When you have an important decision to make, such as buying a car or a house, it’s best to do something else first or simply sleep on it and forget about it, allowing your unconscious mind to participate in the decision. A new study suggests that complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind. Scientists say that if you’re faced with a big decision, such as buying a car or a house, it’s important to gather information about it. But once enough information has been gathered, it’s best to put the matter out of your mind for a while and let your unconscious mind deal with the various possible choices, so that the decision made, compared with the same decision made mainly by conscious thought, will make you more satisfied. The results of a novel study published in the latest issue of the journal Science point out that “unconscious thinking (unconscious deliberation)” than just conscious thinking can make you more satisfied with the decision, at least in making important decisions is so. The report points out that conscious deliberation is very beneficial when making less important daily decisions, such as which brand of shampoo or towels to buy; but when making more important decisions, conscious deliberation alone is not enough. Four researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands say they have demonstrated the value of the hypothesis known as “inattentive thinking” in a series of studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory and among shoppers in department stores. Observing people in the lab and at the mall buying items such as cars, furniture, shampoo, oven gloves, etc., they studied how people make simple or complex decisions. For example, in conducting an experiment about buying a car, participants read some information about the car they were going to buy, a complex list of facts, and later they were asked to guess some riddles, which was done to keep them in a state of unconscious thought. After answering these riddles, this group made more satisfying decisions than those who did not answer the riddles and just consciously considered the car information. But when it comes to making simple decisions, such as choosing different types of towels, conscious thought is necessary to make a satisfactory choice. Why does deep thinking sometimes instead lead to less satisfying verdicts? According to the researchers, there are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that consciousness can be “low-functioning,” causing individuals to consider only relevant information and to unduly exaggerate the importance of that information. In such conscious thinking, the authors say, people consider only a subset of the information in question and may inappropriately value these parts of the information. In contrast, the human subconscious has a greater ability to integrate more information, allowing people to make better choices and thus bringing about more satisfying results when making complex decisions. The first author of this report, Dr. Dexter Hawes, said: “When you have to make a decision, the first step is to bring home all the information needed to make that decision, and once you have that information, you will have a decision, which is best for simple things conscious decision, but if the decision is complex, you are better off to combine interesting thinking with unconscious thinking together and leave it for the next day to make a decision.”