The Role of the Unconscious in Information Retrieval: What User Perception Tells Us

Increasing evidence from psychoanalytic and psychodynamic research suggests that the unconscious influences our daily decisions, and psychologists have suggested that as much as 85-95% of decision making occurs outside our conscious awareness. For information science, it is important to understand how these unconscious processes play a role in information seeking. The current study uses subliminal psychodynamic activation (SPA), through the use of subliminal messages that appeared below the threshold of conscious awareness, to investigate the influence of the unconscious in information searching. Twenty-four college students participated in a controlled laboratory experiment, each searching freely on the Internet for information for three search tasks, with various SPA messages appearing in each search. Participants were systematically assigned to one of the four SPA conditions with various subliminal messages. Users' perceptions of search task topic interest, topic knowledge and task difficulty was examined between different SPA conditions, as well as the change of users' perceptions on topic interest, knowledge, and difficulty before and after searching in different SPA conditions. Findings suggested that users' pre- and post-task ratings of topic interest, knowledge, and difficulty did not show significant differences among the 4 SPA conditions. However, the change in users' perceptions of topic interest and topic knowledge before and after searching showed significant differences when SPA messages were present. Our findings inspire future research in this underexplored field.