8 drivers of consciousness in decision-making (vs. ChatGPT’s 6)

8 drivers of consciousness in decision-making (vs. ChatGPT’s 6)

Jeff Goldstein Jeff Goldstein

Jeff Goldstein

President, ACUPOLL Research; Global Board, P&G Alumni Network

发布日期: 2023年5月26日
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As humans we are often emotional, fueled by non-conscious impulses and automatic behavior.

However, as our previous article demonstrated, the oft-used claim that "95% of decisions are non-conscious" is not supportable with data, overstates the level, ignores context, and is generally misleading.

So we challenged ChatGPT to explain what factors it found determines when rational/conscious thinking takes more of a leading role in decisions, and compared it to our research.

The AI identified 6 – but ACUPOLL uncovered 2 additional factors that influence when the non-conscious plays a smaller role.

Here are our key conclusions ... based on 2018 ACUPOLL research and ChatGPT AI (full dialogue excerpt shown below).

Both non-conscious ”System 1” impulse/emotion and “System 2” rational/conscious thought play a critical role in decision-making

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ChatGPT identified 6 scenarios when we tend to rely more on rational System 2 thinking:

  • When decisions are more complex and we need to analyze/apply reason
  • When we’re less familiar with a situation or decision and can’t act on auto-pilot (e.g. habit) or intuition
  • When we’re less time-pressured and stakes are high (which allows System 2 conscious thought opportunity and motive to engage)
  • When emotions are more moderate (or, we’d add, in categories that are inherently more logical, like choosing a product for specific symptoms or a food based on ingredient/nutritional facts, not image-driven categories like fashion or fine fragrance)
  • When decisions involve personal goals or values, which cause our conscious mind to input more into decisions
  • When cognitive load is low and you have mental energy available to think through options

ACUPOLL previously identified two additional factors that determine when conscious/thoughtful decisions occur more often:

  • When we’re deciding by ourselves and not in a social context where we feel judged (e.g. when people are drinking alcohol with others, System 1 emotions increase their influence on brand choices)
  • When situational context favors System 2 (e.g. no distractions, no pressure from salespeople or promotional nudges, a manageable number of choices, easy comparisons, a thoughtful/browsing shopping experience rather than a grab-and-go trip, etc.)

Below is the more detailed dialogue – let me know your thoughts!

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Pete Foley

Founder at Pete Foley Innovation

1 年

Jeff, I'd not focus on 95% as a precise number. That came from Zaltman in 2003, but far more important than?the number is the insight that implicit processes influence far more of consumer behavior than we realized at that time.?We’ve all become more aware of that over the last 20 years.?But even now, it’s still easy underestimate the impact of unconscious effects on consumer behavior. Many cognitive biases/ emotions have gained mainstream awareness, but others such as embodied cognition, visual search, memory retrieval cues, multi-sensory,background emotional state, implicit decision simplification, priming, etc, can still be overlooked. We still struggle to introspect them or predict their influence. Variation within and between individuals creates noise, and in real world situations multiple biases often compete with one another making them hard and expensive to measure. Add to that our bias for quantitative numbers when making difficult decisions, and I suspect we likely still overweight explicit vs. implicit drivers in many cases.?As you say, context matters.?Some decisions are maybe 50:50, others almost pure habit.?Knowing a precise number is probably impossible, making 95% irrelevant,but knowing it's important is critical??

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