Are you for Obama or McCain in the U.S. presidential election? If you call yourself undecided, you may be fooling yourself. A study of decision-making suggests that your mind may be made up long before you think it is.
When deciding between choices, people usually feel as if they're completely in control. They evaluate the criteria and weigh the available information before committing. And when that information doesn't seem to tip the balance, they report that they are undecided. But psychologists know that decision-making is strongly affected by the unconscious mind. Might the unconscious mind of an undecided person already know what it will choose?
To find out, a team led by Silvia Galdi, a social psychologist at the University of Padova, Italy, asked 129 residents of Vicenza, Italy, about their attitude toward a controversial enlargement of a nearby U.S. military base. Most of the people already had a position for or against it, but 33 said they were undecided. To gauge the conscious basis of their decisions, the subjects answered a series of questions relevant to the issue, such as the environmental, economic, and political consequences of the base enlargement. For the unconscious analysis, the researchers had the volunteers watch images of the base and then rapidly choose from lists of positive or negative words. The same tests were repeated a week later.
The results show that automatic associations can predict decisions. In the week between the two tests, 30 of the 33 undecided made up their minds about the base. Even though they had claimed to be undecided at the start of the study, the researchers could guess their ultimate decisions with about 70% accuracy on the basis of the words they had associated with the images, they report tomorrow in Science.
The study shows that "your mind may decide before you know that it did," says Brian Nosek, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. The mechanism behind the association remains unclear, however. "Is this occurring because people really do not know their position," says Nosek, "or do they have a gut feeling that they are aware of but not willing to report yet as their position?"
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