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“Wait! Just Let Me Not Think About That for a Minute”

2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0963721414551958

1467-8721

Ben R. Newell,

Child and Animal Learning Development

The belief that in certain situations we are better off not thinking has anecdotal resonance and appeals to our tendency to follow a “law of least effort.” But is it good advice? In this review, I examine recent work from two domains of higher-level cognition—perceptual category learning and decision making—in which similar claims have been made about the benefits of disengaging explicit thought to allow for the operation of superior implicit processes. A reevaluation of this literature suggests a less appealing but perhaps also less surprising conclusion: Complex tasks appear to require explicit thought, and there is little reason to think that not thinking is optimal in these situations. Far from offering a negative conclusion, this perspective emphasizes not only the powers of human cognition but also our ability to explain our behavior without recourse to the “black box” of the unconscious.