Think Aloud: Studying the Stream of Consciousness

Abstract

Thoughts are an essential part of the human experience, yet our understanding of thoughts is rather limited. In this study, we resurrect an old methodology to study experts, the think aloud, to investigate the stream of consciousness of 94 participants. Advantages of the think aloud include that it samples many consecutively occurring thoughts in a short amount of time and provides access to the entirety of the content. In the first section, the think aloud methodology is compared to other existing methodologies and shown replicate previous findings obtained through competing methods such as experience sampling or retrospective questionnaires. Thoughts sampled with the think aloud replicated the well-established prospective bias (tendency to have thought oriented towards the future) as well as relationships between characteristics of thoughts in trait negativity, rumination, and mindfulness. The second section explores a new aspect of thought, the dynamics with which they unravel, and its potential relationship with mental health. Indices of dynamics explored here, the average length of a thought, was not predictive of ADHD nor depression, but had a relationship with rumination, albeit in the opposite direction of what was predicted. Finally, the think aloud was tested to determine what the characteristics of creative individuals’ thoughts are. Little evidence was found for the theoretically predicted tripartite sets of relationship between creativity, mind wandering, and exploration. Creative individuals were characterized by being more loquacious during the think aloud task, having longer thoughts on average, and thinking about more negative content. Overall, this research presented here demonstrates both the validity and usefulness of the think aloud task in the study of thought.