Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis

What Other Points of View Exist
A recent best-selling book advances the comfortable idea that
conscious reasoning may not confer advantage to the reasoner. 204
Recent research suggests that whereas simple choices may benefit
from conscious thought, complex issues are best left to unconscious
thought, or “deliberation-without-attention.” 205
The explanation
of this finding is that in conscious thinking, people face a severe
limit on the number of factors that they can effectively consider
simultaneously and, second, that in conscious thought people “inflate
the importance of some attributes at the expense of others.” 206
The
authors base this finding on four experiments with subjects who were
asked to indicate their preference for various consumer items. The
experiments involved differing levels of complexity in terms of factors
to be taken into consideration. They ultimately suggest that:
[there] is no a priori reason to assume that the deliberationwithout-attention
effect does not generalize to other types of
choices – political, managerial or otherwise. In such cases,
it should benefit the individual to think consciously about
simple matters and to delegate thinking about more complex
matters to the unconscious. 207
It appears true that the human capacity to weigh evidence
consciously is limited to approximately seven factors. 208
But this seven-
204 Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New
York, NY: Little Brown and Company, 2005). Gladwell argues that thinking does
not require detailed assessment of information. Instead, rapid cognitive responses
are adequate for decisionmaking.
205 Ap Dijksterhuis, Martin W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren, and Rick B. von
Baren, “On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention
Effect,” Science 311, no. 5763 (17 February 2006), 1005. Cited hereafter as
Dijksterhuis, “Deliberation-Without-Attention.”
206 Dijksterhuis, “Deliberation-Without-Attention,” 1005.
207 Dijksterhuis, “Deliberation-Without-Attention,” 1005.
208 George A. Miller. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,”
The Psychological Review 63 (1956), 87. The paper is available online: URL: <
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/>, last accessed 14 March 2006.
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