The Illusion of Conscious Will Read Free Page B

time it happened to me was when I was shopping in a toy store with my family one Saturday. While my kids were taking a complete inventory of the stock, I eased up to a video game display and started fiddling with the joystick. A little monkey on the screen was eagerly hopping over barrels as they rolled toward him, and I got quite involved in moving him along and making him hop, until the phrase “Start Game” popped into view. I was under the distinct impression that I had started some time ago, but in fact I had been “playing” during a pre-game demo. Duped perhaps by the wobbly joystick and my unfamiliarity with the game, I had been fiddling for nothing, the victim of an illusion of control. And, indeed, when I started playing the game, I immediately noticed the difference. But for a while there, I was oblivious to my own irrelevance. I thought I was doing something that I really didn’t do at all.
    3 . An automatism is not the same thing as an automatic behavior, though the terms arise from the same beginnings (first mentioned by Hartley 1749). An automatism has been defined as an apparently voluntary behavior that one does not sense as voluntary (Carpenter 1888; Janet 1889; Solomons and Stein 1896), and we retain that usage here. More generally, though, a behavior might be automatic in other senses—it could be uncontrollable, unintended, efficient, or performed without awareness, for instance (Bargh 1994; Wegner and Bargh 1998).
    4 . This term is not entirely fitting in our analysis because the larger point to be made here is that all of the feeling of doing is an illusion. Strictly speaking, then, the whole left side of the table should be labeled illusory. But for our purposes, it is worth noting that the illusion is particularly trenchant when there is intention and the feeling of doing but in fact no action at all.
    The illusion of control is acute in our interactions with machines, as when we don’t know whether our push of an elevator button or a Coke machine selection lever has done anything yet sense that it has. The illusion is usually studied with judgments of contingency (e.g., Matute 1996) by having people try to tell whether they are causing a particular effect (for example, turning on a light) by doing something (say, pushing a but-ton) when the button and the light are not perfectly connected and the light may flash randomly by itself. But we experience the illusion, too, when we roll dice or flip coins in a certain way, hoping that we will thus be able to influence the outcome. It even happens sometimes that we feel we have contributed to the outcome of a sporting event on TV just by our presence in the room (“Did I just jinx them by running off to the fridge?”).
    The illusion that one has done something that one has not really done can also be produced through brute social influence, as illustrated in a study by Kassin and Kiechel (1996). These researchers falsely accused a series of participants in a laboratory reaction time task of damaging a computer by pressing the wrong key. All the participants were truly innocent and initially denied the charge, showing that they didn’t really experience damaging the computer. However, they were led later to remember having done it. A confederate of the experimenters claimed afterwards that she saw the participant hit the key or did not see the participant hit the key. Those whose “crime” was ostensibly witnessed became more likely to sign a confession (“I hit the ALT key and caused the pro-gram to crash. Data were lost.”), internalize guilt for the event, and even confabulate details in memory consistent with that belief—but only when the reaction time task was so fast that it made their error seem likely. We are not infallible sources of knowledge about our own actions and can be duped into thinking we did things when events conspire to make us feel responsible.
    Most of the things we do in everyday life seem to fall along the