Environmental influence on unconscious volition

Eben Harrel summarizes a paper in an upcoming issue of Science giving exposition to the role of unconscious processing in everyday activities:

Studies have found that upon entering an office, people behave more competitively when they see a sharp leather briefcase on the desk, they talk more softly when there is a picture of a library on the wall, and they keep their desk tidier when there is a vague scent of cleaning agent in the air. But none of them are consciously aware of the influence of their environment.

There may be few things more fundamental to human identity than the belief that people are rational individuals whose behavior is determined by conscious choices. But recently psychologists have compiled an impressive body of research that shows how deeply our decisions and behavior are influenced by unconscious thought, and how greatly those thoughts are swayed by stimuli beyond our immediate comprehension.

In an intriguing review in the July 2 edition of the journal Science, published online Thursday, Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in the Netherlands lay out the mounting evidence of the power of what they term the “unconscious will.” “People often act in order to realize desired outcomes, and they assume that consciousness drives that behavior. But the field now challenges the idea that there is only a conscious will. Our actions are very often initiated even though we are unaware of what we are seeking or why,” Custers says.

It is not only that people’s actions can be influenced by unconscious stimuli; our desires can be too. In one study cited by Custers and Aarts, students were presented with words on a screen related to puzzles — crosswords, jigsaw piece, etc. For some students, the screen also flashed an additional set of words so briefly that they could only be detected subliminally. The words were ones with positive associations, such as beach, friend or home. When the students were given a puzzle to complete, the students exposed unconsciously to positive words worked harder, for longer, and reported greater motivation to do puzzles than the control group.

The same priming technique has also been used to prompt people to drink more fluids after being subliminally exposed to drinking-related words, and to offer constructive feedback to other people after sitting in front of a screen that subliminally flashes the names of their loved ones or occupations associated with caring like nurse. In other words, we are often not even consciously aware of why we want what we want.

John Bargh of Yale University, who 10 years ago predicted many of the findings discussed by Custers and Aarts in a paper entitled “The Unbearable Automaticity of Being,” called the Science paper a “landmark — nothing like this has been in Science before. It’s a large step toward overcoming the skepticism surrounding this research.”

Braugh isn’t the only theorist in this vein.  The Illusion of Conscious Will  by Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner is  one of the most-discussed texts of free will literature of the 21st century. I know this because I’ve never had the chance to read it; Raynor Memorial Library’s only copy was either checked out or reserved for two solid years, corresponding with the latter half of my undergraduate career. (Now that I’ve graduated and moved out of Milwaukee, it is, of course, now available.)

But back to Harrel’s piece. Though the author doesn’t himself use the term, the research under discussion research also lends more evidence to the thesis of embodied congnition:

But Bargh says the field has actually moved beyond the use of subliminal techniques, and studies show that unconscious processes can even be influenced by stimuli within the realms of consciousness, often in unexpected ways. For instance, his own work has shown that people sitting in hard chairs are more likely to be more rigid in negotiating the sales price of a new car, they tend to judge others as more generous and caring after they hold a warm cup of coffee rather than a cold drink, and they evaluate job candidates as more serious when they review their résumés on a heavy clipboard rather than a light one.

“These are stimuli that people are conscious of — you can feel the hard chair, the hot coffee — but were unaware that it influenced them. Our unconscious is active in many more ways than this review suggests,” he says.

All this brings to mind John Dewy’s critique of traditional accounts of mind. He claimed the fundamental error underlying previous theories of consciousness and knowledge was their passivity; humans weren’t the detatched observers of the world as previous epistemologists (supposedly) characterized them, but active organisms assertively seeking to fulfill needs in their environment, and in so doing interacting with and changing that environment. What he didn’t seem to have recongized just how far the environment impresses on us, how much it changes (dictates?) our behavior.

Going forward, I can imagine embodied cognition theorists frequently fending off accusations of behaviorism.

The proper response to realizing the unreality of free will

A moment of contemplative awe before getting on with a friendly life. (Language NSFW):

The fraught field of animal sexuality studies

Via Jerry Coyne:

Today’s New York Times Magazine has a long article by Jon Mooallem, “Can Animals Be Gay?,” that discusses recent observations of same-sex sexual behavior in animals.  It’s a pretty good piece, showing the minefield that is animal research on homosexuality.  On one hand you have researchers with a more ideological agenda, studying or describing phenomena in the hopes that they’ll somehow vindicate gay behavior in humans (see my review of Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow); on the other hand are researchers who explicitly disavow any connection between their studies of same-sex sexual behavior in animals and gay behavior in humans.

The polarization around this work is equally strong among laypeople.  Mooallem describes one study of a mutation that produces same-sex courtship in Drosophila males:

In 2007, for instance, the University of Illinois neurobiologist David Featherstone and several colleagues, while searching for new drug treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease, happened upon a discovery: a specific protein mutation in the brain of male fruit flies made the flies try to have sex with other males. What the mutation did, more specifically, was tweak the fruit flies’ sense of smell, making them attracted to male pheromones — mounting other males was the end result. To Featherstone, how fruit flies smell doesn’t seem to have anything to do with human sexuality. “We didn’t think about the societal implications — we’re just a bunch of dorky biologists,” he told me recently. Still, after publishing a paper describing this mutation, he received a flood of phone calls and e-mail messages presuming that he could, and would, translate this new knowledge into a way of changing people’s sexual orientations. One e-mail message compared him with Dr. Josef Mengele, noting “the direct line that leads from studies like this to compulsory eradication of gay sexuality . . . whether [by] burnings at the stake or injections with chemical suppressants. You,” the writer added, “just placed a log on the pyre.” (Earlier that year, PETA and the former tennis star Martina Navratilova, among others, were waging similar attacks on a scientific study of gay sheep, presuming it was a precursor to developing a “treatment” for shutting off homosexuality in human fetuses.)

And, in talking to gay people, I find some who would prefer that human homosexuality be shown to be genetic, so that they won’t be derided for making a supposedly immoral “choice” and can impute their behavior to a genetic imperative.  Other gays would prefer a more “nurture-ist” finding, since they envision a kind of pogrom or eugenics program if gay behavior were found to be genetic.  And there are those, myself included, who think that the question is irrelevant, since the morality seeing gays as having equal rights does not depend on any genetic or evolutionary basis. (Or, if you take a Sam-Harris-an approach to the question, you can say that our well being is best served if we don’t discriminate against gay people or legally regulate the sexual behavior of consenting adults).

Can animal studies really inform work on human homosexuality? I’m not an expert in this area, but Mooallem doesn’t paint an optimistic picture.  He shows, and I had guessed this, that “gay” behavior in animals (by this I mean “same-sex” sexual behavior) is a grab-bag of diverse phenomena that don’t support a single evolutionary explanation.  Some same-sex behavior, such as the occasional tendency of males to mount other males, could simply be a byproduct of a general tendency for males to copulate with anything moving, which is itself adaptive since sperm is cheap. (Some flies, for example, will try to copulate with balls of wax, and some orchids, to gain pollination, have flowers mimicking female bees, with which overstimulated males try to mate).  In other cases  same-sex behavior may have evolutionary roots, reflecting specific adaptations.  Mooallem describes “lesbian” behavior in albatrosses in Hawaii, for instance, in which pairs of females will nest together (sans males) to incubate a single egg.  While this behavior isn’t yet understood, it may reflect the advantage of brooding an egg even when you’re not sure it’s yours, just because there’s a dearth of males in the population and it’s better to have half a chance of producing an offspring than no chance at all.  In other cases, like the polymorphous sexuality in bonobo chimps, sexual behavior may have been co-opted into forms of social bonding. I wouldn’t expect, for instance, that same-sex mounting in Drosophila would have an evolutionary explanation similar to that of male mammals fellating each other.

So we shouldn’t hold out a lot of hope that these kinds of studies will shed much illumination on human homosexuality.  It may, but I’m not hopeful.  For one things, humans have a rich and mercurial culture that is unlike anything seen in animals.  Social stigma or conventions can change quite quickly, and this can affect the propensity of same-sex behavior.  Was prolific gay behavior in ancient Athens the same thing, biologically, as the behavior of gays in 1930s Chicago? Who knows?

The controversy about the roots of gay behavior in our culture is often couched as a dichotomy: is it genetic or is it a “choice”?  Because I’m a physical determinist who believes that there’s no such thing as true free will or a genuine “choice”, I prefer to couch the dichotomy as one of nature versus nurture: are there genes whose presence results in gay behavior, or is that behavior entirely due to environmental influences, including social pressures and the behavior of one’s peers?  The most likely answer is “both.”  There is some evidence that homosexual behavior in our species has a genetic basis, but we don’t know much about this, and of course how genes produce traits depends, with few exceptions, on the relevant environments. “Gay” genes may show environmental effects on expressivity (the degree to which gay behavior actually appears when one has “gay genes”) and penetrance (is such behavior even seen at all when one has the genes?).

What philosophers think about free will

Patrick Appel passes along a fascinating survey of  438 professional philosophers and PhDs and 210 philosophy grad students on meta- and normative ethics, God, the afterlife, naturalism, and some ill-defined political positions. And of course, my favorite topic:

Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

Accept: compatibilism	873 / 3226 (27%)
Lean toward: compatibilism	788 / 3226 (24.4%)
Lean toward: libertarianism	303 / 3226 (9.3%)
Accept: libertarianism	288 / 3226 (8.9%)
Lean toward: no free will	255 / 3226 (7.9%)
Accept: no free will	236 / 3226 (7.3%)

I’ve never heard any of our philosophy students or instructors weigh in on the question. Don’t think I’m not curious.

Forster on personality

Dora Carrington's portrait of Edward Morgan Forster, ca. 1924-5

Good description, bad prescription:  

[P]sychology has split and shattered the idea of a “Person,” and has shown there is something incalculable in each of us, which may at any moment rise to the surface and destroy our normal balance. We don’t know what we are like. We can’t know what other people are like. How, then, can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we cannot. But in practice we can and do. Though A is not interchangeably A, or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of living, one has to assume that personality is solid and the “self” is an entity, and ignore all contrary evidence. -E.M. Forster, “What I believe,” 1938  

It confuses and frustrates me when people suggest acquiring knowledge of things which have always been true about the human condtion somehow poses a threat to the possibility of accepting that condition–for example, when Einstein said we should treat human beings “as if” they possessed free will, even though he had just said he could not imagine what a will uncompelled by internal necessity could possibly look like. Recognizing humanity as a natural thing bound by mechanistic laws, Einstein recognized individuals as the causes of the effects of their actions, and wished to arrange society so as to provide incentives for good behavior and punishments for bad ones. Which is to say, he wished for people to be more-or-less treated as they always had been. Despite our intuition’s insistance otherwise, responsibility can be thought of as an individual being the necessary cause of the effects of their actions; and belief or disbelief in determinism or indeterminacy has no effect on our valuation of incentives or fear of punishments. 

Perhaps this frustration arises from my gnosticism. I use the term not in reference to the early immaterialist Christian sects, but in the broadest possible sense of the word. I am a gnostic insofar as I believe truth is liberating, is soteriological. 

So I accuse Forster, otherwise an exemplary liberal, as a destroyer of human liberty in urging the ignorance of a difficult truth. He is does so because he is mistaken as to the utility of his untruth. Human relations do not depend on belief in an atomic “self.” They are probably, in fact, harmed by it. All bad psychology, all corruptions in our theory of mind force us to hold intercourse with ghosts of fancy. 

All personalities we interact with are fictions–but some more fanciful than others. We surmise other minds only by analogy and inference, which is to say invention. This is necessarily true of our own minds as well. Too much information passes before consciousness for all of it to be remembered or even processed correctly the first time. This is true even of entirely subjective knowledge, pleasures, pains, emotional reactions, daydreams, unspoken comments, flutterings of the esprit d’escalier, etc. So we know ourselves by means of a working fictional account of ourselves, an overly simplified embodiment of general trends of our behaviors real and imagined, or at least real but so heavily redacted in remembering they cannot be called true.   

This fiction is not our ideal self. We admit ourselves faults, though not all of them. The importance of some may be exaggerated, other perhaps more important ones downplayed. As La Rochefoucauld said, 

Often we admit a vice to conceal a greater one. 

Forster speaks of those occasions in which “that something incalculable” bubble up, which is to say, the spontaneous fluxes of our personality, as if they are rare occasions that only might disturb our “normal balance.” If by “our normal balance,” he means a pattern of behavior aligning with our conception of ourselves, this is broken all the time.  But a battery of cognitive biases prevent us from recognizing change within ourselves, or makes us forget its appearance, or rationalize it away as a fluke. I am more than what I am. My form is capable of a wider array of passions and behaviors than I can ever be allowed to recognize by myself. And yet. Another person, one who has been around me long enough to notice the inconsistancies in my character can alert me to my betrayals of my best selves. They could, if they cared for me. 

 friendships are those which do not indulge either friend, but one in which the joys of exertion are shared, where friends work together to refine themselves to achieve the highest possible potential. This can only be done if both participants are brutally honest with each other, if they highlight the other’s self-deceptions and hypocrisies. Which is to say, only if both recognize the other’s personality, which they themselves love so much, is as a phantom.

The fracturing of personality is not the end of friendship; rather, it means when we befriend an individual, we gain more friends than we can count.

Two days after Warren

The White House got around to denouncing the Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act. Good, but a week late, and dressed in vaguely unsettling historicist language:

The President strongly opposes efforts, such as the draft law pending in Uganda, that would criminalize homosexuality and move against the tide of history. [Emphasis mine.]

Even when it’s for a good cause–as denunciation of the Act definitely is–talk of destiny disturbs me. I’m a determinist, not a fatalist. Claimants to be on the side of progress have used that faith as justification for…well, everything. When one claims a thing is “inevitable,” they are not always apologizing for it. But often enough they are. And if they are for an inevitibility, there is little they won’t do to bring it about.

Determinists who believe the momentum of creation is behind their political movement are as mistaken as libertarians. Probably more dangerous.

What Flaubert and I have in common

From the correspondence, by way of D.A. Williams’ 1973 “Psychological determinism in ‘Madame Bovary,'” in the Journal of Occassional Papers in Modern Languages:

La fatalite, qui m’avait courbe des la jenesse, s’etendait pour moi sur le monde entier, je la regardais se manifester dans toutes les actions des hommes aussi universellement que le soleil sur la surface de la terre.

And he was a self-confessed Spinozist!

Neither of these facts is helping me write my research proposal for a Madame Bovary term paper. I should stop blogging now.

The case against character

Gustavo Dore's portrait of Immanuel Kant composing his "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," as Johann Gottlieb Fitche looks on.

I’ve mentioned several times in this space that I believe there is no substance to “the self.” I can think of no better analogy to it than a fictional character, the protagonist of a narrative the brain tells itself to winnow the data it is inundated with into something manageable. This winnowing necessarily omits some vital information, even about the mind’s own function. It overplays some trends and downplays others, usually to make itself look better than it is. (Once the individual believes the lie of excellence it has made, it can more readily convince others, too, of its excellence.) Contrawise, a depressive might downplay accomplishments and virtues as a means of rationalizing the low moods they feel, which may have begun prior to the recognition of any of any malady, shortcoming, or crisis. I proffer these examples to illustrate the statement: We are capable of a broader range of good and bad behavior than we believe ourselves capable of at any given moment. The Socratic imperative “Know thyself!” is impossible. At least, it is impossible to have a complete account of oneself; self-deception comes to easily. Even if we do come across every relevant true statement about our character over our lifespan, we won’t believe all of them at one time. If we are to be realistic, “Seek thyself tirelessly! But do not trust [s]he tells you!” is our command. Or, even more aptly, “Know thyselves!”

I find more support in the recent work of Kwame Anthony Appiah. According to Jeremy Waldron, writing in The New York Times Review of Books, Appiah is working to defeat the Quixotic campaign of Kant to understand ethics without reference to psychology:

Virtue theorists believe that the disposition to act and react courageously or honestly is deeply entrenched in a person’s character. As Appiah describes their position, a virtue is supposed to be something that “goes all the way down,” enmeshing itself with other aspects of character, equally admirable, and affecting what a person wants out of life, her conception of happiness, and her view of other people.

Are there such virtues? Well, the psychologists that Appiah has read report that character traits do not exhibit the “cross-situational stability” that virtue presupposes. He cites a study of ten thousand American schoolchildren in the 1920s, which showed that they were willing to lie and cheat in school and at play in ways that did not correlate with any measurable personality traits. It is not that the children cheated whenever they could get away with it; they cheated sometimes and in some settings (when they could get away with it) and not other times or in other settings (when they could get away with it). “The child who wouldn’t break the rules at home, even when it seemed nobody was looking, was no less likely [than other children] to cheat on an exam at school.” There was none of the consistent and comprehensive honesty, “all the way down,” that virtue ethics seems to presuppose.

This seems to be true for other virtues too: helpfulness or charity, for example. With respect to them, studies cited by Appiah show that people act in ways that seem vulnerable to odd and unseemly differences in circumstance. If you accidentally drop your papers outside a phone booth, the best predictor of whether people will help you pick them up is whether they have just discovered a dime in the phone’s coin-return slot: six out of seven of the dime-finders will help as opposed to one in twenty-five of everyone else. If you need change for a dollar, stand outside a bakery: the warm smell of fresh-baked bread makes a huge difference to the kindness of strangers. The beneficiaries will probably say of anyone who came to their assistance, “What a helpful person,” little suspecting that tomorrow when the bakery is shut down and there is nary a dime in the phone booth, the selfsame person will be as mean-spirited as everyone else.

Hume was wrong

From the Treatise, I.VI :

[W]e may observe, that the true idea of the human mind, is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other. Our impressions give rise to their correspondent ideas; said these ideas in their turn produce other impressions. One thought chaces another, and draws after it a third, by which it is expelled in its turn. In this respect, I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts.

Wrong, but close. The brain works like the electoral college.

What Lincoln and I have in common

(On the occassion of  The Word Warrior’s 999th post, Bento engages in the production of a self-indulgent mega-post of prodigeous word-count and no relevency to current events. Do not feel the need to humor him. In fact, he would probably be better of if you didn’t encourage him.)

Should the flashbulb used to produce this photograph been given the power of thought, it should surely assert that it flashed of its own free will, independent of the depression of the camera's button or ignition of the magnesium powder.

Two Fridays ago, I arrived back in Milwaukee. As my parents turned bickeringly into the 16^th street parking complex, I noticed a car with Illinois plates. Superimposed over the ghostly blue portrait of Lincoln was this vanity phrase:

FRWLL

Presumably, “free will.” Plastered were it was, across the face of our 16^th president, it was an ironic, eerily apt insult to the memory and person of the man. For all his adult life, Abraham Lincoln was a strict determinist and denier of the will’s freedom.