The Illusion of Conscious Will (24 page)

Desire for Automatism

Automatisms happen in part because we want them to happen. When people perform automatisms for the entertainment of themselves or others, with the Ouija board, for instance, it would be pretty disappointing to get only gibberish. The desire to do something unwilled can be responsible for a variety of ways in which people might avoid, deny, or reinterpret the usual features of willed action to recast it as unwilled.

Consider, for example, the cases of the complex or lengthy performance of automatism produced by automatic writers. If one desperately wanted to engage in automatic writing, one way to do this would be to just start trying it and then to look at what has happened and try to find evidence of automatism. In this way, it might be possible to find some hints of the desired involuntariness, particularly if one could take one or a few instances of apparent involuntariness as evidence that the whole production was an automatism. One might write a few loops and slip into a word, or a few letters and then finish up with another few letters that made sense. This episode as a whole might seem sort of involuntary. Given enough desire to produce the effect, it might be the beginning of a fine self-delusion.

11.
Thanks, Elvis Costello.

Ouija board spelling may work the same way. On moving the planchette around with a friend, one might include some movements that seem quite conscious and intentional (say, the first letter in a word) and others that seem less so (as when the planchette stops on a letter that one suddenly recognizes will make a sensible word from what has gone before). With a strong desire to produce an automatism, the speller could easily overlook the conscious choice of some or many letters and thereby overemphasize the role of involuntariness in the whole sequence, especially when the final letter is one that pops up to “make sense” of the sequence.

This happened when a group of students I had coaxed into a Ouija exercise one afternoon reported on what had made them write the word
Jew
on the letter board. Although they reported feeling that they had picked “j” randomly, one mentioned then “kind of wanting” the next letter to be “e” so as to make a sensible word of some kind. No one reported consciously anticipating the “w” that was chosen next, and in fact all expressed surprise. But they also went on to report that they felt the whole word
Jew
had occurred involuntarily—whereas this really happened clearly only for the last letter. The curious feature of all this was that the word was spelled right after one of the students, who happened to be Jewish, made fun of the Ouija session and left the room. Everyone’s recognition of the word and its reference to the absent student added greatly to the sense that the spelling was involuntary yet intelligent. More generally, it may be that enthusiasm and desire to believe in occult effects can contribute to complex automatisms of all kinds by leading automatism wannabes to gloss over intentional or accidental occurrences and to judge the whole agglomeration of subacts as involuntary merely on the basis of a few. The potential blindness created by the desire to believe is a danger in the interpretation of all these effects, both for the people who experience them and for the scientists who study them.

Another way that motivation for automatisms might work is by leading people to the strategy of consciously suppressing thinking about their intentions. In those automatisms that involve sustained performance rather than brief movements, and that also are supported by the individual’s strong motivation to behave involuntarily, a conscious attempt to suppress or neglect subsequent conscious intentions might be operative. If people can indeed rid their minds, even for a while, of the thoughts that they would normally associate with an action, they might be able to overcome the experience of will. Perhaps consciousness of an ongoing action such as writing can be suppressed, or in Hilgard’s (1986) terms, “intentionally excluded.”

Can people suppress their conscious intentions? There is a fair amount of evidence that people find it unusually difficult to suppress thoughts, at least for short periods of time in the laboratory (e.g., Wegner 1989; 1994; Wenzlaff and Wegner 2000). So at one level, the answer would seem to be no. Yet there are times when, at least for a while, it works. Right when you try to stop thinking of a white bear, for instance, it may come back in a flurry, or should I say a furry. But then if you keep it up, there may be a moment or even moments of peace—islands of time that are not populated by conscious thoughts or images of the bear. It may be that people trying to produce automatic writing, Ouija spelling, or similar automatisms are sometimes actively drawing their own attention away from the conscious intentions that come to mind, either by direct suppression or by other mental control techniques. They may be purposefully avoiding the conscious representation of their purposes, at least for a while until the thought returns. This could then yield a temporary reduction in the experience of will.

Resistance to Action

Curiously, a number of automatisms hold in common the attempt
not
to produce the target behavior. In these cases, the person who experiences the automatism seems to create it by
trying not to do it
. A distinct resistance to table turning, for instance, was noted by Carpenter (1888) as common among people who in fact produced this automatism. Similarly for dowsing, Vogt and Hyman (1959) observe, “The diviner typically will assert that he was trying to prevent the rod from moving at the moment of its action” (121). And the series of pendulum experiments conducted by Wegner, Ansfield, and Pilloff (1998) showed that counterintentional automatism is likely to occur and is particularly evident when people are given a simultaneous mental load, as when they are asked to count backward from 1,000 by 3s. The desire to resist the movement creates a tendency to perform that movement, and this tendency becomes functional primarily when the normal mental effort at resistance is subverted by a distracting mental task.

You may have noticed that the tendency to experience small automatisms in daily life follows this rule. When you stand looking down from a height, for example, it is only natural to resist any movement toward the edge. But this resistance sometimes prompts a bit of teetering, and you should be particularly careful at this time not to count backward from 1000 by 3s. The odd impulse you might experience to veer into oncoming traffic, to ride your bike into a rut, or in sports to make precisely the error you have been desperately hoping to overcome count as further examples of this perverse motion tendency. These instances suggest that resisting an action serves to induce what we know as ideomotor movement but, in this case, movement that follows from the unfortunately compelling idea of what
not
to do.

The analysis of this perversity of automatisms involves two ideas. First, we can point to the application of the consistency principle that must happen when a person tries not to do something. The thought the person has is
about
the action but it is entirely inconsistent with it. The thought is not to do the act. Thus, any performance of the action would seem not to have been caused by this thought. How could the thought not to do it be the cause? Actions that do occur under conditions of resistance are also, however, the focus of considerable expectant attention in that the person is primed to look for their occurrence. This means that the resistance produces conditions in which the resisted action will surely be interpreted as unwilled if it indeed occurs. In essence, resistance produces a circumstance that is ripe for the experience of automatism in that the individual is deeply focused on both the thought and action but at the same time is precisely opposed to the notion that the thought is the cause of the action.

As it happens, then, the resistance also actually enhances the likelihood that the action will occur because of the priming and ideomotor effect that accrue from thinking about what not to do. Attending to and remembering what shouldn’t be done are powerful primes for the behavior.

The reason resistance works in this way can be understood more completely through the theory of
ironic processes of mental control
(Wegner 1994; 1997). This theory was prompted initially by the observation that people have great difficulty suppressing an unwanted thought—that darned white bear.

In trying to understand what kind of mental system would make a suppressed thought come back to mind again and again, my colleagues and I did a series of experiments in which people were asked not to think about white bears, sex, and a variety of other things (Wegner 1989; 1992; 1994; Wegner et al. 1987). As it turned out, this research revealed a general principle: The mind appears to search, unconsciously and automatically, for whatever thought, action, or emotion the person is trying to control. A part of the mind, in other words, is looking surreptitiously for the white bear even as we are trying not to think about it. The theory goes on to suggest that this
ironic monitoring process
can actually create the mental contents for which it is searching. This is why the unwanted thought comes back to mind.

The ironic process theory turns out to explain a lot of otherwise perplexing effects: why we get depressed when we’re trying to be happy (Wegner, Erber, and Zanakos 1993), why we stay awake when we’re trying desperately to sleep (Ansfield, Wegner, and Bowser 1996), why we get anxious when we’re trying to relax (Wegner, Broome, and Blumberg 1997), and why we get distracted when we’re trying to concentrate (Wegner 1997), to name a few. What seems to be happening in these cases is that mental loads or stresses can come forward to undermine our normal mental control efforts. The automatic process whereby we monitor control failures is not as distractible as these conscious efforts, and so such distractions unleash it to yield the ironic opposite of what we are trying to create. In the case of action, this ironic, automatic process is the equivalent of a prime that enhances the production of ideomotor action. There is no new counterthought (in William James’s sense) to stop the action that is produced through suppression because the person is
already
engaged in trying to stop the action. So, ideomotor effects occur quite often for things we are trying to resist thinking or doing.

Taken together, the consistency principle and the ironic process theory provide a useful way of understanding many of the automatisms (see Ansfield and Wegner 1996). When people try not to do things, they very likely perceive those things as unwilled because such action is inconsistent with their avowed thought and yet they are prone to do the forbidden act nonetheless because of ironic processes. When mental load or distraction or stress arise, these ironic effects are particularly evident, and apparent automatisms abound.

Potential Outside Agency

Many automatisms seem to be accompanied by attributions of agency or will outside the self. James remarked in this regard, “The great
theoretic
interest of these automatic performances, whether speech or writing, consists in the questions they awaken as to the boundaries of our individuality. One of their most constant peculiarities is that the writing and speech announce themselves as from a personality other than the natural one of the writer, and often convince
him,
at any rate, that his organs are played upon by someone not himself” (1889, 45). The notion of spirit causation or outside agency has been an underlying integrative theme for most of the automatisms. In fact, the only automatisms we’ve considered that are not associated with such an attribution are those such as automatograph movement that produce effects invisible to the participant. Whenever people produce actions of which they are aware but that they don’t ascribe to their own mental causation, they seem to look elsewhere to attribute the action to an outside agent of some kind.

Does the perception of outside agency follow the occurrence of automatism or precede it? This is like asking, Do we think there are ghosts because of the noises in the attic, or do we hear noises in the attic because we think there are ghosts? In the first case, it could be that a person who observes a personal automatism looks for an explanation and, finding no feeling of doing in the self, then turns elsewhere to look for an outside agent. Alternatively, it may be that the theory of outside agency is an aid to the creation of the automatism. Given a strong belief in an outside agent, it might take far less convincing experiences of automatism for a person to decide that indeed the feeling of doing was gone. Both of these possibilities follow from the exclusivity principle. It makes sense that people might look for nonself causes of their own action if they are led by considerations of nonpriority or inconsistency to doubt their own agency. And in complementary fashion, people might begin to doubt their own causal agency when they have embraced an alternative theory of their action that suggests some other agent is its cause.

The remarkably strong link between automatism and the attribution of outside agency suggests that when we see an action, we immediately require that
someone
did it. If we cannot trace the origin of the action to our own mind because we have no recollection of conscious intention, because the priority of the intention is incorrect, or because the intention is inconsistent with the action, we nevertheless insist on the origination of the movement in
some
mind. This fundamental looseness in the connection between our behaviors and their author gives rise to a variety of fascinating phenomena that we take up later in the book—clever animals, trance channeling, and dissociative identity disorders. For now, it is important to recognize just the basic fact that actions cry out for explanation in terms of an agent. That agent can be found in the self when there is an illusion of conscious will, and elsewhere when the illusion breaks down. And the presence of any potential agent other than self can relieve us of the illusion that we consciously willed our action.