Conscious Deliberation Research Articles

THE SUBCORTICAL CONFINEMENT HYPOTHESIS: A NEUROLOGICAL MODEL FOR SCHIZOTYPAL HALLUCINATIONS.

Introduction Different types of hallucinations are symptomatic of different conditions. Schizotypal hallucinations are unique in that they follow existing delusional narrative patterns: they are often bizarre, they are generally multimodal, and they are particularly vivid (the experience of a newsreader abusing you personally over the TV is both visual and aural. Patients who feel and hear silicone chips under their skin suffer from haptic hallucinations as well as aural ones, etc.) Although there are a number of hypotheses for hallucinations, few cogently grapple the sheer bizarreness of the ones experienced in schizotypal psychosis. Methods A review-based hypothesis, traversing theory from the molecular level to phenomenological expression as a distinct and recognizable symptomatology. Conclusion Hallucinations appear to be caused by a two-fold dysfunction in the mesofrontal dopamine pathway, which is considered here to mediate attention of different types: in the anterior medial frontal lobe, the receptors (largely D1 type) mediate declarative awareness, whereas the receptors in the striatum (largely D2 type) mediate latent awareness of known schemata. In healthy perception, most of the perceptual load is performed by the latter: by the top-down predictive and mimetic engine, with the bottom-up mechanism being used as a secondary tool to bring conscious deliberation to stimuli that fails to match up against expectations. In schizophrenia, the predictive mode is over-stimulated, while the bottom-up feedback mechanism atrophies. The dysfunctional distribution pattern effectively confines dopamine activity to the striatum, thereby stimulating the structural components of thought and behaviour: well-learned routines, narrative structures, lexica, grammar, schemata, archetypes, and other procedural resources. Meanwhile, the loss of activity in the frontal complex reduces the capacity for declarative awareness and for processing anything that fails to meet expectations.

The interplay between presentation material and decision mode for complex choice preferences

Recent research suggests that, when faced with a choice between several alternatives described with a large number of attributes, people make better choices if they do not consciously ponder over the alternatives but rather perform a distraction task assumed to elicit unconscious thought. Subsequent research attempting to replicate this finding, however, provided mitigated support for its existence. The research reported here contributes to this ongoing debate on two grounds. First, it highlights a methodological confound between qualitative and quantitative presentation material and proposes a novel procedure that can accommodate both. Second, it shows that, whereas conscious deliberation leads to better decisions when alternatives are characterised by quantitative information, the use of a qualitative format for presenting information cancels the advantage of conscious deliberation.

From intentions via planning and behavior to physical exercise habits

ObjectivesIndividuals who enact a health behavior effortlessly with minimal conscious deliberation can be assumed to have formed a healthy habit. This can be reflected by increases in self-reported habit strength of a behavior. We examined whether physical exercise intentions facilitate changes in exercise habit strength by increasing the use of action planning and exercise. DesignTwo field studies investigated the effect of behavioral intentions on changes in habit strength through a sequential path from action planning to exercise. MethodExercise intentions, action planning, habit strength, and exercise were assessed at two measurement points in time in 231 university students (Study 1), and at four points in time in 134 rehabilitation patients (Study 2). ResultsIn multiple-step mediation models in both samples, there were indirect effects of intentions on habit strength through action planning and behavior. ConclusionAction planning and behavior operated as sequential mediators to bridge the gap between intentions and habit strength. Exercise habit strength may increase as a result of conscious action planning and frequent behavior enactment. Including these constructs jointly into behavior change models may improve the understanding of the mechanisms involved in behavior maintenance.

Trust Primacy

Management scholars have historically framed trust as a consequence of organizational justice that develops slowly over time. However, theory and empirical research outside of the management literature suggest that trust is inevitably present prior to the initiation of exchange relationships. For instance, neuroscientific evidence suggests that the human brain has evolved mechanisms capable of automatically evaluating the trustworthiness of potential exchange partners without conscious deliberation. This article presents a new theoretical model suggesting that trust forms rapidly and exerts significant influence on employee perceptions of justice. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The unconscious thought advantage: Further replication failures from a search for confirmatory evidence

AbstractAccording to the deliberation without attention (DWA) hypothesis, people facing a difficult choice will make a better decision after a period of distraction than after an equally long period of conscious deliberation, an effect referred to as the unconscious thought advantage (UTA). The status of the DWA hypothesis is controversial, as many studies have tried but failed to replicate the UTA. Here, we report a series of experiments that sought to identify the conditions under which the UTA can be replicated. Our starting point was a recent meta-analysis that identified the conditions under which the UTA was strongest in previous studies. Using a within-subjects design and a task that met each of these conditions, we failed to replicate the UTA. Based on closer inspection of previous methods and findings, we then examined some additional factors that could be important for replicating the UTA, including mental fatigue and choice complexity. This was to no avail, as the results revealed only a significant conscious thought advantage, when choice complexity was increased relative to the first experiment. We subsequently conducted exploratory analyses on the data across experiments and found that male subjects showed a significant conscious thought advantage while female subjects showed a trend towards an UTA. Taken together, our results suggest that replication of the UTA may depend more on characteristics of the sample than on the characteristics of the task, and they suggest that gender could be a source of variance in the outcomes of previous studies using a between-subjects design.

Exploring the Scope of Public and Private Responsibilities for Climate Adaptation

Although in practice the division of responsibilities in adaptation to climate change is often not explicitly decided upon, governments appear to be primary actors in adaptation planning. However, literature suggests that the governance of adaptation requires roles for both public and private actors so that responsibilities can be shared and all of society's resources can be fully exploited. Active involvement of all societal actors might overcome problems of inefficiency and raise the legitimacy of adaptation action. This article presents a framework that enables the characterization and explanation of existing governance arrangements in terms of responsibility divisions among public and/or private actors, and that facilitates the search for alternative responsibility divisions and their associated advantages and disadvantages. The framework is illustrated with an example of a governance arrangement for green roofs as an adaptation measure for storm water retention in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The merit of the framework is that it promotes the conscious deliberation of considerations in the public–private divide, taking into account some specific challenges to the governance of climate adaptation. It may, therefore, support well-informed decisions on responsibility divisions in climate adaptation by local governments.

How convenient! The epistemic rationale of self-validating belief systems

This paper offers an epistemological discussion of self-validating belief systems and the recurrence of “epistemic defense mechanisms” and “immunizing strategies” across widely different domains of knowledge. We challenge the idea that typical “weird” belief systems are inherently fragile, and we argue that, instead, they exhibit a surprising degree of resilience in the face of adverse evidence and criticism. Borrowing from the psychological research on belief perseverance, rationalization and motivated reasoning, we argue that the human mind is particularly susceptible to belief systems that are structurally self-validating. On this cognitive-psychological basis, we construct an epidemiology of beliefs, arguing that the apparent convenience of escape clauses and other defensive “tactics” used by believers may well derive not from conscious deliberation on their part, but from more subtle mechanisms of cultural selection.

Food for thought? Trust your unconscious when energy is low.

Recent studies showed that a period of unconscious thought can help when making complex decisions. Under some circumstances, unconscious thought improves decisions even more than conscious thought. Executive functioning depends on energy provided by glucose, and we know from previous research that the performance of various conscious processes deteriorates when energy is low. Unconscious processes require less energy and may operate unhampered when energy is low. Therefore, we propose that whereas low blood glucose levels impair conscious thought, this is not the same for unconscious thought. An experiment, where we manipulated blood glucose levels, indicated that indeed, when making decisions, the unconscious can best be trusted when blood glucose levels are low, whereas conscious deliberation yields the best results when blood glucose levels are elevated.

Conscious and unconscious thought in artificial grammar learning

Unconscious Thought Theory posits that a period of distraction after information acquisition leads to unconscious processing which enhances decision making relative to conscious deliberation or immediate choice (Dijksterhuis, 2004). Support thus far has been mixed. In the present study, artificial grammar learning was used in order to produce measurable amounts of conscious and unconscious knowledge. Intermediate phases were introduced between training and testing. Participants engaged in conscious deliberation of grammar rules, were distracted for the same period of time, or progressed immediately from training to testing. No differences in accuracy were found between intermediate phase groups acting on decisions made with meta-cognitive awareness (either feeling-based intuitive responding or conscious rule- or recollection-based responding). However, the accuracy of guess responses was significantly higher after distraction relative to immediate progression or conscious deliberation. The results suggest any beneficial effects of 'unconscious thought' may not always transfer to conscious awareness.

Moral decision-making, ToM, empathy and the default mode network

Automatic intuitions and deliberate reasoning, sourcing internal representations of our personal norms and values, contribute to our beliefs of what is right and wrong. We used fMRI to directly compare moral (M) and non-moral (NM) decision-making processes using scenarios requiring conscious deliberation, whereby the main character declared an intention to take a course of action. Furthermore, we examined the relationship between BOLD signal, associated with M>NM decision-making, and moral judgment competence, psychopathy, and empathy. We observed greater activity in various parts of Theory of Mind, empathy and default mode networks during M>NM decision-making. There was a trend for high scores on primary psychopathy to correlate with decreased M>NM BOLD activation in an area extending from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to medial prefrontal cortex. We suggest that moral decision-making entails a greater degree of internally directed processing, such as self-referential mental processing and the representation of intentions and feelings, than non-moral decision-making.

Implicit Attitudes Toward Violence Among Male Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence

Whereas cognitive variables are hypothesized to play an important role in intimate partner violence (IPV) etiology and intervention, cognitive assessment methods have largely targeted offenders' explicit, controlled cognitive processing using paper-and-pencil questionnaires prone to social desirability biases. Using an implicit measure of attitudes (the Implicit Association Test [IAT]), we assessed attitudes toward gender, violence, and the association between gender and violence among 50 men enrolled in an IPV treatment program and a comparison sample of 40 nonviolent (NV) men. Although no group differences were noted on explicit attitudinal measures, men in the IPV group showed more positive implicit attitudes regarding violence, and a more rapid association between women and violence. Among men in treatment for IPV, the attitudes toward violence IAT was significantly correlated with self/partner-reported IPV frequency. In accordance with social information processing models of aggression, these results suggest that aggressogenic attitudes are likely to operate automatically and with little conscious deliberation. As a result, clinicians and researchers must adapt assessment and intervention strategies to capture both implicit and explicit aspects of cognitive processing.

Triggering Self-Presentation Efforts Outside of People’s Conscious Awareness

Three studies utilized priming techniques to examine whether self-presentations can be activated without conscious awareness. The results across all experiments consistently demonstrated nonconscious self-presentation effects, in that people were unaware that their self-presentations were triggered automatically and that their self-presentations were comparable to participants who were explicitly instructed to self-present. The findings are novel because they are the first to demonstrate that self-presentations can be triggered without conscious awareness in a manner similar to self-presentations that are strategically selected. In addition, the results help undermine the common misconception that self-presentation typically involves conscious deliberation, pretense, or outright deception.

Deliberations on Unconscious thought Theory

Deliberations on Unconscious thought Theory

Reasoning, cognitive control, and moral intuition

Recent Social Intuitionist work suggests that moral judgments are intuitive (not based on conscious deliberation or any significant chain of inference), and that the reasons we produce to explain or justify our judgments and actions are for the most part post hoc rationalizations rather than the actual source of those judgments. This is consistent with work on judgment and explanation in other domains, and it correctly challenges one-sidedly rationalistic accounts. We suggest that in fact reasoning has a great deal of influence on moral judgments and on intuitive judgments in general. This influence is not apparent from study of judgments simply in their immediate context, but it is crucial for the question of how cognition can help us avoid deleterious effects and enhance potentially beneficial effects of affect on judgment, action, and cognition itself. We begin with established work on several reactive strategies for cognitive control of affect (e.g., suppression, reappraisal), then give special attention to more complex sorts of conflict (“extended deliberation”) involving multiple interacting factors, both affective and reflective. These situations are especially difficult to study in a controlled way, but we propose some possible experimental approaches. We then review proactive strategies for control, including avoidance of temptation and mindfulness meditation (Froeliger et al., 2012, this issue). We give special attention to the role of slow or “cool” cognitive processes (e.g., deliberation, planning, and executive control) in the inculcation of long-term dispositions, traits, intuitions, skills, or habits. The latter are critical because they in turn give rise to a great many of our fast, intuitive judgments. The reasoning processes involved here are distinct from post hoc rationalizations and have a very real impact on countless intuitive judgments in concrete situations. This calls for a substantial enlargement of research on cognitive control, drawing on work in developmental psychology, automatization, educational theory, and other fields.

Beyond Button Presses

This paper addresses three questions: What are the types of action at issue in the free will and moral responsibility debate? Are the neuroscientists who make claims about free will and moral responsibility studying those types of action? If not, can the existing paradigm in the field be modified to study those types of action? Section one outlines some claims made by neuroscientists about the inefficacy of conscious intentions and the implications of this inefficacy for the existence of free will. Section two argues that, typically, the types of actions at issue in the philosophical literature require proximal or distal conscious decisions (or at least non-actively acquired intentions) and have the right kind of connection to reasons. Section three points out that neuroscientists are not studying this class of actions, as their studies focus on simple commanded actions (e.g., finger or wrist flex) and simple Buridan choices (e.g., push the left or right button). These types of actions do not require conscious control and do not have a connection to the participants' justificatory or motivational reasons for action beyond complying with the experimenter's instructions. Finally, section four then argues that neuroscience already has the resources to study the type of action relevant for free will and moral responsibility and outlines two experiments which focus on skilled actions and moral choices that could be run using the available technology. These kinds of experiments would better address the empirical question about whether conscious intentions and deliberation involving reasons ever play a role in the production of actions that are typically considered to be free and subject to moral evaluation.? Neuroscience of Free WillIn 1983, Benjamin Libet and his colleagues used neurological experimental methods to question an arguably key assumption of commonsense accounts of agency: do conscious intentions to cause subsequent (overt) action? Libet and his colleagues found that when participants were asked to perform a series of either preplanned or spontaneous wrist flexes as they felt the intention to do so1 and report the timing of their awareness of their intention to flex, EEG readings showed brain preparation for the flexing, termed the readiness potential or RP, prior to the participants' awareness of their intention to flex (1983). Libet et al. took these findings to indicate that unconscious brain processes decide (form an intention) to flex, with conscious intentions to flex temporally later and inefficacious. They further generalized these results to all intentional actions, claiming that conscious intentions to A (where A is some overt action) never cause A-ing. Other theorists, such as Daniel Wegner (2002), have argued for similar contentions, using Libet et al. (1983) as support.Some psychologists and neuroscientists have coupled this claim about the inefficacy of conscious intentions with the further claim that free will exists only if conscious intentions at least sometimes cause our intentional actions. From these claims they argue that neuroscience supports the conclusion that free will does not exist, despite our intuitions to the contrary. For example, Libet himself has argued in some papers that empirical work suggests that there is no free will under the traditional view of free will, only 'free won't' (Libet 2005).2 Libet reaches this conclusion via the following route: Under a traditional view of free will, which Libet sometimes seems to suggest is an incompatibilist agentcausal or perhaps an incompatibilist event-causal view,3 a conscious intention to A should appear before or simultaneously with the RP for Aing; that is, the conscious intention should command the brain to perform the intended act (Libet 2005, 553). The fact that participants' reported consciousness of their intention to flex occurred a third of a second after the onset of the RP supports, according to Libet, the proposition that at least some actions that we intuitively take to be free actions are unconsciously initiated. …

Driven to Distraction: The Impact of Distracter Type on Unconscious Decision Making

While there is a variety of wonderful ways to take a break from work, is there a type of distraction that is actually more productive? Studies on the deliberation-without-attention effect (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & Van Baaren, 2006) show that a period of distraction while making complex decisions can actually lead to better decisions than a period of conscious deliberation. Although there are a number of activities that will distract participants from decision-making tasks, we investigated if certain types of distracter tasks are better for demonstrating the deliberation-without-attention effect. Since most people realistically take a break with undemanding forms of activity, we hypothesized that undemanding distracter tasks will yield the best results. In Experiment 1, participants were given a choice between four different cars but before they made their decision they instructed (1) to think consciously about the choices, (2) listen to their own music with a portable digital mus...

Revising Beliefs about the Merit of Unconscious Thought: Evidence in Favor of the Null Hypothesis

Claims that a period of distraction—designed to promote unconscious thought—improves decisions relative to a period of conscious deliberation are as multifarious as they are controversial. We reviewed 16 experimental studies from two labs, across a range of tasks (multi-attribute choice, creativity, moral dilemmas), only one of which found any significant advantages for unconscious thought. The results of each study were analyzed using Bayesian t tests. Unlike traditional significance tests, these tests allow an assessment of the evidence for the null hypothesis—in this case, no difference between conscious and unconscious thought. This is done by computing the likelihood ratio (or Bayes factor), which compares the probability of the data given the null against the probability of the data given a distribution of plausible alternate hypotheses. Almost without exception, the probability of the data given the null exceeded that for the alternate distribution. A Bayesian t test for the average effect size acr...

The Habitual Use of the Self-report Habit Index

Gardner and colleagues’ [1] review of the associationbetween health-related behavior and habit strength assessedwith the Self-report Habit Index (SRHI) helpfully shifts thedebate beyond reflective influences on food intake andactivity behaviors. The review exemplifies a concerninghabit in behavioral medicine on the use of a scale with anumber of considerable limitations in correlational researchdesigns, undermining progress into understanding the role ofhabit in behavior and behavior change. We aim to highlightconceptual, construct validity and other measurement issuesin the SRHI with a view to advancing the discourse on theeffect of non-reflective influences on health behaviors.A behavior is habitual if it is cued by the context inwhich it is regularly enacted such that the cue, rather than aprocess of conscious deliberation, determines enactment[2]. Assuming that we can measure habit, it is not clearwhat insight is provided by assessing whether habitcorrelates with behavior, because any measure of habit isinherently also a measure of behavior. Habits do not causebehaviors; habits presume behaviors.Features of habitual behavior should be distinguishedfrom the factors that determine habit formation and theconsequences of habits [3]. A pre-condition to the forma-tion of a habit is a history of past enactment in the presenceof stable contextual cues. This pre-condition determines ahabit but is not part of the construct habit in itself. At itscore, a habit is behavior which exhibits features ofautomaticity, including efficiency and lack of awareness,intentionality, or controllability [4]. The extent that one isaware of the critical contextual cues, of engaging in thehabitual behavior, and of its outcomes, has implications forwhat can be self-reported. When a habit is operating outsideof awareness, a self-report likely reflects an inference aboutone’s behavior based on the consequences of the habit (e.g.,snacking habit inferred from an empty bag of potato chips)rather than on a report of the habit itself. The consequencesof habit may however not always be salient, which hasimplications for what is being measured by the SRHI.The SRHI is a 12-item scale which assesses the repetitionand automaticity of a behavior and the extent to which itcorrespondswithone’s self-identity [5]. The scale conflates apre-condition of habit (history of enactment) with automa-ticity, a point raised by Gardner and colleagues [1], which isan issue because mere repetition does not guarantee habitualperformance [6]. The SRHI also conflates habit with possibleconsequences of habits, e.g., “makes me feel weird if I donot do it” (p. 1329) [5]. Furthermore, the scale includes ameasure of self-identity, which does not readily appear to bea necessary feature of habitual behavior (e.g., one would behard-pressed to suggest that habitual eating of potato chips ispart of one’s self-identity). By including measures of pastbehavior and self-identity in the scale, it is not clear to whatextent the size of the “habit”–behavior relationship reported

Catching of Balls Unexpectedly Thrown or Fired by Cannon

Although learned actions can be automatically elicited in response to expected stimuli for which they have been prepared, little is known about whether learned actions can be automatically initiated by unexpected stimuli. Responses of unwitting participants to balls unexpectedly thrown by an experimenter (n=10) or propelled by a hidden ball cannon (n=22) were recorded by motion capture. Experience of ball catching correlated negatively with hand movement distance, indicating most responses were defensive, but successful catches were made in response to both thrown and fired balls. Although reaction time was faster in response to fired balls, interception was more frequent in response to thrown balls, indicating that movement cues by the thrower facilitated unexpected ball catching. The latency to begin a catching action by the only successful catcher of an unexpectedly fired ball was 296 msec. Given current knowledge of reaction time tasks and latencies of neural substrates of conscious perception and deliberation, it is probable that there was insufficient time available for conscious preparation of catch attempts. Ball catching may represent an example of a learned response which can be rapidly and unconsciously initiated without contextual priming or expectation of the stimulus.

Should I go with my gut? Investigating the benefits of emotion-focused decision making.

Deliberative decision strategies have historically been considered the surest path to sound decisions; however, recent evidence and theory suggest that affective strategies may be equally as effective. In four experiments we examined conditions under which affective versus deliberative decision strategies might result in higher decision quality. While consciously focusing on feelings versus details, participants made choices that varied in complexity, in extent of subsequent conscious deliberation allowed, and in domain. Results indicate that focusing on feelings versus details led to superior objective and subjective decision quality for complex decisions. However, when using a feeling-focused approach, subsequent deliberation after encoding resulted in reduced choice quality. These results suggest that affective decision strategies may be more effective relative to deliberative strategies for certain complex decisions.