The Illusion of Conscious Will

The Illusion of Conscious Will

The Illusion of Conscious Will

Daniel M. Wegner

Bradford Books

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying,recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Sabon by Interactive Composition Corporation and was printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wegner, Daniel M., 1948-

   The illusion of conscious will / Daniel M. Wegner.

        p.cm.

   “A Bradford book.”

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 0-262-23222-7 (hc: alk. paper)

   1. Will. 2. Free will and determinism. I. Title.

BF611 .W38 2002

153.8—dc21                                                                                  2001054608

A leaf was riven from a tree,

“I mean to fall to earth,” said he.

The west wind, rising, made him veer.

“Eastward,” said he, “I now shall steer.”

The east wind rose with greater force.

Said he: “’Twere wise to change my course.”

With equal power they contend.

He said: “My judgment I suspend.”

Down died the winds; the leaf, elate,

Cried: “I’ve decided to fall straight.”

Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary
(1911)

Contents

Preface
ix

1  The Illusion
1

It usually seems that we consciously will our voluntary actions, but this is an illusion
.

2  Brain and Body
29

Conscious will arises from processes that are psychologically and anatomically distinct from the processes whereby mind creates action
.

3   The Experience of Will
63

The experience of conscious will arises when we infer that our conscious intention has caused our voluntary action, although both intention and action are themselves caused by mental processes that do not feel willed
.

4   An Analysis of Automatism
99

The experience of will can be reduced to very low levels under certain conditions, even for actions that are voluntary, purposive, and complex—and what remains is automatism
.

5   Protecting the Illusion
145

The illusion of will is so compelling that it can prompt the belief that acts were intended when they could not have been. It is as though people aspire to be ideal agents who know all their actions in advance
.

6  Action Projection
187

The authorship of one’s own action can be lost, projected away from self to other people or groups or even animals
.

7  Virtual Agency
221

When people project action to imaginary agents, they create virtual agents, apparent sources of their own action. This process underlies spirit possession and dissociative identity disorder as well as the formation of the agent self
.

8  Hypnosis and Will
271

In hypnosis the person experiences a loss of conscious will. This loss accompanies an apparent transfer of control to someone else, along with the creation of some exceptional forms of control over the self
.

9  The Mind’s Compass
317

Although the experience of conscious will is not evidence of mental causation, it does signal personal authorship of action to the individual and so influences both the sense of achievement and the acceptance of moral responsibility
.

References
343

Author Index
387

Subject Index
399

Preface

Do we consciously cause what we do, or do our actions happen to us? Most people are willing to accept that these alternatives are in fact oppo-sites, and then they immediately become embroiled in argument. Determinism? Free will? Some middle ground? Philosophers have given us plenty of “isms” to use in describing the positions that can be taken on this question, meanwhile not really answering it in a satisfying way. Psy-chologists and neuroscientists, in turn, haven’t helped things much by often assuming that our actions are happenings that must, of course, be caused by prior events—and thus that questions of conscious will are not answerable. Students of religion and of the law, for their part, weigh in with substantial arguments on this question as well, anchoring the prob-lem with deep concerns about responsibility and morality.

This is a book about a different sort of answer to the question. Here it is: Yes, we feel that we consciously cause what we do; and yes, our actions happen to us. Rather than opposites, conscious will and psychological determinism can be friends. Such friendship comes from realizing that the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain just as human actions themselves are created by the mind and brain. The answer to the question of conscious will, then, may involve exploring how the mecha-nisms of the human mind create the experience of will. And the experience of conscious will that is created in this way need not be a mere epiphe-nomenon. Rather than a ghost in the machine, the experience of conscious will is a feeling that helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do.

Now, of course, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This is to be expected because I’ve already written this whole book and you’re just starting to look it over. Let me just say here that as a scientific psychologist involved in research on how people think about themselves and others, I’ve always found it frustrating that no one seems to have thought all this through and done the proper research. So many intriguing philosophical questions have been approached in useful ways through science, and this is one that is still just begging to be addressed. If psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for human behavior, why does it feel as though we are consciously causing the things we do? It turns out there is a world of scientific research on this question.

In these pages, this research is approached from several directions. We look at the conditions that influence illusions of the experience of will— the cases when people feel they are willing an act that they in fact are not doing, or when they feel they are not willing an act that they indeed are doing. We explore conscious will in settings such as hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication. We examine, too, such unusual phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling, to grasp some of the extreme transformations of the experience of will. Psychological disorders—some caused by detectable brain damage and others, such as schizophrenia, by more subtle processes are examined also, to understand how the experience of conscious will is modified in these conditions. The goal of this book is to put conscious will into perspective as a topic of psychological study. To do this, we need to understand how conscious will might be an illusion, a feeling that comes and goes independent of any actual causal relationship between our thoughts and our actions.

Unlike anything I have ever studied before, the topic of conscious will excites interest and controversy. At first I didn’t like the controversy—the heated, seemingly interminable question periods following my talks, during which audience members pointed out the gaping holes in my thinking and in my head. More than once I found myself closing the question period early so I could escape the interrogation. As it turned out, though, these discussions were essential for shaping this book, and I am indebted to the many people who helped in this way. I express my thanks here for their wisdom and guidance.

Specific individuals also guided this work in important ways. For reading and commenting on one or more chapters, I thank Henry Aaron, John Bargh, Michael Bratman, Jerry Clore, Daniel Gilbert, Clark Glymour, Jon Haidt, John Kihlstrom, Angeline Lillard, Bobbie Spellman, Herman Spitz, Toni Wegner (who advised and cajoled me through four needed revisions of
chapter 1
), and Timothy Wilson. For valuable commentary on the entire book, I am indebted to Daniel Dennett. For extended conversations on this topic that were particularly helpful, I thank Henk Aarts, Susan Carey (an audience member whose comments were so much on target that I went off and wrote them down), Herbert Clark, Jerry Clore (the best sounding board on this work I ever encountered), Ap Dijksterhuis, John Flavell, Chris Gilbert, Daniel Gilbert, Tory Higgins, Larry Jacoby, Michael Kubovy, Benjamin Libet, Neil Macrae, Jonathan Schooler, Robin Vallacher, Henry Wellman, and Daniel Willingham.

My students have also contributed in major ways. For their reading, comments, and ideas I thank Elizabeth Dunn, Alana Feiler, Valerie Fuller, Jean Goddard, PerHenrik Hedberg, Holly Hom, Brian Malone, Abby Marsh, Carey Morewedge, Wendy Morris, Rebecca Norwick, Kelly Schoeffel, Mark Stalnaker, and Weylin Sternglanz. Special thanks go to Zita Meijer for her extensive help in collecting evidence on spirit posses-sion across cultures. Thalia Wheatley deserves particular recognition for her key role in developing a research paradigm for the study of will, and for her contribution on this topic to
chapter 3
. I have enjoyed the help of outstanding research assistants, all of whom worked in valuable ways on this volume, and I thank them all: Jeanine Dick, Eva Gutierrez, Cheri Robbins, Betsy Sparrow, and Eli Ticatch. I’m grateful as well to the stu-dents in seminars on conscious will at the University of Virginia and at Harvard University for their creative and insightful contributions.

This book was started during my sabbatical year (1996-1997) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto. I thank the Center, with a note of special gratitude to the staff and fellows, and I thank the University of Virginia for its sabbatical support. Some of the research described here was funded by a grant from National Institute of Mental Health (Grant MH-49127).

The Illusion of Conscious Will

1

The Illusion

It usually seems that we consciously will our voluntary actions, but this is an illusion.

All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.

Samuel Johnson,

Boswell’s
Life of Johnson

(1791)

So, here you are reading a book on conscious will. How could this have happened? One way to explain it would be to examine the causes of your behavior. A team of scientific psychologists could study your reported thoughts, emotions, and motives, your genetics and your history of learn-ing, experience, and development, your social situation and culture, your memories and reaction times, your physiology and neuroanatomy, and lots of other things as well. If they somehow had access to all the infor-mation they could ever want, the assumption of psychology is that they could uncover the mechanisms that give rise to all your behavior and so could certainly explain why you picked up this book at this moment.
¹
However, another way to explain the fact of your reading this book is just to say that you decided to pick up the book and begin reading. You consciously willed what you are doing

1
. This assumption is similar to a conjecture of the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827) in his
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
(1814): “An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.” It turns out that this “single formula” is so complex that the project of understanding the causation of even a single human action is a vast challenge to scientists, perhaps an impossible one. However, we’re talking here about an ideal of science, not a practical project.