Facilitating Complex Product Choices on E-commerce Sites: An Unconscious Thought and Circadian Preference Perspective

E-commerce consumers often face complex product choices and have to make decisions at various times of the day. Extant research has primarily focused on providing decision aids and eliminating “distracting” features to help consumers' conscious thought when making complex decisions. Our research adopts a novel perspective that consumers' unconscious thought may have some advantages and be exploited to help consumers make complex purchase decisions, especially when one's circadian preference (optimal time of day for decision-making, e.g., morning vs. evening) is not met. Drawing on the Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT), we developed two hypotheses regarding the effects of consumers' unconscious thought and its interaction with consumer circadian preference on decision quality. A controlled experiment was conducted to test our hypotheses. The findings show that unconscious thought outperforms conscious thought for making complex product choices in general and such effects are amplified when there is an asynchrony between one's circadian preference and the time of decision. The new circadian synchrony perspective enriches our understanding of the effects of unconscious thought on decision-making, helps explain the somewhat mixed findings in prior work on UTT, and thus contributes back to the UTT literature. The findings have implications about how unconscious thought can be leveraged to facilitate online shopping, and underscores the importance of considering consumer's circadian preference and time of decision. •Unconscious thought has the potential to outperform conscious thought for complex product choices.•The advantages of unconscious thought are more salient when there is an asynchrony between consumers’ circadian preference and the time of decision.•Considering individual’s circadian synchrony/asynchrony helps reconcile the mixed findings in prior work on Unconscious Thought Theory.•Practitioners can employ time-related strategies to leverage the power of customers’ unconscious thought to help them make better purchase decisions.