Automatic actions: Agency, intentionality, and responsibility

Abstract

The article discusses a challenge to the traditional intentional-causalist conceptions of action and intentionality as well as to our everyday and legal conceptions of responsibility, namely the psychological discovery that the greatest part of our alleged actions are performed automatically, i.e. unconsciously and without a proximal intention causing and sustaining them. The main part of the article scrutinises several mechanisms of automatic behaviour, how they work and whether the resulting behaviour is an action: actions caused by distal implementation intentions, four types of habit and habitualisation, mimicry and semantically induced automatic behaviour (which, however later is disregarded because of its unclarity). According to the intentional-causalist criterion, the automatic behaviours resulting from all but one of these mechanisms turn out to be actions and intentional; and even the behaviour resulting from the remaining mechanism (naturally acquired habits) is something we can be responsible for. Hence, the challenge, seen from close up, does not really call the traditional conception of action and intentionality into question.

Predicting Perceived Problems in Self-Administered 24-Hour Dietary Recalls: A Quantitative Think-Aloud Study Comparing Automated Self-Assisted 24-Hour Dietary Assessment Tool (ASA24®) and INTAKE24© in University Students

“…Systems usability and food habits were significant predictors of perceived problems when completing INTAKE24©. This reinforces the literature pertaining to habit automaticity [ 61 ], cognitive load, and memory [ 51 ] and tells us that attempts should be made to account for food habits when using a 24HR design.…”

“…Although it is unclear why we obtained differing results for food habits between the two programs, a possible reason could be due to the automaticity of habits. To elaborate, this idea argues that repetition begins to produce action without conscious thought (i.e., requiring no attention), thus resulting in either not recalling the intention of the behaviour or no memory of completing the automatic behaviour [ 61 ]. In contrast, this result may simply be explained by university students’ general lack of a regular diet, as the standard deviation for the habit score was very large.…”

Strategy (Part I): Conceptual Foundations

“…Most of the attention in the philosophy of action is to intentional actions that are the upshot of deliberation, or that seem caused by mental states like beliefs and desires. However, philosophers have growingly been interested in exploring how unconscious or habitual actions can nevertheless be construed as intentional (e.g., Douskos, 2017; Lumer, 2017; Owens, 2017). It is thus open to us to ask whether and when such behavior can be construed as strategic as well.…”

Unconscious Motives and Actions – Agency, Freedom and Responsibility

“…Automatic and habitualized behaviors, i.e., learned, schematic and automatically triggered and executed behaviors, are also unconscious but make up a big separate and particular group. I will not deal with them here; I have discussed them in a parallel article again with regard to the challenges C1 to C3: Lumer (2017). Implicit bias (see e.g., Brownstein and Saul, 2016) is also not discussed here because of its peculiar problems.…”