Are our actions mostly motivated unconsciously?
by Tibor R. Machan
Here is a brief report, courtesy of Science and World Science staff (July 1, 2010)
Philosophers since ancient times have struggled with the question of whether humans have any free will. With forces such as God or molecular interactions—de pending on whom you asked and when—said to ultimately control every thing, can humans really make any decisions “independently”?
Some scientists say recent research validates such concerns, casting doubt on the common human feeling that we are able to make up our own minds, at least in the way we like to think.
In the July 2 is sue of the research journal Science, Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in The Netherlands discuss research suggesting our subconscious thoughts can manipulate our goals and motivations much more than scientists have ever imagined.
“Although it is often taken for granted that goal pursuit originates in conscious decisions, it can also arise from unconscious sources,” the pair wrote.
Recent findings show that the human brain is often steps ahead of its owner, Custers and Aarts explained: the brain prepares the action well be fore any conscious thoughts instruct it to do so.
The scientists cited work by re searchers such as John Bargh at Yale University and Peter Gollwitzer at New York University starting in 2001. Bargh and colleagues showed how motivation toward a goal could arise without conscious awareness, Custer and Aarts wrote. “Students were seated at a table to work on two seemingly unrelated language puzzles. For some students, the first puzzle included words related to achievement (such as win or achieve), and for others it did not. Students who were exposed to achievement words were found to outperform the others on the second puzzle.”
Custer and Aarts present a theory based on the idea that the human brain is designed for action, continuously and subconsciously processing information relevant to our behavior, so that it is constantly ready to “instruct” its owner how to deal with the opportunities and challenges posed by our environments.
The framework the authors propose for this subconscious decision-making process, they said, helps reveal just how thoroughly these unconscious thoughts permeate our everyday lives.
“Earlier research has shown that action goals, such as moving a finger, that were initially consciously set are unconsciously prepared before they are acted on,” they wrote. “The literature reviewed here suggests that the unconscious nature of the will has an even more pervasive impact on our life. Goals far more complex than finger movements, can guide behavior without being consciously set first, when they them selves are activated outside conscious awareness.”
In my view this is mostly wrong, and here is why:
The contention that because some unconscious motives are detectable when one thinks one is deciding consciously most of our conduct is unconsciously motivated is hasty—it commits what I call the blow up fallacy (taking a tiny picture and applying it to everything). As the saying goes, one swallow does not a spring make.
One can test this point thus: Decide that after you see a random event, e.g., a purple car coming down the road, you will beep your horn and then wait and when you do see such a car, you beep your horn but not before. If the beeping were motivated unconsciously, this could not happen. One needs to be conscious of the purple car before beeping the horn, as per one's decision.
Hundreds of other simple experiments confirm the point. Whatever researchers such as John Bargh at Yale University and Peter Gollwitzer at New York University—and previously Benjamin Libet (as well as Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in The Netherlands)—have recorded must cover but a tiny fraction of human action, actions that are habitual, certainly not when it comes to complex behaviors (such as constitute most of what we do, including carrying out experiments and writing papers about them). These come about unplanned, unanticipated, and require conscious attention and control. Sure, there are many routine actions plans for which can be tucked away in the subconscious—scratching one’s head, removing one’s pajamas each morning, adding spices to the soup one is cooking up. But writing reports on experiments, giving a birthday gift, organizing chapters of a book, designing a home, etc., these and millions of others presuppose conscious attention and control.
So the notion that unconscious thoughts thoroughly “permeate our everyday lives” is unjustified.
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