scientificamerican | It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm
clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the
fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents,
consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But what does science
have to say about the true source of this experience?
In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago,
the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary
proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they
suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that
our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no
causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to
think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did.
But there’s a mystery here. Suppose, as Wegner and Wheatley propose,
that we observe ourselves (unconsciously) perform some action, like
picking out a box of cereal in the grocery store, and then only
afterwards come to infer that we did this intentionally. If this is the
true sequence of events, how could we be deceived into believing that we
had intentionally made our choice before the consequences of
this action were observed? This explanation for how we think of our
agency would seem to require supernatural backwards causation, with our
experience of conscious will being both a product and an apparent cause
of behavior.
In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom
and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle.
Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are
rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was
actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously
perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.
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