The Amazing Unconscious Mind

In my first book, Consumer.ology, I investigated the importance of the unconscious mind in consumer behaviour. There is now a wealth of evidence that shows how it is the unconscious mind that can be significant in shaping how consumers behave, and indeed, whether they buy or not.

A lot of consumer behaviour is habitual; we quickly pass the processes that we've learned into our unconscious mind and let it take control of much of what we do.

This is certainly a much more efficient way of existing (and this, I suspect, explains why we've evolved this way).

Consider a supermarket shop. Imagine not knowing any of the brands, where anything was, or how to make good decisions about what's good value for money and what isn't: it would take hours to shop for your weekly groceries.

Instead we have lots of short cuts. We "know" that bulk buying is usually cheaper, so we often grab the big pack without checking the price if we were to buy several of the smaller size.

We have favourite brands so we can reach for them without having to appraise all the products each time and so we can make an 'informed' choice if we find a familiar brand in an unfamiliar category.

And we learn to match our product needs to the layout of the store so that we find ourselves looking for the right products at the right moment, rather than having to go backwards and forwards too often.

Of course, any of these aspects can go wrong. We may, for instance, realise that we've got too far into our shop without getting the cheese we like and have to retrace our steps.

This realisation could happen in one of two ways; we may do a quick, conscious check-list and run it against the parts of the store we know we've passed. Or more likely, we will 'just realise' that we haven't got that cheese.

Researchers have recently shown that, in addition to handling many processes, the unconscious mind is capable of detecting errors it has made: in other words, it doesn't require the conscious mind's intervention for the unconscious to notice it has made a mistake.

In the series of experiments psychologists manipulated what people typed; either inserting errors at random or correcting errors that the person had made. All the participants were skilled typists, so they knew that they were using unconscious processes that are required if you are going to type at higher speeds.

They discovered that people generally accepted responsibility for the errors that had actually been inserted by the researchers. At a conscious level they believed they had made the mistakes.

However, by tracking the speed of typing they found that the slowing down that is know to happen when good typists make a mistake, didn't occur when the error had been inserted artificially.

The study shows that our unconscious minds are capable of detecting errors in the processes they control, without needing recourse to our somewhat less agile conscious minds.

Our understanding of how the unconscious mind works is still in its infancy; but there can be little doubt that organisations wanting to understand their customers are missing a large part of the puzzle if they put their faith solely in what they learn from their consumers' conscious minds.

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Source: Gordon D. Logan, and Matthew J. C. Crump. Cognitive Illusions of Authorship Reveal Hierarchical Error Detection in Skilled Typists. Science, 29 October 2010: Vol. 330. no. 6004, pp. 683 - 686 DOI: 10.1126/science.1190483