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Discuss the evidence that consciousness enables us to control our thoughts and our behaviour

"I think therefore I am." Is there any stronger philosophical statement of what it means to be human than this? And yet, what is this thinking that we are doing and how is it linked to our behaviour? Consciousness is often talked about as a state of awareness of the totality of self, the sum of all the things that make up a person: beliefs, attitudes, sensitivities. But it is also difficult to use the word 'conscious' without thinking of the 'unconscious'. By definition Freud's submerged world of seething desires lies out of the realm of our awareness, so perhaps consciousness is awareness. Freud, like many others, believed that our unconscious had a profound effect on our behaviour. This suggests that consciousness, or the totality of our being, is something more - something beyond awareness. The study of consciousness had been largely avoided in cognitive psychology for some time because of the need to study personal, internal representations, which are, necessarily, not open to objective measurement. This has changed in recent years as consciousness has become a legitimate and necessary subject for study in cognitive psychology.

A fundamental question in the study of consciousness in cognitive psychology is whether our behaviour can be affected by thoughts that we are unaware or of which we are unconscious. This is a very similar question to that posed by Freud but this emerges from a different tradition and is therefore subject to more rigorous testing. Poppel, Held, and Frost (1973) examined the case of four patients who had suffered lesions in the part of the brain associated with vision. This had left them with partial blindness in their visual field, into which the researchers presented stimuli. Although the patients claimed not to be able to see the object they performed above chance when asked to look at it. These results suggested that the patients were, at some level, aware of the object, but this information was not consciously available to them. Renault, Signoret, Debruille, Breton & Bolgert (1989) examined prosopagnosic patients - those unable to recognise faces - who were presented faces that were known to be familiar to them while brain wave patterns were measured. Although the patients claimed not to recognise the familiar faces they were shown, there were significant changes in brain wave patterns that were associated with recognition.

But these studies, while providing some evidence of cognition without apparent awareness, examined patients with acquired or congenital problems that may separate them from ordinary members of the population. Many other research studies, however, have found similar effects in ordinary members of the population. These have used a variety of paradigms including word priming and number priming. The experiments involve the prior presentation of information below the level of conscious awareness that is found to influence subsequent decisions. A question mark about these types of studies is that although they assume a lack of awareness, there is often no empirical measurement of the participants awareness as this is seen as treading on the thin ice of asking people to report subject experience. Mack & Rock (1998) have, though, managed to find an experimental paradigm to counter this criticism. Participants were told to attend to a cross which was only presented for a fraction of a second and to report on it. Unknown to the participants in one of the trials the word 'flake' was included at a distance from the cross. Participants were then asked afterwards whether they were aware of anything else other than the cross - 60% reported that they weren't. In other words they were 'blind' to the presentation of the word. To test the unconscious recognition Mack & Rock (1998) then performed another test on the participants which involved the completing the stem of a word or forcing the choice of a word. For example in stem completion, participants were presented with 'fla' and asked to finish it with two English words. Overall 47% of those who indicated that they had not been aware of the word 'flake' used the word in the word choice tests. Merikle, Smilek & Eastwood (2001) state that previous research has examined unattended words stimuli, little or no attempt has been made to assess the actual awareness of the participants. As in neuropsychology, this dissociation of awareness from cognitive processing is very important, and provides compelling evidence that we are at least to some degree removed from conscious control of our thoughts - and therefore our behaviour. After all, what these studies are showing is that our behaviour is controlled by thoughts of which we are not aware.

So what about coming from the opposite perspective: what positive evidence is there that consciousness is required to control our thoughts and behaviour? Is there any evidence that we are not simply automatons? Dehaene & Naccache (2001) point out the surprising paucity of evidence on this score. One category of behaviour that Dehaene & Naccache (2001) posit requires consciousness is generating intentional behaviour. They point out that even though patients with blindsight can point to objects they claim not to be able to see, they cannot (or at least do not) do this at all unless actually prompted to do so. In addition the experiments that show implicit cognitions require the participants to be forced to pay attention to something - it requires prompting. None of these things negates the fact that our thoughts and behaviour may be affected by things we are not conscious of, but does serve to point out that we might not have the level of awareness that could be implied. Secondly Dehaene & Naccache (2001) claim that consciousness is required to maintain information in the mind in an active and useful state. Studies on priming show that unconscious primes fade away from consciousness very quickly. The third type Dehaene & Naccache (2001) claim is required for consciousness is the generation of new behaviours. They claim this is demonstrated in studies that require the suppression of routine behaviour in order to create new behaviour (Merikle, Joordens & Stolz, 1995). These three categories are, due to the currently available evidence, difficult to substantiate, but they do provide some reassurance that we may control some areas of our thoughts and behaviour.

A related distinction that some of these ideas touch on is between automatic and controlled processing. This distinction is a long-standing one in cognitive psychology going to back to James (1890). Automatic processing is where a person can carry out a behaviour without attention or control in response to a particular type of stimulus. For example, an experienced driver can drive safely along a well-known route using automatic processes of which they are hardly aware. In contrast, controlled processing requires attention and control to the specific behaviour that is being carried out and is generated in response to a novel situation. The driver now trying to work out how to get to a location she has never visited before has to actively work out the route and concentrate on the trip. The operation of automatic processes takes time to become ingrained but can encompass complicated behaviours while controlled processes can be built quickly as required although they will tend to be limited in scope.

The empirical evidence has provided support for some of these distinctions. Shiffrin and Schneider (1977, Experiment 3) involved participants in a search and detection experiment which required them to find particular letters amongst many. Over a period of 25 sessions the letters that there were searching for were rotated between a number of categories. After this, now that the participants had received training in searching for a number of different categories, the search was changed so that it was consistent. The participants then showed a dramatic increase in speed with the new task, demonstrating that automatic processes take much longer to establish than controlled processes.

Importantly for our conscious control over our behaviour, research on automatic processing shows that when a process is learned and ingrained we tend to lose control over it. The Stroop (1935) task is an excellent example of this. Participants in this task are asked to report the colour of a word - first when the word matches the colour (red is written in red) and secondly when the word does not match the colour (red is written in green). It is found that it is very difficult to avoid reading the word and reporting the word (rather than the colour) because it is such an ingrained automatic process. It is precisely this sort of automatic process that feels like it is beyond our conscious control to change - a fact that researchers claim shows the power of automatic processes.

Schneider & Chein (2003) claim that it is precisely these differences between automatic and controlled processing that are necessary for us as they provide a survival advantage. Automatic processing that is quick, resistant to outside stressors can work for some of the tasks that we need to carry out automatically every day while controlled processing is used for those tasks that require novel solutions and the exclusion of normally relevant stimuli.

It could be argued, however, that the automatic process of driving a car is, to some extent, still conscious and therefore under our conscious control. While we may not be aware of every little detail of our behaviour, we do consciously get into the car and decide to drive somewhere. This forms one part of a distinction sometimes made in the literature between conscious and unconscious automaticity. Bargh, Chen & Burrows (1996) asked participants in a study to solve a series of scrambled sentences that contained concepts that were related to age. Other participants carried out a similar task in which the words did not have this connotation. Participants were then timed to see how quickly they walked down the corridor away from the room where the experiment was carried out. Sure enough those participants who had been primed with 'elderly' words walked more slowly and yet when debriefed afterwards they had no awareness of this whatsoever. Similarly Dijksterhuis & Van Knippenberg (1998) primed two groups of participants in a quiz, one with the idea of 'professor' and one with the idea of 'soccer hooligan'. Those who had been primed with the 'professor' did better in the general knowledge quiz - and again both groups were unaware of the manipulation or of feeling any more or less clever.

These kinds of questions of unconscious automaticity have generated a large range of research that has examined a variety of different areas of life. In a series of social cognition experiments that looked at how unconscious stereotypes affect behaviour, Bargh, Chen, & Burrows (1996, Experiment 3) presented the faces of African Americans to participants subliminally. There were later shown to react more aggressively to provocation - presumably as a result of the stereotype effect. Similarly Chen & Bargh (1997) used the same priming condition as Bargh et al. (1996) and then had the primed and non-primed participants play a frustrating game with each other. After objective comparisons were made, the primed participants were shown to be more aggressive than the non-primed. Interestingly, primed participants reported that their non-primed partners were in fact acting aggressively, but failed to notice this in themselves. The process of activating aggression in the participant, then, seemed to prime them to look for it in the environment while they remained unaware of the effect closer to home.

What many of these examples show is that our conscious experience or awareness is often quite divorced from our behaviour or our thoughts and cognitions. Certainly our consciousness, or the totality of our being, can take in many more things about the world than we are actually aware of. Similarly studies seem to show that we actually lose control of our behaviour when our consciousness is confronted with a task it would normally deal with automatically. Aspects of our social world have also been shown to have an enormous effect upon our behaviour although perhaps little effect on our conscious thoughts. The evidence of how often our conscious control has little effect on our thoughts and behaviour is quite strong and can make us question whether we are anything more than sophisticated automatons: 'the unbearable automaticity of being?' (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).


References

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