ANDY CLARK holds the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.
So much of what we do, feel, think, and choose is determined by unconscious, automatic uptake of cues and information.
Of course, advertisers will say they have known this all along. But only in recent years, with seminal studies by Tanya Chartrand, John Bargh, and others, has the true scale of our daily automatism really begun to emerge. Such studies show that it is possible (it is relatively easy) to activate racist stereotypes that impact our subsequent behavioral interactions—for example, yielding the judgment that your partner in a game or task is more hostile than an unprimed control would judge him/her to be. Such effects occur despite a subject’s total and honest disavowal of those very stereotypes. In similar ways, it is possible to unconsciously prime you to feel older (and then you will walk more slowly).
In my favorite recent study, experimenters manipulate cues so that the subject forms an unconscious goal, whose (unnoticed) frustration results in the subject’s losing confidence and performing worse at a subsequent task. The dangerous truth, it seems to me, is that these are not isolated laboratory events; instead, they reveal the massed woven fabric of our day-to-day existence. The underlying mechanisms impart an automatic drive toward the automation of all manner of choices and actions and don’t discriminate between the trivial and the portentous.
It now seems clear that many of my major life and work decisions are made rapidly, often on the basis of ecologically sound but superficial cues, with slow deliberative reason busily engaged in justifying what the quick-thinking zombies inside me have already laid on the table. The good news is that without these mechanisms we would be unable to engage in fluid daily life or reason at all, and that very often they are right. The dangerous truth, though, is that we are indeed designed to cut conscious choice out of the picture whenever possible. This is not an issue about free will but simply about the extent to which conscious deliberation cranks the engine of behavior. Crank it it does, but not in anything like the way, or to the extent, that we may have thought. We had better come to grips with this before someone else does.