The Illusion of Conscious Will (16 page)

The prevailing theory of auditory hallucinations is based on precisely this line of reasoning. Ralph Hoffman (1986) suggests that voices may occur when people find that their thoughts are radically mismatched with their current conscious goals for thinking. He notes that “a nervous tic feels involuntary because it does not reflect a motor plan consonant with accessible goals/beliefs. Similarly, a slip of the tongue feels involuntary because it is not consonant with the current speech goal, that is, to articulate a particular ‘message’” (506). Hoffman proposed that a speaker normally generates an abstract cognitive plan that reflects the gist or intention of what he or she will say and that is sensitive to the goals and beliefs of the speaker. This plan is then transformed into actual words and syntax. In schizophrenia, this discourse planning activity breaks down and thus can lead to unexpected utterances and thoughts (Deese 1978). People with schizophrenia often experience their manifest speech as being poorly matched to what they had in mind to say (Chapman 1966). Ideas appear that don’t fit the prior plan, and when this happens, perhaps it be-gins to seem reasonable to attribute the thoughts to a “voice.”

In studies of discourse planning disturbances, Hoffman found evidence for this theory. The research developed assessments of “discourse deviations”—departures from a plan for what to say—that occur in people’s answers to interview questions. Here is an example low in discourse deviation:

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe where you live?

PATIENT: Yes, I live in Connecticut. We live in a fifty-year-old Tudor house. It’s a house that is very much a home. . . . ah . . . I live there with my husband and son. It’s a home where people are drawn to feel comfortable, walk in, . . . let’s see . . . a home that shows very much of my personality. (Hoffman 1986, 506)

And an example higher in deviation:

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about school.

PATIENT: School? Well there are schools of play and schools of fish, mostly you see fish school, people edumacating [sic] themselves, you see, sea is one thing and education is another. Fish is school in their community, that’s why the community of man stands in the way of the community of the sea, and once they see the light of the sunny sunshine then they well let it be. (Hoffman 1986, 507)

Although the first answer seems to follow from an overall plan (of explaining why the house is a home), the second seems to involve puns and plays on words with no overall goal. Hoffman found that people with schizophrenia who had verbal hallucinations had much higher scores on discourse deviation than those who did not experience verbal hallucinations. This suggests that the attribution of one’s thoughts to “voices” may arise from the failure of those voices to follow a consistent plan that would help the words to seem willful.

The tendency to think that our inconsistent thoughts are not our own is not just a feature of schizophrenia. In studies of normal college students, Morris and Wegner (2000) observed the same inclination. For these experiments, the students were asked to listen to “subliminal messages” over headphones, but what they actually heard was merely a recording of garbled voices from a crowded cafeteria. As they listened, some of the participants were given a task known to produce intrusive, inconsistent thoughts: While they wrote their thoughts down on paper, they were asked to try not to think about some topic (a house, car, mountain, or child). And, of course, the suppressed thought popped into mind quite frequently, even though it had nothing to do with what the participants were trying to think about (Wegner 1989; 1992; Wenzlaff and Wegner 2000). For comparison, another group of participants was given instructions to think about one of these topics on purpose.

After doing the thinking task while listening to the audiotape, all parti-cipants were asked to judge the degree to which the “subliminal messages” influenced their thoughts. Those who had been instructed to suppress were more likely to say that the thoughts came from the messages. Apparently, thought suppression can create introspective alienation—the tendency to think that the suppressed thoughts are coming from somewhere outside oneself. Returning to mind unbidden and without specific relevance to what one wants or plans to think about, suppressed thoughts can be attributed to nonexistent outside influences, such as a bogus subliminal message. In one study, Morris and Wegner (2000) also asked people to try to imagine what kind of person might be speaking on the ostensible subliminal tape. The participants were given the chance to rate this individual’s personality and style on a number of dimensions. It was found that participants instructed to suppress a thought, compared to those instructed to think about it on purpose, judged the (nonexistent) subliminal voice as commanding (rather than suggesting) and mean (rather than kind), and as the voice of someone they would want to ignore. Although these impressions of a nonexistent voice are far from the experiences of internal voices reported by people with schizophrenia, they illustrate that even in normal people the hypothesis that one’s thoughts are being caused by other agents can gain a surprising level of credence.

Schizophrenia presents yet further complications that move well beyond simple misattribution of one’s own thoughts. Feelings of alien control in schizophrenia might also be attributed to a specific deficit in remembering what one is intending. Perhaps it is not just that people with schizophrenia say or think things that are inconsistent with their prior thoughts; it may be that they
lose track
of their current thoughts about actions and thereby experience inconsistency in a different way.

Studies of the relation between thought and motor control, in fact, have suggested that thoughts of what one is doing are poorly represented in some forms of schizophrenia. Malenka et al. (1982) found that schizophrenic individuals have trouble correcting their own movement errors without visual feedback, perhaps because of the absence of a concurrent mental representation of the movement. They don’t seem to remember what they have done, even just as they are doing it, so they can’t correct an action without being able to see it. Frith and Done (1989) suggested that such problems in “central monitoring” might underlie experiences of alien control. They found that people with schizophrenia who report alien control experiences, as compared with those without such experiences, were less able to correct their movement errors on a video game in the absence of visual feedback. Without seeing what they were doing, they didn’t seem to remember it long enough to correct for it.
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7.
The absence of a sense of “what I’m doing now” in schizophrenia could make it possible for individuals with this disorder to misidentify their own movements as those of someone else. This has been observed by Daprati et al. (1997), who found that hallucinating schizophrenics presented with a video image of a hand were inclined to accept the hand’s movements as their own, even when the hand was not theirs. It appears that this lapse in current action knowledge may be specifically traceable to hyperactivation in the parietal and cingulate cortices of the brain (Spence et al. 1997).

A deficit in the mental representation of action that occurs during the action, then, may be another way of understanding the profound disturbance in conscious will that occurs in schizophrenia. The person with schizophrenia may not just perform acts or have thoughts that are inconsistent with prior thinking but may experience inconsistency as a result of failing to recall the prior thinking as the action unfolds. Without a thought in mind that is consistent with the observed action, and presented instead with inconsistency, the schizophrenic individual may be placed in the position of feeling that the self could not have performed the action. The next step that occurs when will is not experienced may be the inference that some other agent must be responsible (“If I didn’t do it, someone else must have done it”). This inference of outside agency anticipates a third rule of the experience of will—the exclusivity principle.

The Exclusivity Principle

People discount the causal influence of one potential cause if there are others available (Kelley 1972; McClure 1998). So, for instance, in the case of our friends the billiard balls, the causal influence of one ball on another can be called into question by the arrival of a third just at the time of impact. Applied to the experience of will, this principle suggests that people will be particularly sensitive to the possibility that there are other causes of an action besides their own thoughts. When their own thoughts do not appear to be the exclusive cause of their action, they experience less conscious will. And when other plausible causes are less salient, in turn, they experience more conscious will.

The causes that compete with thoughts are of two kinds—internal and external. The plausible internal causes for an action might include one’s emotions, habits, reflexes, traits, or other unconscious action tendencies— psychological causes other than thoughts. The plausible external causes for an action might include real external agents, such as people or groups, or imagined outside agents in the form of spirits, voices, angels, ghosts, or other disembodied entities.

Internal Alternatives to Intention

Whenever we become aware of some cause of our action that lies inside ourselves but of which we were previously unconscious, we may lose some of the sense of will. This may happen even though we have a prior, consistent thought of the action. Knowing that one is going to eat a large bag of potato chips, for instance, may not contribute to the sense that this is willful when one does it if one also believes that one is a habitual and compulsive chip-hound. Knowing that one is going to sneeze may also fail to prompt an experience of will when the sneeze occurs, perhaps because one has an appreciation of the uncontrollableness of sneezes that derives from a history of experiencing sneezes without prior thoughts.

People seem to know their own psychology well enough to grasp several possible alternatives to thoughts as causes of their actions. In particular, they may discount thoughts and so bypass the experience of will when they find their behavior attributable to
emotion, impulse, disposition,
or
habit
. In the case of emotion, for example, a person acting out of blind rage, profound sadness, or giddy euphoria might experience little in the way of voluntariness. This would be particularly true when relevant conscious thoughts were absent prior to the action, but it could also be that the sense of will might be undermined by the presence of strong emotions even if conscious thoughts were present. Issues of emotional justification of action are commonly broached in the law, as when people commit crimes in the “heat of passion,” and the lack of the experience of will in these cases is often seen as undermining the person’s responsibility for the action.

Impulse is a potential cause of action when the action regularly seems to occur without prior thought or intention. Impulsive actions seem spontaneous and may include, too, the various coughs, yawns, or other involuntary motor movements we seldom seem to think about before we do them. In people with motor disorders, such apparently involuntary actions may include tics of several kinds. A classification study by Jankovic (1997) describes two general types: “
Simple motor tics
involve only one group of muscles, causing a brief, jerk-like movement or a single, meaningless sound.
Complex motor tics
consist of coordinated, sequenced movements resembling normal motor acts or gestures that are inappropriately intense and timed. They may be seemingly nonpurposeful, such as head shaking or trunk bending, or they may seem purposeful, such as touching, throwing, hitting, jumping, and kicking” (269). People with tics sometimes feel them as voluntary or willed and sometimes perceive them as involuntary (Lang 1991), perhaps depending on the degree to which they judge their premonitions of the action as causal. When an action is of a class that usually seems to run off without prior thought, however, it would seem that people might learn to refrain from attributing that action to thought and thus come quite naturally to apprehend that action as unwilled.

It also makes sense that people might see actions that flow from their own dispositions or habits to be unwilled. If you always brush your teeth in the morning, or if you always give change to panhandlers, you might become aware that your disposition or habit is causing your behavior and so perceive it as unwilled. However, the evidence on this possibility is not clear. Kruglanski and Cohen (1973) found the opposite—that people perceived actions consistent with their dispositions to have been performed freely, whereas actions inconsistent with their dispositions were experienced as less free. In later work, though, Kruglanski (1975) observed that this finding might be an expression of a more profound tendency for people to feel they performed freely when they did things they wanted to do rather than doing things for extrinsic reasons. Perhaps people must be particularly aware of their disposition or habit to have it feel like a true cause of their behavior. Many of the things we do in a day may not feel compelled in any strong sense but rather as though we merely were carrying on as usual.

This issue is still open, then, because no one has really done a study in which the experience of will is measured when people do things with or without prior thought, and in a way that is consistent or inconsistent with their own well-entrenched habits. People do often report experiencing high levels of “will power” and self-satisfaction when they overcome unwanted habits such as overeating or smoking (Baumeister, Heatherton, and Tice 1995). In this case, thoughts of self-denial prior to the act of abstaining from a habit seem to be experienced as especially willful and efficacious (Herman and Polivy 1993).

The degree to which thoughts cause action is a common theme in the perception of self-control more generally (Bandura 1997). People often describe their “weakness of will” as a matter of succumbing to habits or impulses or demons, along with a concomitant failure to think the right thoughts at the right time that might have guided their actions in a desired direction. This conclusion makes sense if the experience of will is indeed computed in terms of the perceived exclusivity of thought as a cause of action. When internal psychological variables such as emotion, impulse, and habit vie with thought as plausible sources of behavior, will can suffer as a result. The absence of such internal causes, in turn, can bolster the attribution of action to the occurrence of appropriate action-relevant thoughts.