Unconscious Thought Theory and Its Discontents: A Critique of the Critiques

A review of Unconscious Thought Theory, its original empirical support, and the several methodological and empirical critiques that followed leads to the following conclusions: (1) the basic tenants of Unconscious Thought Theory are in harmony with recent research and theory on unconscious processes if not with the dated, “straw-man” version of the unconscious presented by its critics; (2) the several published “failures to replicate” are actually, on closer inspection, found to be a series of consistent replications of at least the equivalent quality of unconsciously made versus consciously made decisions; (3) the most recent research is showing superiority of unconsciously made decisions in more ecologically valid “real-life” judgmental situations (e.g., fairness assessments and cheater detection) for which natural selection has likely equipped us with unconsciously operating expertise, compared to the artificial situations studied by the decision theorists (which often involve numerical computations); and 4) going forward, all researchers should be open-minded about the potential contributions of both unconscious and conscious processes in complex decision making.