The Illusion of Conscious Will (17 page)

External Alternatives to Intention

More than once, I’ve started to open a door only to find that someone else is simultaneously opening it from the other side. What felt like a willed action (even if the door at first seemed to move a bit too easily) immediately became in my mind an action by someone else. The exclusivity of thought as a cause of action, quite simply, can be challenged by external causes. Plausible external causes for an action might include other people or external forces that impinge on us even when we are thinking of the action in advance. In general, when a person is engaged in a co-action with another person—such as walking hand-in-hand, kissing, dancing, arguing, wrestling, having sex, and the like (ideally, not all at once)—the proper attribution of causality to self and other can be a major puzzle. One may be thinking about some of the aspects of the co-action and not others, and may have to adjust one’s notion of what is happening and what one is doing at a rapid pace as the co-action unfolds.

This puzzle of co-action turns out to be the basis of a number of common automatisms, including table turning and the Ouija board, and was an essential part of the
I Spy
study as well. But confusions about joint physical movements are just the start of the kinds of intriguing transformations of experienced will that can occur in social situations. Many things people do involve psychological rather than physical coaction. People talk together or work on projects or argue about things, and the question of who did what turns out to be open in a wide variety of these cases. Other people with whom we interact, of course, are also thinking and acting, so our perceptions of the causal relations between their thoughts and actions can enter into our interpretation of their willfulness, which may have implications for the degree to which our behavior in interaction with them is interpreted as willful.

As long as there are other possible agents around, one’s own actions may at times be attributed to them, and fluctuations in the sense of one’s own will may follow. Stanley Milgram (1974) brought up this possibility in the interpretation of his famous obedience experiments. His finding that most people would obey an experimenter who insisted that they deliver strong electric shocks to another person in the laboratory has long been celebrated in psychology as an extraordinary example of the apparent abdication of personal responsibility. Milgram suggested that the remarkable obedience he observed was produced by an “agentic shift,” a change in the perceived source of agency for actions that occur when one obeys another. The experimental subject apparently delivering the shock does so only on guarantees from the experimenter that the subject is not responsible, and so experiences a sort of transfer of agency that eliminates the usual sense of moral accountability for action.

A further complication arising in dyads and groups is that a group level of agency may also be constructed such that things “we” do are independent of what “you” do or what “I” do (Wegner and Giuliano 1980). One might experience the will of one’s group rather than that of the self, for example, as a result of knowing that the group was thinking of doing something and that group action had ensued (“We’re going to the zoo”). This, then, suggests that one must keep track not only of one’s own thoughts about social actions but also of other people’s thoughts. If others apparently think of what the group does just before the group does it, they are more plausible willful agents of the group’s enterprise than is the self. Even in just a pair of people, it is possible that each person might think or not think of what self, other, or both will do, leading to a variety of interpretations of the willfulness of the action. The computation of will in social life begins with the principle of exclusivity but then blossoms into a variety of interesting formats quite beyond the basic sense of self as agent.

The external causation of one’s action is not necessarily limited to real agents or forces. What about spirits? Once the possibility of outside agency is allowed, it becomes clear that people can imagine or invent out-side agents to account for actions of themselves or others (Gilbert et al. 2001). The assumption that one’s actions or thoughts are being introduced by outside agents is, as we have noted, a common theme in schizophrenic thinking. However, the appeal to hypothetical outside agents is far too common an experience in human life to be attributed to schizophrenia alone. The occurrence of spirit possession or channeling, for example, is so widespread across cultures and so highly prevalent in some cultures— affecting as much as half of the population (Bourguignon 1976)—that it has become a major focus of the field of anthropology. Attribution of behavior to angels, spirits, entities, and the like is sufficiently common throughout the world that it is a mistake to assume it is limited to traditional cultures. Industrialized cultures have their share of channels, trance dancers, and people who “speak in tongues” or otherwise attribute their action to divine intervention as part of religious ceremonies. The common denominator for these phenomena is the attribution of what otherwise appears to be voluntary behavior to an imagined outside agency.

The exclusivity principle underlies the general extension of the will to others as well as the formation of the individual’s own identity. In the extensive field of possible causes of a person’s behavior, there exists only one self, an author that has thoughts and does actions. This self competes with internal causes and with an array of external causes of action in the individual’s assessment of what he or she has willed. Whittling away all the other possible causes of actions allows the person to develop this self and so experience personal identity, and the process of finding external causes of one’s own action, in turn, gives shape and attributed will to all the other actors in one’s social world. Much of the discussion in later chapters (particularly
chapters 6
,
7
, and
8
) focuses on how it is that people discern their own willed actions from those of others in complicated interactions when the exclusivity of one’s own thoughts as a cause of action cannot be assumed.

Perception and Reality

The processes described in this chapter rest on an important premise. They rely on the assumption that conscious will is an experience, not a cause. This means that the thoughts we attach to our actions are not necessarily the true causes of the actions, and their causal connection is something we ascribe to them. This realization gives rise to two concerns. First, how well does this causal perception process capture what is actually happening in the empirical relation between thought and action? And second, how and when do thoughts of actions get produced if they are not causal? These interrelated concerns arise if we want to understand the role of the theory of apparent mental causation in the more general psychology of human beings, so it is useful to examine some possible answers.

The real and apparent causal sequences relating thought and action probably do tend to correspond with each other some proportion of the time. After all, people are pretty good information processors when given access to the right information. The occurrence of conscious intention prior to action is often wonderful information because it provides a fine clue as to how things that are on the person’s mind might pertain to what the person does. In fact, the mental system that introduces thoughts of action to mind and keeps them coordinated with the actions is itself an intriguing mechanism. However, if conscious will is an experience that arises from the interpretation of cues to cognitive causality, then apparent mental causation is generated by an interpretive process that is fundamentally separate from the mechanistic process of real mental causation. The experience of will can be an indication that mind is causing action, especially if the person is a good self-interpreter, but it is not conclusive.

The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation. Because we have thoughts of what we will do, we can develop causal theories relating those thoughts to our actions on the basis of priority, consistency, and exclusivity. We come to think of these prior thoughts as intentions, and we develop the sense that the intentions have causal force even though they are actually just pre-views of what we may do. Yet in an important sense, it must be the case that
something
in our minds plays a causal role in making our actions occur. That something is, in the theory of apparent mental causation, a set of unconscious mental processes that cause the action. At the same time, that something is very much like the thoughts we have prior to the action.

One possibility here is that thought and action arise from coupled unconscious mental systems. Brown (1989) has suggested that consciousness of an action and the performance of the action are manifestations of the same “deep structure.” In the same sense that the thought of being angry might reflect the same underlying process as the experience of facial flushing, the thought and performance of a voluntary action might be different expressions of a single underlying system. The coupling of thought and action over time in human adults is really quite remarkable if the thought is
not
causing the action, so there must be some way in which the two are in fact often connected.

The co-occurrenceofthoughtandactionmayhappenbecause thoughts are normally thrust into mind as
previews
of what will be done. The ability to know what one will do, and particularly to communicate this to others verbally, would seem to be an important human asset, something that promotes far more effective social interaction than might be the case if we all had no idea of what to expect of ourselves or of anyone around us. The thoughts we find coming to our minds in frequent coordination with what we do may thus be produced by a special system whose job it is to provide us with ongoing verbalizable previews of action. This preview function could be fundamentally important for the facilitation of social interaction.

We must remember that this analysis suggests that the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation operate without revealing themselves to us and so may be unconscious mechanisms of mind. Much of the recent research suggesting a fundamental role for automatic processes in everyday behavior (Bargh 1997) can be understood in this light. The real causes of human action are unconscious, so it is not surprising that behavior could often arise—as in automaticity experiments—without the person’s having conscious insight into its causation. Conscious will itself arises from a set of processes that are not the same processes as those that cause the behavior to which the experience of will pertains, however. So even processes that are not automatic—mental processes described as “con-trolled” (Posner and Snyder 1975) or “conscious” (Wegner and Bargh 1998)—have no direct expression in a person’s experience of will. Such “controlled” processes may be less efficient than automatic processes and require more cognitive resources, but even if they occur along with an experience of control or conscious will, this experience is not a direct indication of their real causal influence (Wegner, in press). The experience of conscious will is just more likely to accompany inefficient processes than efficient ones because there is more time available prior to action for inefficient thoughts to become conscious, thus to prompt the formation of causal inferences linking thought and action. This might explain why controlled/conscious processes are often linked with feelings of will, whereas automatic processes are not. Controlled and conscious processes are simply those that lumber along so inefficiently that there is plenty of time for previews of their associated actions to come to mind and allow us to infer the operation of conscious will.

The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action. So, while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves.

4

An Analysis of Automatism

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.

Although it has been usual to designate by the term
voluntary
all those muscular movements which take place as the result of mental operations, . . . a careful analysis of the sources from which many of even our ordinary actions proceed, will show that the Will has no direct participation in producing them.

William B. Carpenter,
Principles of Mental Physiology
(1888)

Our sense that we consciously cause what we do ebbs and flows through the day and even changes by the moment. We feel ourselves willing our actions almost the way we use the accelerator pedal in an automobile: Once in a while we floor it; more normally we give it a little punch from time to time; but for long periods we just have a foot on it and maintain speed, experiencing little sense at all that we are pushing on the pedal. Either because we are very good at what we are doing, because we have simply lost interest, or for yet other reasons, there are intervals when we lose the experience of agency even while we are performing voluntary actions.

Automatisms involve this lack of the feeling of doing an action but may even go beyond this to include a distinct feeling that we are
not
doing. The absence of conscious will in automatism, then, is particularly profound. It is more than those little recognitions we have that we seem to have let up on the mental gas pedal. The loss of perceived voluntariness is so remarkable during an automatism that the person may vehementlyresist describing the action as consciously or personally caused. It seems to come from somewhere else or at least not from oneself. This experience is so curious that automatisms often are noteworthy events in themselves rather than just unnoticed lapses in conscious willing.