Abstract
Many?studies?have?shown that unconscious thought can improve the effectiveness of decision making than conscious thought. To combine with unconscious thought theory and research paradigms, the present study tries to explore the effect of unconscious thought on decision-making in sport, especially focus on the weight of information available for decisions. Video clips from basketball competitions were edited to produce the decision-making tasks, which were divided into analytical and intuitive decision-making situations. Participants were 81 basketball players from one sport university.
Experiment 1 tries to examine the effect of unconscious thought on sport decision under two kinds of information available conditions. The research adopts 2 (mode of thought: conscious vs. unconscious thought) ×2 (type of information: intuitive vs analytical decision-making information) mixed-design. Thirty-six basketball players were equally assigned into two groups: conscious thought group (thinking carefully for 2 minutes) and unconscious thought group (performing 0-back distraction task for 2 minutes). Repeated measurement analysis of variance indicates that the interaction between mode of thought and type of decision information in basketball decision making is significant, F(1, 34) = 13.01, p < .05, η2 = .28. Participants from unconscious thought group performed better (2.33.97) than those from conscious thought group (1.33.84, p < .05) 撕破如同exists in decision-making performance between unconscious thought group (3.06.99) and conscious thought group (3.441.09, p > .05) when analytical decision-making information was available. The results of experiment 1 generally show that the effect of unconscious thought on sport decision exists when intuitive decision-making information is available, but the accuracy of decision-making is nearly at a random level (7*1/3=2.31) and the reason might be that the processing of intuitive decision information is more difficult and has to occupy more cognitive resources so as to restrict the performance in decisions. The previous studies have indicated that the information processing in decision-making is inclined to be holistic and it can be inferred that the holistic processing intention was elicited before participants think unconsciously, the cognitive load would be reduced so as to improve the performance of decision-making. Experiment 2 adopt one factor (processing style: global, local vs control conditions) between-subject design to investigate the influence of processing style on the effect of unconscious thought in decision making. Global Navon task, Local Navon task and 0-back task were designed as distraction tasks and the basketball decision-making performance under intuitive information condition was examined. Fifty-five participants were assigned into three groups. The results from one factor analysis of variance indicate that the main effect of the processing style is significant, F(2, 44) = 18.55, p < .001, η2 = .47. The decision-making performance under unconscious thought condition coupled with global processing style (3.53.96) is better than that coupled with local processing style (1.47.99, p < .001) and in control condition (2.07.96, p < .001). But no significant difference exists in decision-making performance between participants who thought unconsciously in control condition (2.07.96) or coupled with local processing style (1.47.99, p > .005).
Conclusions are drawn as the followings: the effect of unconscious thought on sport decision-making is modulated by processing style when intuitive decision-making information is available and the global processing style can improve the decision-making performance under unconscious thought conditions.
Key words
unconscious thought, conscious thought, sport decision-making, processing style
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The Research of Unconscious Thought in Sport Decision-making[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2017, 40(2): 329-334
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