FIGURE 12.5 If You Don’t Know, Don’t Think! Undergraduates at the University of Amsterdam were asked to predict winners of four World Cup soccer matches in one of three conditions: (1) immediate—as soon as they saw the names of the nations that were competing in each of the contests, (2) conscious—after thinking for two minutes about their answers, and (3) unconscious—after two minutes of solving distracting math tasks. The experts were better at predicting winners after unconscious processing, but the non-experts became less accurate when they thought about their answers, either consciously or unconsciously.
Source: Dijksterhuis et al., 2009.