Under the influence and unaware: Unconscious processing during encoding, retrieval, and weighting in judgment

Given the sheer number of decisions people make and the extensive time spent making them, self-help authors have offered suggestions for improving the judgment process. This chapter offers a review of recent research documenting the unconscious processes involved in judgment. It catalogs unconscious influences on three key aspects of information processing: encoding, retrieval, and weighting of information. The chapter delineates what aspects of the decision making process can occur unconsciously. Emerging evidence questions how replicable some of the field’s most prominent findings are, and the file-drawer problem persists within the study of unconscious decision making. Additionally, experimenters may unknowingly, and perhaps unconsciously, influence the behavior they intend to study. The chapter ends with a discussion of recent controversy and reviews ways in which the study of unconscious decision making can advance through this critical stage of its development.