Albert Jan "Ap" Dijksterhuis (born 12 November 1968, Zutphen)[1] is a Dutch Social Psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen.
From 1996-1999, he did post-doc work as a Research Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, located in Amsterdam.
In 2007, his first book was published, in Dutch, called ‘Het slimme onbewuste’ (‘The Smart Unconscious’).
He works & co-leads the Unconscious lab at Radboud University Nijmegen, with Rick van Baaren.
Evaluative conditioning is most often used to change attitude towards a neutral stimuli, but he proposed it would work for implicit self-esteem.
The results support his hypothesis; participants in the experimental condition showed higher levels of implicit self-esteem on both measures compared to controls.
The argument is that conscious thought is not capable of handling all the complex information that we need to process in order to make good decisions.
In experiment 2 participants in the conscious thought condition reported only using a subset of the information provided to make their decision.
In the first study, participants were shown 4 (simple) or 12 (complex) attributes, randomized one at a time, about four fake cars.
[17] Dijksterhuis wanted to get away from the artificial information that people are provided in a laboratory setting and see what happens when they have to rely on their own knowledge about a subject to make decisions.