Do Conscious Thoughts Cause Behavior?

Abstract

Everyday intuitions suggest full conscious control of behavior, but evidence of unconscious causation and automaticity has sustained the contrary view that conscious thought has little or no impact on behavior. We review studies with random assignment to experimental manipulations of conscious thought and behavioral dependent measures. Topics include mental practice and simulation, anticipation, planning, reflection and rehearsal, reasoning, counterproductive effects, perspective taking, self-affirmation, framing, communication, and overriding automatic responses. The evidence for conscious causation of behavior is profound, extensive, adaptive, multifaceted, and empirically strong. However, conscious causation is often indirect and delayed, and it depends on interplay with unconscious processes. Consciousness seems especially useful for enabling behavior to be shaped by nonpresent factors and by social and cultural information, as well as for dealing with multiple competing options or impulses. It is plausible that almost every human behavior comes from a mixture of conscious and unconscious processing.

The benefits of simply observing: Mindful attention modulates the link between motivation and behavior.

“…At best, conscious processes seem to produce outcomes that are neither better nor worse than the outcomes produced by unconscious processes. More recently, though, proponents of conscious thought have started to point out the beneficial ways in which conscious thought affects behavior, often by modulating unconscious processes (e.g., Baumeister, Masicampo, & Vohs, 2011).…”

Questions for a Science of Moral Responsibility

“…For example, do the results show that decisions are deterministically caused by neural events (Roskies, 2006(Roskies, , 2011(Roskies, , 2014Balaguer, 2009;Haynes, 2011;Misirlisoy & Haggard, 2014;Nahmias, 2014;Fischborn, 2016Fischborn, , 2017Roskies & Nahmias, 2017)? Do they show that decisions, intentions, or conscious mental states in general do not play the role they are supposed to do in the generation of actions (Nahmias, 2002;Wegner, 2002;Pockett, Banks & Gallagher, 2006;Gomes, 2007;Mele, 2009;Baumeister, Masicampo & Vohs, 2011;Schlosser, 2012;Marques, 2015;Asma, forthcoming)? These questions, once again, share the assumption that science can help to tell whether the conditions of moral responsibility are ever satisfied.…”

Feeling and Thinking about the Future: Offline Metacognition in Decision-Making

“…Firstly, numerous psychological and neuroscientific studies show that people decide and act differently in "unconscious" compared to "conscious" experimental conditions [30][31][32], especially when participants carry out more complex tasks. And even though such research is mainly about correlations between unconscious/conscious activity and behaviour (including decisions) and thus not about "true" causality, most proponents of epiphenomenalism "from the empirical circles", such as psychology or cognitive neuroscience, should accept the mentioned research as valid.…”