seen as the subconscious decision). It turned out that the subconscious community made the best decisions by looking at the choices they made (subjectively, as well as when variables of individual significance were taken into account, such as when someone said that location was more important than height, etc.).
We neglect one important aspect of these various ways of 'thinking' when we think of conscious and subconscious thinking as merely slow vs. quick or effortful vs. effortless: the amount of knowledge that can be processed. Consciousness can handle only a comparatively small amount of information at once, while the subconscious 's processing ability is much greater. Therefore, conscious thinking will lead to better outcomes than the subconscious when we have to make a decision and take just a few details into account, while the subconscious tends to be better at creating overall perceptions. Aware deliberation runs the risk of taking into consideration not all of the details because there are several variables to consider, but of basing the decision on only a few of the facts. Therefore, it can always be easier to listen to your gut instincts even when making complex, significant decisions.
And one of the pieces of advice given to you earlier by your friends and family is actually based on this idea: sleep on your decision. Sometimes, it will help to draw a conclusion by being distracted for a moment, and writers, authors and anyone else who needs to use their imagination will know that incubation (stepping away from a problem) will help greatly to come up with good solutions.
Overall, it can be said that not only easy, unimportant decisions are best taken using the subconscious, but that our subconscious is highly affected by even difficult and important decisions, such as choosing a home, since it provides a more global impression. This is why it is not only important to test subconscious, implicit and automatic experiences when trying to predict the popularity of cheap products such as fast-moving consumer goods, but also to provide a lot of insight into more expensive products (and related brands, advertising strategies and design).
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I am not a client or a seller. But I think this article is so helpful for them. Who working in this kind of thing.