The Illusion of Conscious Will (55 page)

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. Haidt and Rodin (1999) and Skinner (1995) have provided reviews of this voluminous literature. Researchers have studied the effects of perceived control under many names: perceived control (Glass and Singer 1972), locus of control (Rotter 1966; Weiner 1974), psychological reactance (Brehm 1966), personal causation (DeCharms 1968), intrinsic motivation (Deci 1975), illusion of control (Langer 1975), self-efficacy (Bandura 1977; 1997a), personal control (Folkman 1984),optimism (ScheierandCarver 1985),personalagency (Vallacher and Wegner 1989), positive illusions (Taylor and Brown 1988), attributional style (Peterson, Maier, and Seligman 1993), and control motivation (Weary, Gleicher, and Marsh 1993).

Perceived control is usually understood as a global feeling of competence or confidence. Thus, it is reasonable for a person who perceives control in one area to suspect the possibility of such control in another. In fact, the early study of perceived control (initiated by Julian Rotter in 1966) focused specifically on the idea that the tendency to attribute control to self is a personality trait. Some people have more of it than others, and this generalized expectancy for control influences a person’s actions and choices across a wide range of circumstances. Perceiving control is a lot like optimism in that it portends confidence and exuberance in many domains of life; little perceived control, in turn, is like pessimism in that it leads to a general underestimation of what can be done. People who don’t perceive that they are controlling things in their lives often attribute events to chance, fate, or powerful others.

The benefits of new perceived control can be particularly positive for people who believe they have little control. This was discovered through the use of control interventions, the addition of control opportunities or demonstrations in a person’s life. Among elderly people, for instance, there is a progressive natural decline in actual ability to control aspects of life. With reduced mobility, retirement from work, and increasing health problems, people seem to experience an overall loss of actual control, often accompanied by reductions in perceived control. When elderly people are given new control opportunities, even minor ones such as being asked to take care of themselves and to water a plant (rather than being told they will be cared for and their plant will be watered by others), they show renewed resilience in psychological and physical well-being (Langer and Rodin 1976; Rodin and Langer 1977; Schulz 1976). Perceived control seems to lessen the negative effects of actual reductions in control in many areas, making people feel and perform better in stressful environments (Glass and Singer 1972), for example, and improving their adjustment to health problems (Gatchel and Baum 1983; Taylor and Aspinwall 1993).

In addition to this global “I can do anything” kind of perceived control, there is a more specific “I can do this” variety. This action-specific form of perceived control is really quite like the experience of conscious will. And, as one might expect, having such specific self-confidence is an important element in the likelihood that a person will even try to under-take a specific action. Albert Bandura (1977; 1997a) has studied such perceived control under the rubric of self-efficacy, focusing attention on what happens when this is absent—the cases of actions for which people express zero self-confidence. Self-efficacy seems to be conspicuously missing for actions associated with fears and phobias.

A person who has a phobic reaction to spiders, for instance, finds that fear of spiders is only a part of the problem. The more weighty concern is the person’s lack of a feeling that he or she could even
approach
a spider without collapsing into a quivering heap on the floor. The absence of any memory of consciously willing an effective act in this circumstance robs the person of all inclination to approach spiders and replaces it instead with the desire to run away. Without any history of self-efficacy, then, the person is acutely incapacitated in any situation in which this action is potentially required. This unpleasant state of affairs is something each of us has experienced at one time or another. If we don’t worry about spiders, we may have fears of flying or falling or crowds or loneliness or public speaking or test taking or financial ruin. Whichever of these circumstances happens to be our personal crippler, the essential ingredient in each case is that, in this particular situation, we simply don’t know what to do and have no memory of doing anything right in the past.

What to do? Bandura and others (e.g., Bandura, Reese, and Adams 1982) have championed therapies in which people are encouraged to do very small things in the direction of acting. People who fear spiders, for instance, might be encouraged at the outset to watch someone else draw a picture of a spider. This seems innocuous enough and may be tolerated. But then the therapy escalates, and phobics are asked, perhaps, to draw their own picture of the beast, to watch someone touching a photo of one, to touch the photo themselves, to watch a person touch a real spider, and so on. The phobia sufferer is encouraged to relax along the way and in this process gets a sense of being able to will each of a series of actions all the way up to the target act. Finally, the person may be able at least to enter a room with a spider and may even assemble the nerve to contact a spider in the way most people do, by flattening it with a rolled-up newspaper. The incremental approach of such systematic desensitization works its magic by building up an experience of conscious will for acts that progressively approximate the act the person has not been able to do.

In all these examples of perceived control, the perception of control is not the same thing as actual control. The point we have rehearsed to exhaustion throughout this book—that the feeling of will is not the same as the force of will—arises again here. Perceived control can depart from actual control significantly and repeatedly in life, and the consequences of this variation are not trivial.
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Consider, for instance, what happens when people have too little perceived control—less than is warranted by the actual causal connection between their thoughts and their actions. In this circumstance they are likely to attempt little or nothing (like the spider phobics) and so may seldom if ever learn that they should perceive more control. This is the classic dilemma of the underachiever. Having tried nothing, the person expects that exertions of conscious will are likely to be futile and so continues to try nothing. This can be a road to depression and despair.

All in all, then, it might be better to err on the side of too much perceived control. And, indeed, this seems to be what most people do. Shelley Taylor (1983; Taylor and Brown 1988; Taylor, Wayment, and Collins 1993) has explored the role of such a
positive illusion
in psychological and mental health, and has catalogued many instances in which it seems to be better to think you have control than not. This sometimes seems to be true even if no real control exists at all. The belief that one has control can be beneficial even in the case of dire circumstances—among people who have terminal illnesses that make their future uncontrollable, for example, or who have suffered serious traumas and so are left with memories of uncontrollable events in the past. It could be unpleasant and potentially disheartening to be brought down from this cloud of fantasy to the reality of a lack of actual control, but an inflated perception of control seems generally to be better even than an accurate view of control.

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. Not everyone remembers this point all the time, as it is easy to blur the distinction between real and perceived control when speaking generically of “human agency”; see, for example, Bandura (1997b).

But there might be benefits, too, to losing one’s illusions. Albert Einstein, the epitome of the
good
scientist, remarked on the mental peace that can come from relaxing the striving for control and accepting a philosophy of resignation to determinism: “The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction” (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172). Religious traditions such as Zen Buddhism teach a philosophy of relinquishing the pretense of control and view a break with the illusion of conscious will as the ultimate form of enlightenment (Breer 1989). One wonders, however, whether it is possible purposefully to renounce the illusion of purpose or whether one must only sit back and wait for the loss of the illusion to happen.

Whether we embrace the illusion of control or reject it, the presence and absence of the illusion remain useful as clues to what is real. Just as the experience of will allows us to know what we can control, the lack of this feeling alerts us to what we
can’t
control, what surely exists beyond our own minds. As Marcia Johnson (1988) has observed, the uncontrol-lableness of any given percept or memory gives us a hint that we’re dealing with reality rather than with imagination. Perceptions with no sense of will attached to them are likely to be indications of reality rather than figments of our minds. The experience of conscious will is thus a friendly sign, a marker of things that have some “give” in that we have felt we could influence them by virtue of our thoughts. The experience of will marks the indulgent areas, the places where we remember having known what we were doing and then doing it. This is good. Even if conscious will isn’t an infallible sign of our own causation, it is a fairly good sign and so gives us a rough-and-ready guide to what part of experience is conjured by us and what part is bedrock reality.

The role of conscious will in psychological well-being, in this light, may be a very useful one. Even though conscious will does not signal the actual occurrence of mental causation, it serves as a hint that such causation is happening. Each surge of will we feel accrues very quickly into our overall experience of effectiveness and achievement. Admittedly, this experience of will can be mistaken. A person who fails to sense the willfulness of an automatism, for example, has failed to keep score correctly and may attribute to outside agents the actions actually caused by the self’s thoughts. And people can also experience will for actions they did not perform, as in the
I Spy
study (Wegner and Wheatley 1999), which led people to feel they had chosen to do things they had actually been forced to do. But for a significant range of everyday experiences, the feeling of will does measure and accumulate a record of the force of will. This function turns out to be vastly useful, and that might be why people feel will as they do.

Responsibility and Morality

Conscious will is strongly linked to responsibility and morality. As the logic goes, a person is morally responsible only for actions that are consciously willed. Thus, the idea that conscious will might be no more than an illusion stirs up a torrent of moral worries: If conscious will is illusory, how can we continue to hold people responsible for what they do? If behavior is determined and people are merely automatons, how can a person be any more moral or immoral than a machine—a toaster, say, or a Buick? How can we blame people for despicable acts if they didn’t will them? How can we reward people for good acts if there is no doing things on purpose? And what about heaven and hell? How will we know what we deserve in the eyes of God? And who shall we blame for all these darned questions?

There is a foundation for many of these worries. There are indeed some contradictions between the standard ways in which people think of moral responsibility and the new ways suggested by the theory of apparent mental causation. However, the contradictions are not nearly as devastating as these questions suggest. Unlike the major moral paradigm changes suggested by some forms of deterministic psychology—behaviorism, for example (Skinner 1971), or theories of automatic behavior (Bargh and Ferguson 2000)—the changes suggested by the present theory are relatively small. After all, the apparent mental causation approach does not throw out conscious will entirely; it instead explains how the experience comes to be. To understand exactly where the real conflicts arise, and which conflicts are merely misunderstandings, it is useful to explore the basic theory of free will that underlies most commonsense moral thinking.

The Free Will Theory

Moral judgments are based not just on what people do but on what they consciously will. In the case of the law, this means that we are concerned not just with what damage might have been caused by an action but with what the person meant to do by so acting. Hart (1968) describes the practice this way: “All civilized penal systems make liability to punishment . . . dependent not merely on the fact that the person to be punished has done the outward act of a crime, but on his having done it in a certain frame of mind or will. These mental and intellectual elements are many and various and are collected together in the terminology of English jurists under the simple sounding description of
mens rea,
a guilty mind. But in many ways the most prominent is a man’s intention . . .” (114). So what people intend and consciously will is a basis for how the moral rightness or wrongness of the act is judged.
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Religion often emphasizes conscious will even more forcefully than does the law. What people consciously will becomes the arbiter of what they deserve on earth and of their fate in the hereafter. The idea that conscious will might be an illusion is radically disturbing to those who believe that our conscious choices determine our eternal futures. Winter (1998) noted, for example, how doubts about the will that were aroused by the popular discovery of automatism during the spiritualist era came to prompt religious concerns: “The struggle over the natural or supernatural character of mesmerism, table-turning, and early spiritualism developed into a pamphlet war during the early 1850s. . . . The concept of a voluntary or willed action being carried out
unconsciously
was not only objectionable to many Evangelicals but even unimaginable. To make what were in effect unconscious choices would make it impossible to be on one’s guard against satanic influence” (264-267). The role of a person’s conscious will in choosing what is right and rejecting what is wrong makes it a theological issue, and much of the concern about mechanistic explanations of human behavior may be traced to an origin in Western culture and its religious ideologies (Lillard 1998).