The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness

Abstract

People often act in order to realize desired outcomes, or goals. Although behavioral science recognizes that people can skillfully pursue goals without consciously attending to their behavior once these goals are set, conscious will is considered to be the starting point of goal pursuit. Indeed, when we decide to work hard on a task, it feels as if that conscious decision is the first and foremost cause of our behavior. That is, we are likely to say, if asked, that the decision to act produced the actions themselves. Recent discoveries, however, challenge this causal status of conscious will. They demonstrate that under some conditions, actions are initiated even though we are unconscious of the goals to be attained or their motivating effect on our behavior. Here we analyze how goal pursuit can possibly operate unconsciously.

Additive and subtractive resilience strategies as enablers of biographical reinvention: A qualitative study of ex-smokers and never-smokers

“…The use of such a biographical approach to understanding the motivations to quit smoking has been reinforced by a recent paper (Custers & Aarts, 2010) which argues that "This affective-motivation process relies on associations between the representations of outcomes and positive reward signals that are shaped by one's history" (p.49). Custers and Aarts (2010) argue that although motivations around behaviour (in this paper, relating to quitting or not starting smoking) involve subliminal or unconscious processes, people "may become conscious of their motivation after the behaviour is performed and when they are explicitly asked to reflect on it" (p.48). Therefore, the process of the oral histories allowed the space for participants to reflect on their past experiences throughout their lives in order to allow them and us to interpret the factors influencing their motivations and behaviours.…”

Synthetic consciousness: the distributed adaptive control perspective

“…R. Soc. B 371: 20150448 subconscious as well as conscious [75,76], that subconscious intentions reliably precede conscious awareness of motor actions [77][78][79] and that behavioural goals can be set by subconscious factors [80]. Another category of implicit factors in experience and action are emotions.…”

Classical conditioning of analgesic and hyperalgesic pain responses without conscious awareness

“…Studies of fear learning in humans suggest that emotional contingencies can be acquired nonconsciously, as demonstrated by conditioned changes in autonomic and motor responses (11)(12)(13)(14). In addition to evidence for conditioning of low-level physiological responses, a recent literature challenges the idea that nonconscious processing stops at an early perceptual level (4), suggesting that higher-order cognitive representations, such as meaning and goal pursuits, can be acquired nonconsciously (15). Moreover, findings from neuroimaging studies show that nonconscious stimuli have extensive representations in the human brain, activating a large number of cortical areas (16)(17)(18) at frequency bands previously seen as markers of conscious awareness (19).…”