Abstract
This study aims to explore whether unconscious thought tends to categorize information according to taxonomic or thematic relations. In two experiments, participants were presented with three groups of words related to an object (such as bus). One group of words dominated the thematic relations of this object, whereas another group dominated the taxonomic relations of this object, and yet another group accounted for half of the thematic and taxonomic relations of this object. The experiment results show that participants from the unconscious thought group tended to select the group with dominant thematic relation (Experiment 1). This result could not be explained by online judgments (Experiment 2). The present study showed that the unconscious thought tended to categorize information based on thematic relation.
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Data Availability
The pre-assessment data of experimental materials are available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/yrcwd/?view_only=8d1564c31e6143048244a9efdfce8e4a. The remaining datasets generated for this study are available upon request to the corresponding authors.
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This research is supported by the Foundation for Natural Science Foundation of Gansu Province (gankeji [2021] 19).
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The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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The study was conducted after obtaining Institutional Review Board approval from the department of Psychology at Northwest Normal University. We received the written consent of all participants before testing began. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Li, J., Guo, H., Shi, K. et al. Unconscious thoughts tend to categorize information based on thematic relations. Curr Psychol 42, 22910–22918 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03431-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03431-1