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

Abstract

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.