1. Had the unknown factor not existed, how would I have acted differently (e.g., in what ways would we want to say I performed a different action)?
2. Had I been aware of the influence of the factor, would I have attempted to avoid its influence on me? (or a different question: Were I to learn about the influence the factor had on me, would I accept that influence as legitimate?)

It is very difficult to see how we could empirically examine these questions, but there are ways to get at them.

For some of the relevant studies, it seems that even if the answer to 1 is that I would have acted differently, the answer to 2 makes it clear it doesn’t matter much (“Oh, I wouldn’t have picked the right pair of stockings–so what? My goal was to pick the pair I liked best, and I did.”) For others, it is hard to answer question 1 (how many of the Virginias who moved to Virginia would not have moved there if they’d been named Georgia? And would Virginia say she didn’t want to be influenced by this whimsical factor?).

But for other studies, the worries run deeper (personally, I tie these worries to the free will debate, since it seems we have diminished freedom to the extent that we are influenced to make decisions based on factors we would not accept as good reasons). It seems clear that some people who would otherwise be helpful to those in need are not helpful because of the unrecognized influences of unhelpful bystanders or of being in a hurry or of smelling something gross, *and* it seems that most of us would not accept these influences as legitimate (we would counteract their influence were we able). Of course, we may in fact be able to counteract some of these influences the more we learn about them, though the jury is still out on the degree to which such knowledge “frees us.”

A second group was given a negative frame: the meat has received the rads equivalent of 30 million chest x-rays. Predictably, almost everyone in the first group wanted the irradiated sandwich. They would actually bid against each other, usually up to 20 cents, for the right to exchange their ordinary sandwich for the safer one. Predictably, the second group would not volunteer two cents for the cancerous slab.

Surprisingly–to me anyway–was the result Hayes got when he subjected a third group to both treatments. I’d have expected a bimodal distribution; some folks biting while others turning up their noses. Wouldn’t you think at least some people would see through the “30 million chest x-rays” rhetoric and go for the reduced Trichinella story? To the contrary, no individuals in the group receiving both the attractive and repulsive descriptions wanted to bid. Subjects receiving both frames exhibited instead exactly the same behavior as those receiving only the negative frame.

Shouldn’t at least some rational actors hearing a negative description of an ordinary commercial food stuff be able to sift the wheat from the chaff? Especially when they’ve also been presented with a positive description? Shouldn’t a few of us be able to see through anti-science rhetoric, distinguish relative degrees of plausibility, and occasionally reach the ‘right’ conclusion? Alas, it appears that this almost never happens.

That’s a sobering result. How deflationary is it for belief in things like rationality and free will? Doris knows these tricky waters better than most. I’ll be looking for guidance from his natural history of the self.

* D. Hayes, J. Fox, J. Shogren. Consumer preferences for food irradiation: how favorable and unfavorable descriptions affect preferences for irradiated pork in experimental auctions, J. Risk Uncertainty 24 (2002): 75-95.

The first point is related to one raised by Dan Haybron: “it will probably be hard to assess the threat these studies pose to our self-image without developing, at least in part, a positive account of human functioning.” Before we dismiss answers as irrational we need an account of the rational answers. To take an example from evolutionary psychology: why won’t (most) people sleep with their siblings? Psychologist Jon Haidt uses this example to show the irrationality of people’s moral judgments. When he presents his subjects with a hypothetical scenario of brother-sister incest, subjects first object (“it’s wrong”), and then when asked to explain why appeal to the possibility of birth defects, psychological harm and so on. Haidt points out that subjects persist in their objections even once these concerns have been addressed one by one (e.g., birth control, psychological resilience). Thus the subjects are said to be “morally dumbfounded”. But what would it look to not be morally dumbfounded? How would a “rational animal” have answered? What are the right answers, for example, to other questions about basic moral behavior – why it’s good to behave fairly, or why it’s not good to hurt people gratuitously? Before judging whether the answers are good or bad, there must be some account of the good answers and the bad answers, whether they are in folk-psychological terms of beliefs and desires, evolutionary psychological terms, etc.

The second point is related to one made by Shaun Nichols: “It might be that the kind of judgment in the choice-blindness task – facial preferences – isn’t the sort of thing that involves decision making.” Indeed, it seems that “the sort of thing” matters when it comes to explanation. Mate selection, incest aversion, caring for one’s children – these are behaviors that may be understood and explained on multiple levels. A mother cares for her young because she loves them (belief-desire terms) and because surviving and thriving offspring will allow her genes to propagate (evolutionary psychological terms) – and undoubtedly for numerous other reasons. Also, depending on how behavior is carved up (e.g., caring for one’s offspring versus feeding one’s baby this kind of formula over that), it may make more pragmatic sense to prefer one kind of explanation over another. But again a detailed account of what counts as an rational explanation – and in what terms – helps in determining how and when people are behaving as irrational animals.

In my own case, I think I’m unlikely to include these other factors (does a potential new address match my name?) because I often treat explaining my decisions and actions to involve providing reasons that make sense of what I do, where ‘making sense’ means showing why my move is reasonable, or rational, or just a good idea from where I stand when I do it. I say ‘often’ because I don’t always explain my actions this way. When it serves some purpose (if I want to distance myself from my actions), I might find myself explaining why I’ve done what I’ve done in terms of external influences and causes, rather than my reasons.

What I find most interesting is why I think I know what I’m doing, even if I don’t have a good grip on the best explanation for why I’ve done it. Here’s a sketch of a simple story. Suppose I usually do have conscious access to reasons or information that is part of a decent explanation for why I’ve done what I’ve done — it makes reasonable sense of it. However, the evidence shows that in lots of cases there’s further information affecting my decisions and deeds that I don’t know causes me to do what I’ve done. Still, it’s part of, or all of, the best explanation for why I’ve done what I’ve done. And, sometimes, I’m not even potentially conscious of it as explaining or making intelligible what I’ve done. Though I can still come to know though science or close study that it impacts my decision, the processes themselves are largely subconscious.

So, I have conscious access to a serviceable candidate explanation for most of what I do and decide. But the evidence shows that often I lack access to the full or best explanation. The reason I think I know what I’m doing is that I mistake the absence of consciousness (of my action’s best or full explanation) for the absence of a further cause or better explanation of it (beyond that of which I am conscious). This is like looking around, seeing nothing, and concluding that there’s nothing around when, in fact, you’ve missed a critical detail. I mistake my lack of awareness of a further cause, reason, or explanation for the absence of a further cause, reason, or explanation. So I think I know what I’m doing. And often I’m incomplete, or just wrong.

Why worry? Once psychology admits there’s more to the mind than we recognize on introspection, what’s most interesting about what makes us human could be what doesn’t come to mind.

References
• Bargh, J. A,, and Uleman, J. S. (eds.). 1989. Unintended Thought. New York and London: The Guilford Press.
• Bornstein, R. F., and Pittman, T. S. (eds.) 1992. Perception without Awareness: Cognitive, Clinical, and Social Perspectives.  New York and London: The Guilford Press.
• Chaiken, S., and Trope, Y. (eds.) 1999. Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology. New York and London: The Guilford Press.
• Doris, J. M. In preparation. A Natural History of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Doris, J. M. Forthcoming. “Skepticism about Persons.” Philosophical Issues 19: Metaethics.
• Dutton, D. G., and Aron, A. P. 1974. “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 30: 510-17.
• Greene, J. forthcoming.  The Moral Brain . . .  and What to Do about It. New York Penguin.
• Haidt, J. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books.
• Hassin, R. R., Uleman, J. S., and Bargh, J. A. (eds.). 2005. The New Unconscious.  New York: Oxford University Press.
• Haybron, D. 2008. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well Being.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., and Olsson, A. 2005. “Failure to Detect Mismatches Between Intention and Outcome in a Simple Decision Task.” Science 310: 116-119.
• Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., Tärning, B. and Lind, A. 2006. How Something Can Be Said About Telling More Than We Can Know.” Consciousness and Cognition 15: 673-92.
• Pelham, B. W., Mirenberg, M. C., and Jones, J. K. 2002. “Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82: 469-487.
• Stanovich, K. E. 2004. The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Wegner, D. M. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Wilson, T. D. 2002. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. New York: Belknap.
• Wyer, R. S. (ed.) 1997. The Automaticity of Everyday Life (Advances in Social Cognition, Volume X).  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Yet I’m inclined to read studies like these as “foot-in-the-door” examples pointing, along with a broad range of other research—including the situationist and heuristics and biases literatures, not to mention anthropological work—toward a view of human functioning that may not be so friendly to some traditional views of the rational animal. Perhaps it will turn out that healthy human functioning quite fittingly involves very substantial nonrational, even counter-rational, influences on cognition and behavior—and not just regarding pedestrian activities where (direct) rational control would obviously be inefficient, but in core areas of life, including setting our priorities. Depending on how the details work out, one could imagine such a picture of human life sitting rather poorly with standard issue Aristotelian, economic, and other views of the good life. (It perhaps bears mentioning that this hardly means denying an important role for rational processes in human life. The question is whether they play the roles required by our theories etc.)

This is all highly speculative, of course. The point I want to make here is just this: it will probably be hard to assess the threat these studies pose to our self-image without developing, at least in part, a positive account of human functioning. Even a long list of provocative studies can usually be dismissed piecemeal. But such a dismissal is much harder to pull off if, looking at many lines of research across disciplines, we arrive at a plausible psychological framework on which those results should be *expected*. (And better yet, prove not to be a bug, but a feature—a way it is actually good for people to be.) I suspect that framework will, in good measure, vindicate Doris’s hunch. And it may not be all that depressing either.