The Illusion of Conscious Will (54 page)

So a Free Willer doesn’t serve the purposes we would wish it to serve. It doesn’t cause action in a way that leaves the person responsible, and it doesn’t create an experience of free will either. For these reasons, free will is regularly left out of psychological theory.
²
The major deterministic theory of the past century, the behaviorism of B. F. Skinner, not only left out free will but explicitly belittled the idea (e.g., Skinner 1971). In his words, “We do not hold people responsible for their reflexes—for example, for coughing in church. We hold them responsible for their operant behavior—for example, for whispering in church or remaining in church while coughing. But there are variables which are responsible for whispering was well as coughing and these may be just as inexorable. When we recognize this, we are likely to drop the notion of responsibility altogether and with it the doctrine of free will as an inner causal agent” (1953, 115-116).

This approach argued that the mind does not cause action, and behaviorists developed extensive evidence that behavior can be effectively predicted by conditions that precede and follow it, without any reference to the mind. It turns out, of course, that knowing what is on the mind is indeed useful for predicting behavior. With the cognitive revolution that recognized this, psychology has included thought mechanisms in its theorizing, but along with Skinner, it still has left the experience of conscious will quite out in the cold. Psychologists continuing the emphasis on determinism by studying automatic thought and behavior (e.g., Bargh and Ferguson 2000) have presented convincing blueprints for the human mechanism that leave out a Free Willer of any kind. Free will is not an effective theory of psychology and has fallen out of use for the reason that it is
not the same kind of thing
as a psychological mechanism.

2
. Sappington (1990) reports on a number of psychological theories that purport to include some kind of nondeterminism in their formulations. He also argues that theories including free will can be compatible with the scientific tasks of prediction and control. I remain to be convinced. I believe that most of these Free Willer theories have confused having free will with experiencing free will, and the two are vastly different. Having it doesn’t happen, whereas experiencing it goes on pretty much constantly.

We are left, then, with a major void. In leaving out a mechanism that might act like free will, theories have also largely ignored the experience of free will. The feeling of doing is a profoundly regular and important human experience, however, one that each of us gets enough times in a day to convince us that we are doing things (nonrandomly) much of the time. This deep intuitive feeling of conscious will is something that no amount of philosophical argument or research about psychological mechanisms can possibly dispel. Even though this experience is not an adequate theory of behavior causation, it needs to be acknowledged as an important characteristic of what it is like to be human.
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People feel will, and scientific psychology needs to know why. Clearly, people don’t feel will because they are somehow immediately knowing their own causal influence as it occurs. The experience is the endpoint of the very elaborate inference system underlying apparent mental causation, and the question becomes, Why do we have this feeling?

Authorship Emotion

Perhaps we have conscious will because it helps us to appreciate and remember what we are doing. The experience of will marks our actions for us. It helps us to know the difference between a light we have turned on at the switch and a light that has flickered alive without our influence. To label events as our personal actions, conscious will must be an experience that is similar to an emotion. It is a feeling of doing. Unlike a cold thought or rational calculation of the mind alone, will somehow happens both in body and in mind. This embodied quality gives the will a kind of weight or bottom that does not come with thoughts in general. In the same sense that laughter reminds us that our bodies are having fun, or that trembling alerts us that our bodies are afraid, the experience of will reminds us that we’re doing something. Will, then, makes the action our own far more intensely than could a thought alone. Unlike simply saying, “This act is mine,” the occurrence of conscious will brands the act deeply, associating the act with self through feeling, and so renders the act one’s own in a personal and memorable way. Will is a kind of authorship emotion.

3
. Dan Gilbert and I got all frothed up about the importance of experience in psychology and spent several days ruminating on the excessive interest most psychologists have shown in nonexperiential things such as behavior. See Wegner and Gilbert (2000) for the result.

The idea that volition is an emotion is not new. In fact, the quote from T. H. Huxley at the beginning of this chapter makes the equation explicit. Will is a feeling, not unlike happiness or sadness or anger or anxiety or disgust. Admittedly, conscious will doesn’t have a standard facial expression associated with it, as do most other basic emotions (Ekman 1992). The look of determination or a set brow that is sometimes used to caricature willfulness is probably not identifiable enough to qualify as a truly communicative gesture. Still, will has other characteristics of emotion, including an experiential component (how it feels), a cognitive component (what it means and the thoughts it brings to mind), and a physiological component (how the body responds). Although conscious will is not a classic emotion that people would immediately nominate when asked to think of an emotion, it has much in common with the emotions.

Conscious will might be classed as one of the
cognitive feelings
described by Gerald Clore (1992). He points out that there are a set of experiences, such as the feeling of knowing, the feeling of familiarity, or even the feeling of confusion, that serve as indicators of mental processes or states and that thus inform us about the status of our own mental systems. The experience of willing an action is likewise an informative feeling, a perception of a state of the mind and body that has a unique character. Although the proper experiments have not yet been done to test this, it seems likely that people could discriminate the feeling of doing from other feelings, knowing by the sheer quality of the experience just what has happened. The experience of willing is more than a perception of something outside oneself; it is an experience of one’s own mind and body in action.

Now, the body serves as an anchor to thinking in many ways. Antonio Damasio (1994) has described the general function of emotions as “somatic markers,” deep and unavoidable reminders of the body’s interests in what we do and what we experience. It is rare that conscious thought or rational argument can lead a person of sound mind to jump off a bridge, for instance, or to challenge a bear for a fish, reject a loving gesture, or walk away from a large cash windfall. The emotions that these incidents provoke tend to clear away irrelevant or conflicting thoughts and draw the person’s attention strongly toward the emotional point of the situation. We attack things that make us angry, run from things that make us afraid, approach things that make us happy, avoid things that make us sad, and otherwise behave in quite simple self-preserving ways in the presence of these bodily signals of our best interests.

Emotions have evolved as automatic signals for this reason (Plutchik 1980; Wegner and Bargh 1998). Damasio finds that people who behave on the basis of seemingly rational and intelligent thought, but whose damaged frontal lobes reduce their emotional reactions to situations, often act in ways that come to undermine their own pursuit of well-being. When patients with frontal damage are shown emotionally disturbing pictures that stimulated surges in skin conductance level (sweating of the fingers) among normal individuals, they exhibit remarkably little response (Damasio, Tranel, and Damasio 1991). It makes sense, then, that such frontal patients in a gambling experiment picked a strategy that earned them slightly higher payoffs on most trials while not noticing that the same strategy often yielded major losses (Bechara et al. 1994). The usual bodily signals that indicate dangerous behavior are not present in these cases and deprive people of the somatic markers that normally guide them away from serious risk.

Conscious will is the somatic marker of personal authorship, an emotion that authenticates the action’s owner as the self. With the feeling of doing an act, we get a conscious sensation of will attached to the action. Often, this marker is quite correct. In many cases, we have intentions that preview our action, and we draw causal inferences linking our thoughts and actions in ways that track quite well our own psychological processes. Our experiences of will, in other words, often do correspond correctly with the empirical will—the actual causal connection between our thought and action. The experience of will then serves to mark in the moment and in memory the actions that have been singled out in this way. We know them as ours, as authored by us, because we have felt our-selves doing them. This helps us to tell the difference between things we’re doing and all the other things that are happening in and around us. In the melee of actions that occur in daily life, and in the social interaction of self with others, this body-based signature is a highly useful tool. We
resonate
with what we do, whereas we only
notice
what otherwise happens or what others have done. Thus, we can keep track of our own contributions without pencils or tally sheets.

Conscious will can be understood as part of an accounting system. Its regular appearance in actions of all kinds serves as an aid to remembering what we are doing and what we have done. This, in turn, allows us to de-serve things. One of the key reasons for describing actions and ascribing them to persons is as a way of determining who deserves what (Feinberg 1970). Action descriptions mark up the flow of human events into convenient packages (“He repaired my motorbike,” “She shot the winning basket at the final buzzer,” “They sang a musical program at the retirement home”). But each such description of action comes with an ascription, a notation of who is author. Although it could be useful to all of us to remember all the various ascriptions, it is most pressing that we remember our own. We must remember what we have done if we are going to want to claim that our actions have earned us anything (or have prevented us from deserving something nasty). Although the whole team might secretly want to lay claim to that final basket that won the game, for instance, the player who made the shot would be particularly remiss if she didn’t know, or later forgot, that she did it. It is good that when she did it, she had an emotion, an experience of conscious will, that certified it as her own.

Conscious will is particularly useful, then, as a guide to ourselves. It tells us what events around us seem to be attributable to our authorship. This allows us to develop a sense of who we are and are not. It also allows us to set aside our achievements from the things that we cannot do. And perhaps most important for the sake of the operation of society, the sense of conscious will also allows us to maintain the sense of responsibility for our actions that serves as a basis for morality. In the remainder of the chapter, we explore these benefits of the authorship emotion.

Achievement and Confidence

In the causal puzzle that is the world, we are overwhelmed with a large number of events and a large number of causal candidates. So much stuff is going on, and some of the things that are going on are causing other things to go on. Making sense of all this is daunting, and so it is indeed fortunate that we have a handy bonus hint whenever an event seems to be caused by ourselves: the feeling of will. It is as though we were putting together a jigsaw puzzle of male rock stars, for instance, with thousands of little pieces of Dylan and Hendrix and Springsteen and Bowie and Prince and Beck, with the convenient feature that whenever we happen to touch a piece of the Boss, we distinctly hear the tune of
Born to Run
.

We would soon finish the Springsteen part of the puzzle, leaving the rest in pieces. Similarly, the experience of conscious will acts as a unifying clue in our causal analysis, leading us to do a better job of appreciating our own potential causality than the causality of anyone or anything else. Conscious will puts the agent self together in the puzzle of life.

The authorship emotion is one of the things people intuitively believe that they would miss if it were gone. It would not be particularly satisfying to go through life causing things—say, making scientific discoveries, winning sports victories, creating social harmony, helping people, or even digging nice big holes in the yard—if we had no personal recognition of these achievements. If such fine and commendable acts were jumbled into an indistinguishable rubble with all the acts ever done by anyone else we’d ever known and with all the occurrences caused by events outside any human agent, we’d be unable to piece together much of a picture of our abilities. Such a featureless landscape, in which self is indistinguishable among all the other causal forces at work in the world, would be deeply depressing. And, indeed, it is this profound lack of an achieving, causal self that people most regret when they envision life as a robogeek. With the loss of a sense of conscious will comes a loss of the organizing theme that helps us to find the thread of our own abilities and achievements in the context of everything else we perceive and remember.

This key feature of conscious will has been celebrated in the findings of a number of researchers. The term
perceived control
is usually used to refer to the experience of conscious will in the achievement domain, and there are many studies indicating that feelings of perceived control are essential for psychological health.
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We know that people who believe they are the cause of events in their lives tend to be more active in controlling those events. A classic example of this can be found in a study of people’s responses to uncontrollable and unfortunate events. Bulman and Wortman (1977) investigated the attributions made by the victims of paralyzing accidents, classifying the explanations people gave for the events as either internal (“I was responsible”) or external (“Someone else did it,” “It was random”). The noteworthy finding was that people who believed that their victimization was their own responsibility were more inclined to cope well afterwards. Although you might think that these people would be most disappointed in themselves for causing their calamities, the habit of taking responsibility seemed to carry over from the accident into the pursuit of adjustment in the aftermath.