Chapter
Nine
Agency and free will
source directing them towards specific numbers. When later asked whether they
could guess something they had not been told about the experiment, only nine
out of sixty expressed some suspicion. In this task, participants gave higher rat-
ings for involuntariness, and took longer to choose their numbers, than in the
‘Mind-Reading Task’. In interviews, they spoke of how in the mind-influencing
condition the decision ‘just happened’ or the number ‘came out of nowhere. So
I felt like it . . . wasn’t my choice’ (Olson et al., 2016, p. 21). Some mentioned trying
to change the number and feeling they couldn’t, whether it was their own brain
being disobedient (‘my brain just told me no, that’s not the number’) or the power
of the machine dictating to them (‘once the magnet turned on . . . I got 4’), or a
voice or force or image trying to distract them.
Hints of a similar effect – causing something to happen without feeling respon-
sible – were found decades earlier in the ‘precognitive carousel’ (Dennett, 1991).
In 1963 the British neurosurgeon William Grey Walter tested patients who had
electrodes implanted in their motor cortex as part of their treatment. They sat in
front of a carousel slide projector and could press a button, whenever they liked,
to see the next slide. Unbeknown to them, the slide was advanced not by the
button-press but by amplified activity from their own motor cortex. The patients
were startled, saying that just as they were about to press the button, the slide
changed all by itself. When pressing the button, they also found themselves wor-
rying about accidentally changing the slide twice. Perhaps with a longer delay
between the cortical activation and the change of slide they would have noticed
nothing amiss, but sadly Grey Walter did not experiment with variable delays.
Nevertheless, without relying on the kind of artificial judgement about the timing
of will required in Libet’s experiment, this simple finding of surprise demonstrates
that under certain conditions we can actually be in control of our actions without
feeling that we are.
A similar mismatch occurs as a symptom of schizophrenia (Mullins and Spence,
2003). Many people with schizophrenia believe that their actions are controlled
by aliens, by unspecified creatures, or even by people they know. Others feel that
their own thoughts are controlled by evil forces, or inserted into their minds.
This disconnection between voluntary action and the feeling of volition is deeply
disturbing.
THE ILLUSION OF WILL
Can it happen the other way around? Can we have the sense of willing an action
for which we are not responsible? Magicians have long made observers believe
they have freely chosen a card or number, when in fact it was forced. Other experi-
ments by Olson and others show how easy it is to influence people’s choices with-
out them noticing, even if this involves the magician actively handling the card in
question (Shalom et al., 2013; Olson et al., 2015). The outcomes of our actions, and
how likely those outcomes are, can also affect how responsible we feel for them:
a heightened sense of agency may result from ‘nice surprises’, where an action
outcome is both positive and unexpected, without there being a symmetrically
reduced sense of agency for nasty surprises. On the other hand, an anticipated
sense of agency is lost when an outcome is predictably positive or (even more
so) negative: ‘affective context may change the experience of the nature and the
quality of the act’ (Christensen et al., 2016, p. 8). This has important consequences