The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel M. Wegner Page B

as the psychokinetic powers imagined in the movies, people who had them would experience something very much like this. When Sissy Spacek in Carrie burned down the high school gym, for example, or when John Travolta in Phenomenon moved small objects into his hands from a distance, it would certainly be as easy for them to ascribe these results to their own will as would be your act of moving a tree branch at a distance. If there really were people with such occult abilities, they probably would have exactly the same kind of information that you have about your branch. They would know in advance when something was going to happen, and they would be looking in that direction and thinking about it when it did happen. The feeling that one is moving the tree branch surfaces in the same way that these folks would get the sense that they could create action at a distance. All it seems to take is the appropriate foreknowledge of the action. Indeed, with proper foreknowledge it is difficult not to conclude one has caused the act, and the feeling of doing may well up in direct proportion to the perception that relevant ideas had entered one’s mind before the action. This is beginning to sound like a theory.
    A Theory of Apparent Mental Causation
    The experience of will could be a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally. The theory of apparent mental causation, then, is this: People experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action (Wegner and Wheatley 1999). 1 This means that people experience conscious will quite independently of any actual causal connection between their thoughts and their actions. Reductions in the impression that there is a link between thought and action may explain why people get a sense of involuntariness even for actions that are voluntary—for example, during motor automatisms such as table turning, or in hypnosis, or in psychologically disordered states such as dissociation. And inflated perceptions of the link between thought and action may, in turn, explain why people experience an illusion of conscious will at all.
    The person experiencing will, in this view, is in the same position as someone perceiving causation as one billiard ball strikes another. As we learned from Hume, causation in bowling, billiards, and other games is inferred from the constant conjunction of ball movements. It makes sense, then, that will—an experience of one’s own causal influence—is inferred from the conjunction of events that lead to action. Now, in the case of billiard balls, the players in the causal analysis are quite simple: one ball and the other ball. One rolls into the other and a causal event occurs. What are the items that seem to click together in our minds to yield the perception of will?
    1. The Wegner and Wheatley (1999) paper presented this theory originally. This chapter is an expanded and revised exposition of the theory.
    One view of this was provided by Ziehen (1899), who suggested that thinking of self before action yields the sense of agency. He proposed, “We finally come to regard the ego-idea as the cause of our actions because of its very frequent appearance in the series of ideas preceding each action. It is almost always represented several times among the ideas preceding the final movement. But the idea of the relation of causality is an empirical element that always appears when two successive ideas are very closely associated” (296).
    And indeed there is evidence that self-attention is associated with perceived causation of action. People in an experiment by Duval and Wicklund (1973) were asked to make attributions for hypothetical events (“Imagine you are rushing down a narrow hotel hallway and bump into a housekeeper who is backing out of a room”). When asked to decide who was responsible for such events, they assigned more causality to them-selves if they were making the judgments