Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior? 333 • PS62CH13-Baumeister ARI 10 November 2010 7:0
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
PS62CH13-Baumeister ARI 10 November 2010 7:0 ANNUAL Do Conscious Thoughts REVIEWS Further Click here for quick links to Annual Reviews content online, Cause Behavior? including: tOther articles in this volume t Top cited articles Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, t Top downloaded articles t0VSDPNQSFIFOTJWFTFBSDI and Kathleen D. Vohs Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2011. 62:331–61 Key Words The Annual Review of Psychology is online at consciousness, action, control, automaticity, dual process psych.annualreviews.org This article’s doi: Abstract 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131126 Everyday intuitions suggest full conscious control of behavior, but evi- Copyright c 2011 by Annual Reviews. ! dence of unconscious causation and automaticity has sustained the con- All rights reserved trary view that conscious thought has little or no impact on behavior. 0066-4308/11/0110-0331$20.00 We review studies with random assignment to experimental manipula- by ${individualUser.displayName} on 02/05/11. For personal use only. tions of conscious thought and behavioral dependent measures. Topics Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2011.62:331-361. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org include mental practice and simulation, anticipation, planning, reflec- tion and rehearsal, reasoning, counterproductive effects, perspective taking, self-affirmation, framing, communication, and overriding au- tomatic responses. The evidence for conscious causation of behavior is profound, extensive, adaptive, multifaceted, and empirically strong. However, conscious causation is often indirect and delayed, and it de- pends on interplay with unconscious processes. Consciousness seems especially useful for enabling behavior to be shaped by nonpresent fac- tors and by social and cultural information, as well as for dealing with multiple competing options or impulses. It is plausible that almost every human behavior comes from a mixture of conscious and unconscious processing. 331 PS62CH13-Baumeister ARI 10 November 2010 7:0 behavior does not” has been resoundingly an- Contents swered: “Behavior does not originate with a conscious decision” (p. 52). In their model of INTRODUCTION.................. 332 behavior, they assign “no role for conscious- DEFINITIONS AND ness”(p.52).Asimilarlynegativeassessmentled THEORETICAL ISSUES. 333 Bargh (1997a) to speculate, “there ultimately MENTAL SIMULATION, is no future for conscious processing in ac- MENTAL PRACTICE . 335 counts of the mind, in the sense of free will ANTICIPATING, PLANNING, and choice” (p. 52). Wilson (2002) summa- INTENDING.................... 336 rized a widespread view by saying, “The causal REPLAYING, INTERPRETING, role of conscious thought has been vastly over- REFLECTING ON PAST stated” (p. 107), and although he stopped short EVENTS......................... 338 of saying it is zero, he clearly thought it was REASONING, DECIDING, slight. As to how slight, only Bargh (1997b) has SOLVING PROBLEMS . 340 been bold enough to furnish a precise estimate: COUNTERPRODUCTIVE, “Our psychological reactions from moment to MALADAPTIVE EFFECTS . 342 moment...are 99.44% automatic” (p. 243). MENTALLY SIMULATING What then is conscious thought all about? OTHERS’ PERSPECTIVES . 344 Thomas Huxley articulated the “steam whistle MANIPULATIONS OF hypothesis” over a century ago (1874). It says SELF-REGARD, conscious thought resembles the steam whis- SELF-AFFIRMATION............ 345 tle on a train locomotive: It derives from and MENTAL FRAMING AND reveals something about activity inside the en- GOALSETTING................. 347 gine, but it has no causal impact on moving COMMUNICATION AND the train. This view was echoed by Wegner & MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING. 347 Bargh (1998): “Conscious intentions signal the OVERRIDING AUTOMATIC direction of action—but without causing the ac- RESPONSES..................... 349 tion” (p. 456), though elsewhere these authors DISCUSSION . 351 took a more nuanced view. Wegner (2002) re- vived the steam whistle hypothesis but with a different metaphor: “Just as compass readings do not steer the boat, conscious experiences INTRODUCTION of will do not cause human actions” (p. 318). Consciousness is one of the defining features of Dijksterhuis et al. (2005) calculated that con- by ${individualUser.displayName} on 02/05/11. For personal use only. human life and experience, yet a perennial chal- scious thought cannot accomplish much in Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2011.62:331-361. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org lenge to explain. In recent years there has been comparison to the unconscious mind. They a sharp rise in evidence of unconscious, auto- concluded that “strictly speaking, conscious matic processes that has led some to question thought does not exist” (p. 81) because what whether conscious thought has any influence on seems to be conscious thought is merely some behavior at all. The assumption that conscious calculations performed unconsciously that hap- thought is an epiphenomenon was asserted ag- pen to cross into awareness. Jeannerod (2006) gressively during the behaviorist era and has had concluded that in relation to action, conscious- a resurgence due to recent studies of automatic- ness is “a post hoc phenomenon,” being too ity and the brain. slow to initiate or control action and therefore The detractors have dominated recent de- mainly useful “for the cognitive rearrangement bates about consciousness. Dijksterhuis et al. after the action is completed, e.g., for justify- (2007) asserted that the question of “what be- ing its results”; like the steam whistle, “it reads havior requires a conscious decision and what behavior rather than starting it” (pp. 36–37). 332 Baumeister Masicampo Vohs · · PS62CH13-Baumeister ARI 10 November 2010 7:0 Skepticism about consciousness was partic- The question of conscious influence is im- ularly fueled by Libet’s (1985) research. In his portant in multiple spheres. Philosophical and studies, participants watched a highly precise psychological efforts to understand the mind clock and recorded when they made a conscious turn heavily on whether conscious thought is decision to initiate a finger movement. Brain the commanding force, an occasional resource, wave activity showed a sharp increase prior or a mere steam whistle. Moral and legal judg- to the conscious decision. Although the inter- ments of responsibility sometimes depend on pretations of these findings have been debated whether there was conscious causation. C.D. sharply (e.g., Mele 2009), many have taken Cameron, B.K. Payne, & J. Knobe (unpub- them as further support for the steam whistle lished data) found that participants mostly con- theory. Roediger et al. (2008), for example, demned people whose judgments and decisions said Libet’s findings contradict the “naıve¨ were tinged by racial bias, but such condem- view” that “conscious intention causes action. nation was muted among participants who had Clearly conscious intention cannot cause an been led to regard racial bias as unconscious. action if a neural event that precedes and cor- relates with the action comes before conscious intention” (2008, p. 208). Writing in a volume DEFINITIONS AND entitled Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?, THEORETICAL ISSUES Pockett (2006) said Libet’s work leads to the Some debates become interminable because “reasonable conclusion that consciousness is questions are ambiguously phrased and con- not the immediate cause of this simple kind cepts inadequately defined, so that debaters talk of behavior” (p. 21) and then went on to say it past each other. Although our limited space pre- does not cause complex behavior either. cludes a rigorous consideration of all concepts, Another line of work suggests that conscious several points are crucial to our approach. thoughts may have effects on behavior, but First, nearly all theories about conscious- these are largely maladaptive or at best unreli- ness distinguish two forms or levels. The more able. For example, many emotion theories still basic one, phenomenal awareness, corresponds assume that the purpose of emotion is to in- roughly to what humans share with most other stigate behavior directly, but evidence of such mammals, including subjective experience (e.g., effects is weak and ambiguous, and many of the of sensations). The other, conscious thought, is effects suggest that emotion makes people do assumed to be mostly unique to humans, and it impulsive, stupid, and self-defeating things (see includes reflection, reasoning, and temporally Baumeister et al. 2007a). extended sense of self. Our focus is on conscious Thus, the conscious mind seemingly has thought. Functions of phenomenal awareness by ${individualUser.displayName} on 02/05/11. For personal use only. many enemies and few friends in today’s psy- have been discussed elsewhere (e.g., Morsella Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2011.62:331-361. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org chology. Although the skeptics and critics have 2005). been highly vocal, evidence supporting a causal Second, we suspect conscious processes role for consciousness has quietly accumulated work in concert with unconscious ones. The in various places. The present review under- proximal causes of muscle movements are neu- takes to assemble the best such evidence that ronal firings, which are unconscious. More we could cover within the space allocated and broadly, the argument that “if unconscious then evaluate it. If the evidence we could find thoughts cause X, then conscious thoughts