Ap Dijksterhuis

Radboud University | RU · Behavioural Science Institute

In today’s rapidly changing and technology-driven world, the ability to think creatively is essential for individuals and organizations. To date, technology-based training has become a new trend for learning and training in the 21st century; however, little empirical research has been conducted to enhance creativity through online training. In the...

Creative thinking is needed to thrive in our fast‐changing world. It has been shown that creative thinking skills can be enhanced through training. Whereas previous research has mainly focused on examining the overall effectiveness of comprehensive creativity training programs, this study examined the effectiveness of four cognitive‐based training...

School is an excellent place to foster young learners’ creative thinking skills. However, the emphasis on creativity varies among schools. In two studies the putative influence of school education on the development of students’ creativity was examined by means of a retrospective approach. We investigated whether two influential factors within scho...

The Full body illusion (FBI) is an illusion in which participants experience a change in self-location to a body that is perceived from a third-person perspective. The FBI is usually induced through experimenter generated stroking but can also be induced through self-generated stroking. In four experiments (three preregistered) we compared a self-g...

When people have to choose a creative solution from several ideas to tackle a problem, they tend to select mainstream ideas at the expense of creative ideas. In the current research, we examined the effect of rank‐ordering strategy on creative idea selection performance by comparing three different rank‐ordering strategies: choosing (i.e., rank‐ord...

Understanding how sustainable preference change can be achieved is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work shows that merely responding or not responding to objects during go/no-go training can influence preferences for these objects right after the training, when people choose with a time limit. Here we examined whether and how su...

Understanding how sustainable preference change can be achieved is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work shows that merely responding or not responding to objects can change people’s preferences for these objects for at least one week. However, it is unclear whether such lasting preference change is caused directly by the mere (n...

Prior research has shown that our perception of time is compressed when we volitionally perform actions, a phenomenon referred to as temporal binding. In three studies, we investigated the degree to which contextual cues that signaled other agents and related to actions would influence binding, given that those cues may affect individual’s feelings...

Research has found that body illusions may be accompanied by consequences for the real body whereby various somatosensory and homeostatic bodily functions may be impaired. These findings stem from research where an experimenter induced the body illusions. In line with advances in the domains of videogames and virtual reality where the real body is...

Over the past years, there has been a surge in research on subjective well-being. Most of this research relies on correlational methods. As correlational research has important limitations, the field of subjective well-being is in need for more experimental approaches. While longitudinal experimental studies provide maximum ecological validity, fie...

Previous research revealed a positive relation between belief in free will and life satisfaction. We examined this relation in a Western country other than the U.S (the Netherlands). The relation between belief in free will and life satisfaction was obtained, but qualified by questionnaire order. People seemed to indicate stronger free will beliefs...

Creative thinking is an important 21st century skill. To prepare children for our complex and fast-changing world, it is essential to cultivate their creative thinking skills. The objective of the current study was to develop and examine the effectiveness of a brief, domain-unspecific creativity training program: the 5-I training program. Children...

Understanding the formation and modification of preferences is important for explaining human behavior across many domains. Here we examined when and how preferences for food items can be changed by linking mere action versus inaction to these items. In 7 preregistered experiments, participants were trained to consistently respond to certain food i...

Understanding the formation and modification of preferences is important for explaining human behavior across many domains. Here we examined when and how preferences for food items can be changed by linking mere action versus inaction to these items. In 7 preregistered experiments, participants were trained to consistently respond to certain food i...

Creative idea selection—the selection of the most creative idea(s) from available ideas—is an important yet understudied topic. Creative idea selection can be performed by the idea generator (i.e., intrapersonal selection) or by another person (i.e., interpersonal selection). In the current research, we examined whether these two types of selection...

Objective: Not responding to appetitive food items in the go/no-go training has been shown to reduce the evaluation of these items in normal-weight university students. In this preregistered study, we administered an identical go/no-go training in both morbidly obese individuals and normal-weight university students, to assess whether findings from...

Not responding to food items in a go/no-go task can lead to devaluation of these food items, which may help people regulate their eating behavior. The Behavior Stimulus Interaction (BSI) theory explains this devaluation effect by assuming that inhibiting impulses triggered by appetitive foods elicits negative affect, which in turn devalues the food...

Many people find it hard to change their dietary choices. Food choice often occurs impulsively, without deliberation, and it has been unclear whether impulsive food choice can be experimentally created. Across 3 exploratory and 2 confirmatory preregistered experiments we examined whether impulsive food choice can be trained. Participants were cued...

This study aims to examine (a) the time course of stress, fatigue, and sleep quality among PhD students awaiting a stressful event and (b) whether daily anticipation of this event influences day-level stress, fatigue, and sleep quality. Forty-four PhD students completed evening and morning questionnaires on eight days from 1 month before their diss...

In a series of 6 experiments (5 preregistered), we examined how not responding to appetitive stimuli causes devaluation. To examine this question, a go/no-go task was employed in which appetitive stimuli were consistently associated with cues to respond (go stimuli), or with cues to not respond (either no-go cues or the absence of cues; no-go stimu...

Objective The goals of this longitudinal diary-based study were to shed light on the day-level relationship between stress and subsequent sleep, and to examine whether perseverative cognition is a mediating factor in this relation. Methods A total of 44 Dutch PhD students were followed during a 2-month period, from 1 month before their public thes...

When mind-wandering, people may think about events that happened in the past, or events that may happen in the future. Using experience sampling, we first aimed to replicate the finding that future-oriented thoughts show a greater positivity bias than past-oriented thoughts. Furthermore, we investigated whether there is a relation between the tempo...

People can engage in prolonged thought processes, such as when they are facing an important decision or when they are working on a scientific discovery. Such thought processes can take months or even years. We argue that while people engage in such thinking, they make progress not only when they consciously think but also sometimes when they are co...

It is a common research finding that conscious thought helps people to avoid racial discrimination. These three experiments, however, illustrate that conscious thought may increase biased face memory, which leads to increased judgment bias (i.e., preferring White to Black individuals). In Experiments 1 and 2, university students formed impressions...

In the present study we investigated whether differences in the sense of agency influenced the effectiveness of both direct persuasion and self-persuasion techniques. By manipulating both the delay and contingency of the outcomes of actions, participants were led to experience either a low or high sense of agency. Participants were subsequently pre...

While action plans and intentions have been considered to be important factors contributing to the personal sense of causation known as agency, the present research is the first to empirically investigate how action plans influence agency. Participants in multiple studies were required to plan or not to plan ahead their actions. Results consistentl...

In two studies, we investigated the influence of hand dominance on the sense of self-causation or agency. Participants alternately used their dominant or nondominant hand to cause the occurrence of an effect (a tone) in a task in which agency was made ambiguous. Participants were subsequently asked to indicate the degree to which they felt they had...

Anecdotal reports as well as behavioral studies have suggested that creative performance benefits from unconscious processes. So far, however, little is known about how creative ideas arise from the brain. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the neural correlates of creativity by means of structural MRI research. Given that unconscious an...

We discuss three observations about the state of the field of behavior priming. The first is that there are many more empirical demonstrations of behavior priming than may be apparant at first sight. The second is that some people doubt the validity of behavior priming effects because they are "counterintuitive," and we argue that this reasoning is...

Until recently, it was assumed that co-representation of others’ actions, an essential part in joint action, is biologically tuned. However, research demonstrated that we also simulate actions of non-biological interaction partners under certain conditions. In the present study, we investigated whether perceived intentionality or perspective taking...

Cognitive flexibility is one of the essential mental abilities underlying creative thinking. Previous findings have shown that cognitive flexibility can be enhanced by schema violations, and it has been suggested that active involvement is needed for schema violations to facilitate cognitive flexibility. The possibility that identification with an...

Creativity is one of the most important assets we have to navigate through the fast changing world of the 21st century. Anecdotal accounts of creative individuals suggest that oftentimes, creative discoveries result from a process whereby initial conscious thought is followed by a period during which one refrains from task-related conscious thought...

Research demonstrated that by reformulating smoking warnings into questions, defensive responses in smokers are reduced and smoking-related risk perception increases. We explored whether these positive outcomes can be generalised to actual behaviour. Participants saw either a movie presenting subheadings with smoking-related questions or statements...

In two studies, we investigated the degree to which action primes, and acting upon those primes affect agency ratings. Participants performed left or right button-presses that generated tones, and were subsequently asked to indicate the degree to which they felt that they, instead of the computer, had caused the tones. Prior to button-presses, part...

Psychological scientists have recently started to reconsider the importance of close replications in building a cumulative knowledge base; however, there is no consensus about what constitutes a convincing close replication study. To facilitate convincing close replication attempts we have developed a Replication Recipe, outlining standard criteria...

Newell & Shanks (N&S) criticize theories on decision making that include unconscious processes. To the extent that their own perspective becomes apparent, however, it is dated, implausible, and at odds with the major developments of the past decades. Their conclusions are, at least for research areas we feel entitled to evaluate, based on a biased...

The three articles appearing in this special section are constructive and optimistic, and they will encourage new research in the behavioral priming domain. They also show that the recent criticism of behavioral priming is largely overblown. The few widely publicized nonreplications have functioned as a welcome wake-up call, but they should not sug...

This chapter reviews a research programme on the effects of humour in advertising on positive and negative brand associations and brand choice, and integrates the findings into a single overarching model. Based on the Associative and Propositional Processes Model of Evaluation (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006, 2007, 2011), we propose that repeated pa...

People often ascribe human attributes to objects, a phenomenon named anthropomorphism. As research has mainly focused on explicitly measured attitudes towards objects, we investigated in four studies whether perceiving a non-biological agent behaving in a human-like manner influences meaningful social behaviour. Participants watched a video fragmen...

Objectives The objective of this study was to review longitudinal and intervention studies examining the association between psychosocial work characteristics (eg, job demands, job control, and social support) and sleep quality. Our main research aims were to examine whether (i) psychosocial work characteristics are a predictor of sleep quality, a...

The present studies examined whether differences in Need for Cognitive Closure (NCC) were related to differences in regulatory control when confronted with authority. In two studies, levels of regulatory control were measured when participants resisted (Study 1) or prepared to resist the influence attempt of an authority figure (Study 2). Results s...

Research shows that we spontaneously imitate people. Moreover, empathy predicts the degree of this non-conscious imitation. Little is known, however, if or how this expression of empathy is influenced by stable physical characteristics of our interaction-partners. In two studies, we tested whether attractiveness of others moderated the relation bet...

Offences committed by pedophiles are crimes that evoke serious public concern and outrage. Although recent research using implicit measures has shown promise in detecting deviant sexual associations, the discriminatory and predictive quality of implicit tasks has not yet surpassed traditional assessment methods such as questionnaires and phallometr...

Warning labels on cigarette packages rely on the negative health aspects of smoking. For smokers, however, smoking is related to positive as well as to negative outcomes. Positive smoking outcomes are shown to be crucial in activating smoking behaviour. Thus, this study compared current health warnings with warning labels contradicting positive out...

Presents experimental evidence illustrating how the subjective experience of behavior by others can spontaneously influence our own actions in social situations. The similarities and differences between humans and mackerels are explored. The tendency to imitate, the difference between men and mackerels, and focal attention and behavioral time-outs...

Past research has linked creativity to unusual and unexpected experiences, such as early parental loss or living abroad. However, few studies have investigated the underlying cognitive processes. We propose that these experiences have in common a “diversifying” aspect and an active involvement, which together enhance cognitive flexibility (i.e., cr...

Research has shown that helping behavior can be primed easily. However, helping decreases significantly in the presence of inhibition cues, signaling high costs for the executor. On the other hand, multiple studies demonstrated that helping behavior increases after being mimicked. The present study investigated whether imitation still increases hel...

Recent studies showed that a period of unconscious thought can help when making complex decisions. Under some circumstances, unconscious thought improves decisions even more than conscious thought. Executive functioning depends on energy provided by glucose, and we know from previous research that the performance of various conscious processes dete...

Today's world of continuous change thrives on creative individuals. Anecdotal reports suggest that creative performance benefits from unconscious processes. Empirical research on the role of the unconscious in creativity, though, is inconsistent and thus far has focused mainly on one aspect of the creative process – idea generation. This is the fir...

Both scientists and artists have suggested that sleep facilitates creativity, and this idea has received substantial empirical support. In the current study, we investigate whether one can actively enhance the beneficial effect of sleep on creativity by covertly reactivating the creativity task during sleep. Individuals' creative performance was co...

We tested and found supportive evidence for one of the principles of Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT); namely, that unconscious thought is a bottom-up process, whereas conscious thought is a top-down process. In two experiments on impression formation, participants read behavioral information about a fictitious person after a stereotype had been ac...

A meta-analysis was performed on the unconscious thought effect (UTE). All available published and unpublished data on unconscious thought were included. Our aims were to provide a statistically robust estimate of the effect size of the UTE, to identify significant moderators, and to discuss possible underlying processes of the UTE. To assess the U...

Facial expressions can trigger emotions: when we smile we feel happy, when we frown we feel sad. However, the mimicry literature also shows that we feel happy when our interaction partner behaves the way we do. Thus what happens if we express our sadness and we perceive somebody who is imitating us? In the current study, participants were presented...

Social categorization and stereotyping are discussed as normal perceptual processes upon which perceivers rely for an adequate understanding of everyday social events. Social categorization and stereotyping are treated as strongly linked. It will be argued that in many situations social categorizations are used because perceivers expect the categor...

Action observation automatically activates corresponding motor representations in the observer, which is essential in coordinating actions with others. It is assumed that this co-representation system is activated by biological agents only. However, we often identify with biological agents, whereas this is not the case for non-biological agents. Th...

Coordinated action relies on shared representations between interaction partners: people co-represent actions of others in order to respond appropriately. However, little is known about the social factors that influence shared representations. We investigated whether actions performed by in-group and out-group members are represented differently, a...

Two studies address the debate over whether conscious or unconscious mental processes best handle complex decisions. According to Unconscious Thought Theory (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) both modes of thinking have particular advantages: conscious thought can follow strict rules, whereas unconscious thought is better suited for integrating numero...

We tested and confirmed the hypothesis that unconscious thought leads to an automatic weighting process whereby important decision attributes receive more weight, and unimportant decision attributes receive less weight. In three experiments, participants chose between cars with few important positive attributes and many unimportant negative attribu...

THOUGHT PROCESS EFFECTS IN DIAGNOSTIC DECISIONS Background: This study tests the influence of different response modes (direct, after conscious and after unconscious thinking) in clinical decision making. Recently, we published a first demonstration of unconscious thought effects in this domain, specifically in the complex and error-prone task of...

1 Four Traditional Lines of Thought 2 The Unconscious, Goals, and Consciousness: A Taxonomy 3 Unconscious and Automatic Processes in Social Psychology 4 Control 5 What Is Consciousness Good For?

Recent research has shown that goal pursuit can proceed unconsciously. That is, the entire process from goal activation to goal completion can take place without conscious awareness of the goal. This observation is somewhat paradoxical, because there is no denying that in daily life people are often consciously aware of the goals they pursue. The q...

The unconscious-thought effect refers to an improvement in decision making following distraction from the decision context for a period of time. The dominant explanation for this effect is that unconscious processes continue to deal with the problem during the distraction period. Recently, however, some researchers have proposed that unconscious th...

The unconscious thought effect refers to improved judgments and decisions after a period of distraction. The authors studied the unconscious thought effect in a complex and error-prone part of clinical decision making: diagnosis. Their aim was to test whether conscious versus unconscious processing influenced diagnosis of psychiatric cases. They us...

Social psychological and developmental research revealed that imitation serves a fundamental social function. It has been shown that human beings have the tendency to automatically mirror the behavior of others-the so-called chameleon effect. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that being imitated leads to positive feelings toward the imitator. B...

Karin Bongers is a postdoctoral researcher at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Her main research interests center on self-regulation, motivation, and goal-directed behavior. Specifically, she has focused on consequences of unconscious goal-pursuit failure for self-esteem and self-protecting mechanisms. Furthermore, she is interested in the interpla...

People judge, evaluate, and treat attractive people better than moderately attractive or unattractive people [Langlois, J. H., Kalakanis, L., Rubenstein, A. J., Larson, A., Hallam, M., & Smoot, M. (2000). Maxims or myths of beauty? A meta-analytic and theoretical review. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 390–423]. The fact that individuals like attracti...

In two experiments, we investigated the effects of expertise and mode of thought on the accuracy of people's predictions. Both experts and nonexperts predicted the results of soccer matches after conscious thought, after unconscious thought, or immediately. In Experiment 1, experts who thought unconsciously outperformed participants in all other co...

One striking characteristic of human social interactions is unconscious mimicry; people have a tendency to take over each other's posture, mannerisms and behaviours without awareness. Our goal is to make the case that unconscious mimicry plays an important role in human social interaction and to show that mimicry is closely related to and moderated...

If perceptual and bodily states are closely linked and if perceiving action automatically leads to corresponding activations in one's own motor system, then why do not we imitate all the time? There is evidence suggesting that executive functioning (EF) may play a moderating role in inhibiting overt imitation [e.g. Luria, A. R. (1966). Higher corti...

In this article, literature from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and social cognition is integrated to discuss the relation between goals, attention, and consciousness. Goals are the tools with which people engage in volitional behavior. Whereas goal pursuit was traditionally assumed to be strongly related to consciousness, recent research and...

In five experiments we found that deliberation reduces preference consistency. In experiments 1 and 2, participants who deliberated on their preferences were less consistent in their evaluations compared to those who did not deliberate. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this effect is due to the impediment of deliberation and not to the benefit of non...

People are motivated to establish and maintain a positive self-image. When people fail to attain their goals self-esteem is threatened, and this elicits the motivation to protect or repair self-esteem. We investigated whether success and failure to attain goals affects self-esteem if these goals were unconsciously activated. In three experiments, w...

Numerous studies in the fields of social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social neuroscience have provided evidence of automatic imitation in humans, including preverbal children. People have a tendency to automatically and nonconsciously mimic the behaviors and mannerisms of their interaction partners, from face-rub...

Previous studies found that information is more persuasive when self-generated (high self-involvement), rather than when simply read or heard (low self-involvement). In two studies, we investigated whether differences in self-involvement concerning smoking issues would influence immediate smoking behaviour. As predicted, results indicate that parti...

A common measure for implicit self-esteem is the name letter effect, traditionally calculated as the rated attractiveness of someone's initials or name letters minus the average attractiveness of those same letters rated by people not having those initial or name letters. We present evidence showing this calculation method is confounded with genera...

Having power means that one makes decisions that determine the outcomes of less powerful others (e.g., Deprét & Fiske, 1993). In fact, powerful people sometimes face multiple impactful, complicated decisions a day, with little room for error. How do they accomplish this? Recent research indicates that power changes not only a person’s responsibilit...