Ap Dijksterhuis

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think the first episode of Hidden Brain I ever listened to was simply because of the title, because of the name Hidden Brain.

I thought, this is what I'm working on.

Yeah, it's very much comparable.

Well, when we started to study the idea that people think unconsciously, that's the way we call it, what we did is we gave information about four different apartments in the city of Amsterdam.

This was at the time where I was working at the University of Amsterdam.

We gave students information about four different apartments,

And we made sure that one apartment was more attractive than the others.

But they get a lot of information.

It wasn't all that easy to figure it out.

And we said to these participants, choose the best apartment.

And we had two groups.

The first group simply read the information and they chose.

And the second group, they read the information.

We told them to choose later on.

And first, they were distracted with a word puzzle, something simple.

And then just a few minutes later, they were asked their favorite apartment.

And they performed much better than the other group.

So if you give yourself a couple of minutes to unconsciously think about something, you make better decisions.

And we added a third group where we said to, after people read the information about the apartments, we said, well, you can forget about the information of the apartments.