The Illusion of Conscious Will (52 page)

Perhaps the experience of involuntariness helps to shut down a mental process that normally gets in the way of control. And, oddly, this mental process may be the actual exercise of will. It may be that the feeling of involuntariness reduces the degree to which thoughts and plans about behavior come to mind. If behavior is experienced as involuntary, there may be a reduced level of attention directed toward discerning the next thing to do or, for that matter, toward rehearsing the idea of what one is currently doing. A lack of experienced will might thus influence the force of will in this way, reducing the degree to which attention is directed to the thoughts normally preparatory to action. And this could be good.

The ironic processes of mental control (Wegner 1994) suggest that there are times when it might be good to stop planning and striving. It is often possible to try too hard. The initiation of plans for action and for thought is normally a useful enterprise, of course, as it typically leads to the exercise of successful operations of mental control. We plan to stand up and we do so, we intend to concentrate and we do so, we intend to relax, to sleep, to eat, to go outside, or to write a letter, and we do so. However, sometimes the formation of a conscious plan leads to a paradoxical effect—the implementation of the plan creates the opposite of what was planned. The example mentioned at several points in this book is the case of thought suppression; when we try not to think of something, we seem to create an automatic and ironic tendency to think of that very thing. The usual usefulness of our planning and intention procedures makes us go ahead and try to do many things, even those that have inherent ironies.

This ironic effect can undermine effective action and thought in a variety of domains, particularly when people try to perform the planned actions under mental load or stress. The conscious desire to sleep, for example, can cause wakefulness under stress (Ansfield, Wegner, and Bowser 1996); the conscious desire to forget can cause remembering, particularly under mental load (Macrae et al. 1997); the conscious desire to relax can cause anxiety during stress (Wegner, Broome, and Blumberg 1997); the conscious desire to be fair can cause stereotyping and prejudiced behavior under mental load (Macrae et al. 1994). Many of our favorite goals, when pursued consciously, can be undermined by distractions and stressors to yield not just the failure of goal attainment but the ironic opposite of that attainment. We achieve exactly what we most desired not to do.

Think of this now in the case of hypnosis. It may be that some of the special abilities accruing from hypnosis arise because the hypnotic state bypasses the ironies of mental control (King and Council 1998; Bowers and Woody 1996). In essence, hypnosis may save us from the foibles of the normal conscious willing process. When goals are not consciously salient, people may be able to achieve those goals more readily. The mechanistic processes of mind come forward to cause the desired behavior without the ironic monitoring processes that normally yield the counterintentional lapses that are inherent in conscious control. The desire to distract oneself from pain, for example, normally initiates a monitoring process that sensitizes one to the very pain one is hoping to ignore (Cioffi 1993; Cioffi and Holloway 1993; Wegner 1994). If this conscious desiring process can somehow be dismantled, then the ironic return of pain to mind might be sidestepped as well. A similar analysis can be made for the unusual mental control of memory that occurs in hypnosis. The conscious desire not to remember will normally highlight any to-be-forgotten items, making them all the more memorable. In hypnosis, perhaps the processes of conscious desiring are undermined, yielding an enhanced ability to forget (Wenzlaff and Wegner 2000).

The hypnotized person has the unique ability to achieve certain sorts of control over the mind and body that are not within the capability of the waking individual. It is as though in hypnosis a normal layer of conscious controlling apparatus is cleared away to yield a more subtle and effective set of techniques. A variety of self-control techniques that work without the exertion of conscious will—such as the response to placebos and expectations (Kirsch 1999)—may be models for the sorts of control that become available in hypnosis. People seem to experience strong influences of ideas, as has been found in studies of unconscious priming among people in waking states (e.g., Bargh and Chartrand 1999). These effects may be amplified, or at least uncovered, in hypnosis because of a general relaxation of attention to conscious thoughts about action. By this analysis, hypnosis may leave people conscious in the general sense but not conscious of their thoughts about action. As a result, their tendency to check or inhibit their unconsciously primed behaviors, and their tendency to undermine their own conscious purposes through ironic processes, may be set aside during the hypnotic state (Kirsch and Lynn 1999; Lynn 1997). It may be that in this special sense the behavior of the hypnotized person may not only be an automatism (occurring without the experience of conscious will) but also be automatic (occurring without prior conscious thought).

Hypnotized behavior may be special for the fact that it goes
unmonitored
. Most of what we consciously set out to do, as when we decide to walk across a room with a full cup of coffee, is something we watch for success or failure. We are checking all the while as we walk to see if that coffee is remaining unspilled. And in a perverse sense it is the very consciousness of this goal not to spill that creates the precariousness of the action, adding just a bit of the jitters that seem to make us ready to tilt it onto the floor. There are times when we are thinking of other things or are not conscious of spilling, however; at these times we may be remark-ably adept with a cup that is otherwise just as spillable as the first. In hypnosis, it could be that the lack of an experience of will renders our conscious willing process less active, reducing the ironies of conscious willing and so enhancing certain aspects of mental control.

Just how the reduction in an experience of will might influence the force of will is an open matter at this point. A variety of theories and research findings suggest that lapses in the perception of control can in-duce reductions in the exertion of control (Bandura 1997a; Langer 1983; Seligman 1975), and this might be how such things happen. As a rule, such theories have taken a motivational stance, suggesting that the lack of a feeling of conscious will reduces the person’s empirical will by undermining the desire for control. It may be, though, that the lack of a feeling of conscious will reduces the degree to which thoughts about action occur in consciousness at all, or the degree to which they are given conscious attention even if they are generally accessible. Feelings of in-voluntariness may reduce the person’s attention to those thoughts that normally would form the basis for exertions of the force of will.

The Circle of Influence

Hypnosis is a social interaction. This observation is a fitting point of closure for a chapter that has emphasized the social influences on individual mind and action. Social influences are very seldom unidirectional because they happen not just in a one-shot event but in a repeated sequence of events that create pathways for feedback and transformation. When you yell at your friend, for example, there is a one-shot version of the story in which you do the yelling and he does the hearing (and suffering or shrugging or wincing). But in episode two of this story, the friend has a reaction, which in turn influences you. If your friend breaks down weeping, you feel guilty and yell less next time. If your friend yells back, you might yell back immediately, and so on. The circle of influence means that one influence sets off a chain of events that influences everyone.

Circular influence happens regularly in hypnosis, and this process has had a lot to do with shaping the modern format of hypnosis—what we think it is and does. A fine example of this was the development of the strange set of behaviors observed by Jean Charcot in his early clinical uses of hypnosis. In 1862, Charcot became physician to the Salpêtrière, the Paris asylum for women, and inherited the supervision of a ward that housed epileptics and hysterics (Gauld 1992). The hysterics, because of their fine imitative tendencies and, in this case, their exposure to people with epilepsy, also tended to have seizures. Charcot eventually took up hypnosis as a treatment for both groups, finding seizures and “crises” in most of his patients, and developed an extraordinarily detailed theory of the effects of hypnosis. Apparently, people responded to hypnotism in a series of stages, progressing from catalepsy (pliable immobility) to lethargy to somnambulism (suggestibility). Charcot gave regular demonstrations of his findings and had a number of “star” patients who performed almost as if on stage. Catalepsy was particularly entertaining because patients could be arranged into positions they would hold indefinitely, thus replacing certain items of furniture.

The Thing strikes again. In an attack on Charcot’s work, Delboeuf (1886) suggested that the entire display of symptoms was contrived. He proposed that all this occurred because the effect of suggestion passes not only from hypnotist to subject but from subject to hypnotist. One patient with certain remarkable symptoms can create beliefs in the hypnotist about the forms that hypnotic manifestations will take. These can then be transmitted unwittingly as suggestions to other patients, who then act so as to confirm the hypnotist’s expectations. An epidemic of standard responses to hypnosis results. The circle of influence can also promote a kind of social memory. Previous performances by the subject are recalled by the hypnotist and suggested again, then to be performed again by the subject. Thus, the hypnotist develops the conviction that there is a pattern in the subject’s behavior when none would have arisen otherwise. It is easy to see how the hypnotist’s theory of the Thing changes the Thing, which then changes the hypnotist’s theory—a cycle that can move along to produce an evolving picture of hypnosis. Because of this process, hypnosis doesn’t seem to hold still.

The circle of influence is also evident in everyday social interaction. The way in which groups and cultures move along, changing their expectations of each other and themselves, produces an odd situation we might call the “suggested society.” People become what they think they are, or what they find that others think they are, in a process of negotiation that snowballs constantly. In some of this influence, the computation of will is correct in that people come to experience will that maps accurately onto the influence of their own thoughts on their behavior. In other cases of such influence, perhaps the larger portion, the experience of will does not signal very accurately the actual causal relations linking people together. The circle of influence that occurs in reality is accompanied by a vaguely similar set of causal relations that are consciously apprehended by the individuals involved. The causal influences people have on them-selves and each other, as they are understood, capture only a small part of the actual causal flux of social relations (Wegner and Bargh 1998).

In
Unconscious Influence,
Horace Bushnell spoke of this phenomenon wisely: “Men are ever touching unconsciously the springs of motion in each other; one man, without thought or intention or even consciousness of the fact, is ever leading some others after him. . . . There are two sorts of influence belonging to Man: that which is active and voluntary, and that which is unconscious; that which we exert purposely, or in the endeavor to sway another, as by teaching, by argument, by persuasion, by threats, by offers and promises, and that which flows out from us, unawares to ourselves” (quoted in Carpenter 1888, 541).

In hypnosis, conscious and unconscious processes of influence live parallel lives. The hypnotist and subject view the event at the conscious level, appreciating it as “the subject obeys the conscious will of the hypnotist.” This much of hypnosis can be understood as a transformation in the way that the subject’s apparent mental causation is viewed by both participants. The subject experiences less will and more compulsion, and the hypnotist may feel empowered and more willful in directing the subject’s actions. These conscious experiences of will are layered over a set of actual causal changes, however, that are poorly understood by both participants and only beginning to be understood by scientists. At this level, we know now that in certain subjects who seem to have this ability, a subtle sequence of events in social interaction brings about changes in the subject’s mind, brain, and capacity for control.

9

The Mind’s Compass

Although the experience of conscious will is not evidence of mental causation, it does signal personal authorship of action to the individual and so influences both the sense of achievement and the acceptance of moral responsibility
.

Volition . . . is an emotion
indicative
of physical changes, not a
cause
of such changes. . . . The soul stands to the body as the bell of a clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when struck. . . . We are conscious automata.

T. H. Huxley,
Methods and Results
(1910)

Does the compass steer the ship? In some sense, you could say that it does, because the pilot makes reference to the compass in determining whether adjustments should be made to the ship’s course. If it looks as though the ship is headed west into the rocky shore, a calamity can be avoided with a turn north into the harbor. But, of course, the compass does not steer the ship in any physical sense. The needle is just gliding around in the compass housing, doing no actual steering at all. It is thus tempting to relegate the little magnetic pointer to the class of epiphenomena—things that don’t really matter in determining where the ship will go.

Conscious will is the mind’s compass. As we have seen, the experience of consciously willing action occurs as the result of an interpretive system, a course-sensing mechanism that examines the relations between our thoughts and actions and responds with “I willed this” when the two correspond appropriately. This experience thus serves as a kind of compass, alerting the conscious mind when actions occur that are likely to be the result of one’s own agency. The experience of will is therefore an indicator, one of those gauges on the control panel to which we refer as we steer. Like a compass reading, the feeling of doing tells us something about the operation of the ship. But also like a compass reading, this information must be understood as a conscious experience, a candidate for the dreaded “epiphenomenon” label. Just as compass readings do not steer the boat, conscious experiences of will do not cause human actions.