Maybe it helps to be conscious, after all.
Psychologists debate whether consciousness or unconsciousness is most central to human behavior. Our goal, instead, is to figure out how they work together. Conscious processes are partly produced by unconscious processes, and much information processing occurs outside of awareness. Yet, consciousness has advantages that the unconscious does not. We discuss how consciousness causes behavior, drawing conclusions from large-scale literature reviews.
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4301. baumeister@psy.fsu.edu http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/baumeister.dp.html.
Roy F
RF
Baumeister
Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455. vohsx005@umn.edu http://www.carlsonschool.umn.edu/faculty-research/vohsx005/Kathleen_D_Vohs.aspx.
Kathleen D
KD
Vohs
Department of Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109. masicaej@wfu.edu http://www.wfu.edu/~masicaej/
E J
EJ
Masicampo
D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology