Chapter
Nine
Agency and free will
the French and German for ‘yes’) is used to try to contact spirits. Several people
place their fingers on an upturned glass in the middle of a ring of letters and
the glass then moves, spelling out words. Like Faraday’s spiritualist sitters, people
are usually sure they did not push the glass. But in Wegner’s version, participants
were explicitly instructed to exert control over the board’s movements. The glass
was replaced by a 20 cm square board mounted on a computer mouse, and this
moved a cursor over a screen showing about fifty small objects. Fifty-one under-
graduates were tested and each was, unbeknown to them, paired with a confed-
erate. We’ll call the two people Dan (the participant) and Jane (the confederate).
Dan and Jane sat facing each other across a small table and were asked to place
their fingers on the little board and to circle the cursor over the objects. They
were asked to stop every 30 seconds or so, and then rate how strongly they had
intended to make that particular stop. Each trial would consist of 30 seconds of
movement, during which they might hear words through headphones, and 10
seconds of music, during which they were to stop. Dan was led to believe that
Jane was receiving different words from his, but actually she heard instructions to
make particular movements.
On four trials she was told to stop on a particular object (e.g. swan) in the middle
of Dan’s music. Meanwhile Dan heard the word ‘swan’ 30 seconds before, 5 sec-
onds before, 1 second before, or 1 second after Jane stopped on the swan. In all
other trials the stops were not forced. The results confirmed what Wegner calls
the ‘priority principle’: that effects are experienced as willed when the relevant
thoughts occur just before them. On forced trials, participants gave the highest
rating for ‘I intended to make the stop’ when the word came 1 or 5 seconds before
the stop, and the lowest when it occurred 30 seconds before or 1 second after.
Wegner’s principles might underpin the illogical feeling many people have that
they can magically influence events they care about. In further studies, he and
his colleagues gave people the impression that they had harmed someone else
through a voodoo hex (Pronin et al., 2006). The effect was stronger among those
who had first been induced to harbour evil thoughts about their victim. During
sports events, people often superstitiously wear team kit, or urge their favour-
ite player to run a bit faster or score the crucial goal, even if they are watching
on TV and their encouragements can make no difference. In studies of baseball
shooting, observers were more likely to think they had influenced a friend’s suc-
cess if they had first visualised success (Pronin et al., 2006). In these ways, the
mechanisms that give rise to the feeling of willing can even extend to ‘everyday
magical powers’ that we know are impossible. We may well do these things to
feel more involved and less helpless as our team battles it out. Nonetheless, we
often experience the sense that maybe, just maybe, really wanting something
to happen could make a difference. Perhaps this impression is equally mistaken
when it applies to our own actions. ‘Believing that our conscious thoughts cause
our actions is an error based on the illusory experience of will – much like believ-
ing that a rabbit has indeed popped out of an empty hat’ (Wegner and Wheatley,
1999, p. 490). For Wegner, the illusion of will really is like magic and arises for the
same reason. Yet, once again, we must remember that an illusion is not something
that does not exist, and illusions can have powerful effects. Wegner concludes:The fact is, it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we
have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems wefor 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)