- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
PRoFILe 9.1
Daniel Wegner (1948–2013)
Having started a degree in physics,
Daniel Wegner changed to psychol-
ogy as an anti-war statement in
1969, and became fascinated with
questions of self-control, agency,
and free will. He did numerous ex-
periments on how the illusion of free will is created, and
on the effects of trying not to think about something. ‘Try
not to think about a white bear’, he suggests.From the age of 14, Wegner helped his mother, a piano
teacher, run her music studio and taught piano twice a
week after school. He not only played the piano but had
four synthesisers for composing techno. When Professor
of Psychology at Harvard University, he started all his
classes with music. A colleague called him ‘one of the
funniest human beings on two legs’. He enjoyed studying
‘mindbugs’, those foibles of the mind that provide fun-
damental insights into how it works, and believed that
conscious will is an illusion.for how we understand legal responsibility: ‘Reduced responsi-
bility could correspond to a fact of human psychology, rather
than a hopeful story to avoid punishment’ (p. 9).
These examples reveal, from both directions, the important
difference between actually causing something to happen and
having the feeling of causing it. As Daniel Wegner puts it, ‘The
feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is’ (2002, p. 342),
and he has examined in detail the mechanisms that produce
this experience of conscious will.
Imagine that you are standing in front of a mirror with screens
arranged so that what look like your arms are actually someone
else’s. In your ears you hear instructions to move your hands,
and just afterwards the hands carry out those same actions.
Experiments showed that, in such a situation, people felt they
had willed the movements themselves.
This is ‘the mind’s best trick’, says Wegner (2003). Does con-
sciousness cause action? A lifetime of experiences leads us
to believe so, but in fact experiences of conscious will are
like other judgements of causality, and we can get the judge-
ment wrong. Indeed, his stark conclusion is that ‘Our sense of
being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of
being technically wrong all the time’ (2002, p. 342). American
psychologist Sam Harris agrees: ‘There is no question that our
attribution of agency can be gravely in error. I am arguing that
it always is’ (2012, p. 25).
Wegner proposes that ‘The experience of willing an act arises
from interpreting one’s thought as the cause of the act’ (Weg-
ner and Wheatley, 1999, p. 480), and that free will is an illusion
created in three steps. First, our brain sets about planning actions and carrying
them out. Second, although we are ignorant of the underlying mechanisms, we
become aware of thinking about the action and call this an intention. Finally, the
action occurs after the intention, and so we leap – erroneously – to the conclusion
that our intention caused the action.
This is similar to James’s theory of deliberate actions, proposed over a century
earlier. First, various reinforcing or inhibiting ideas compete with each other to
prompt a physical action – or not. Once one or the other finally wins, we say we
have decided. ‘The reinforcing and inhibiting ideas meanwhile are termed the
reasons or motives by which the decision is brought about’ (1890, ii, p. 528). Note
that both these theories explain how the powerful feeling that we willed an action
might come about, whether or not we have free will. Interestingly, James and
Wegner come to opposite opinions on this central question.
Wegner suggests that there are three requirements for creating the experience
of willing: the thought must occur before the action, the thought must be consis-
tent with the action, and the action must not be accompanied by other plausible
causes. To test these proposals, Wegner and Wheatley (1999) carried out an exper-
iment inspired by the traditional ouija board, which, like Faraday’s turning tables,
depends on unconscious muscular action. The ouija board (the name comes from‘Our sense of being a
conscious agent who
does things comes at a
cost of being technically
wrong all the time’
(Wegner, 2002, p. 342)
DID MY THOUGHTS
CAUSE THIS ACTION?‘Compatibilism is
‘wretched subterfuge
[. . .] petty word-jugglery’(Kant, 1788/1956,
pp. 189–190)