Abstract
Three studies investigated how subliminally primed thoughts of an agent prior to action can affect ascriptions of authorship for that action. Participants competed against a computer program to remove words from a computer screen. Participants reported greater feelings of authorship when primed with first person singular pronouns, and lower feelings of authorship when primed with “computer.” We also investigated whether authorship feelings could be affected by priming subjects with a supernatural agent (i.e., God). Feelings of authorship decreased when participants were primed with God, but only among believers.
Highlights
When you do something, how do you know you’re the one who did it? Normally, this doesn’t seem like much of a mystery, because you can feel yourself doing things and appreciate the operation of your physical body
An early theory of such attribution proposed by Ziehen (1899) held that thinking of self before action yields the experience of own agency
The hypothesis that thoughts of self may incline people to interpret actions as their own was later noted by Michotte (1963), and was developed yet more fully in the objective self awareness theory of responsibility attribution (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Duval & Silvia, 2001)
Summary
How do you know you’re the one who did it? Normally, this doesn’t seem like much of a mystery, because you can feel yourself doing things and appreciate the operation of your physical body. One knows one is doing something by virtue of interoceptive sensations of the body’s movement (Craig, 2003) that occur both before action (Frith, Blakemore, & Wolpert, 2000) and after action (Gandevia & Burke, 1992) Such bodily feedforward and feedback systems are supplemented by visual and auditory feedback, as we can often see and hear ourselves act. An early theory of such attribution proposed by Ziehen (1899) held that thinking of self before action yields the experience of own agency He remarked that “ƒwe Wnally 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. The hypothesis that thoughts of self may incline people to interpret actions as their own was later noted by Michotte (1963), and was developed yet more fully in the objective self awareness theory of responsibility attribution (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Duval & Silvia, 2001)
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