Abstract

This is an open-peer commentary on Newell, B.R. & Shanks, D.R. (2014) Unconscious influences on decision making, BBS, 37:1, pp. 1-61. Newell and Shanks’ critical review considers only a very limited sense in which mental processes can be thought of as either conscious or unconscious and consequently gives a misleading analysis of the role of consciousness in human information processing. This commentary provides an expanded analysis of conscious processing that also reveals the various ways in which mental processes are unconscious. This undermines Newell & Shanks' contention that, “evidence for the existence of robust unconscious influences on decision making and related behaviors is weak, and many of the key research findings either demonstrate directly that behavior is under conscious control or can be plausibly explained without recourse to unconscious influences”(p 19). On the contrary, evidence for the influence of unconscious mental processes on human behaviour is ubiquitous.