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The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Intuitively, many will be inclined to see conscious control of mental process as a good thing. Yet control comes at a high price. The consciously not directly controlled, automatic, parallel processing of information is not only much faster, it also handles much more information, and it does so in a qualitatively different manner. This different mental machinery is not adequate for all tasks. The human ability to deliberate consciously has evolved for good reason. However, on many more tasks than one might think at first sight, intuitive decision making, or at least an intuitive component in a more complex mental process, does indeed improve performance. This chapter presents the issue, offers concepts to understand it, discusses the effects in terms of problem-solving capacity, contrasts norms for saying when this is a good thing, and points to scientific and real-world audiences for this work.

Recent results in the cognitive sciences have been interpreted as a challenge to traditional thinking about the will. These interpretations were partly due to misunderstandings between the disciplines, but these misunderstandings are not the whole story. This introductory chapter tries to separate the real core of the challenge from the myths that are surrounding it and discusses the various ways of how to respond to the challenge where it is pertinent. The key areas discussed are the sense of agency, the function of conscious control, and mental actions.

Extensive practice leads to both expertise and automation of actions. Expertise implies knowledge of a skill but automation implies loss of conscious control. So, does practice lead to more or less ability to describe how the skill is performed? This chapter shows that despite their greater expertise at the skill, adults are less able than children to describe how they tie their shoelaces or to recognize the method that they use. Adults know the goals but not how they are achieved. The chapter also shows that adults are not able to explain how they know where to go to catch a ball, nor, in some cases, to describe what they are doing as they catch one. Expertise leads to some actions becoming beyond conscious access.

The final chapter synthesizes the arguments presented over the course of the book by suggesting that skill execution continues to be governed by conscious processes even after performers have attained a high level of expertise. It argues that skill-focused attention is necessary if experts are to eschew proceduralization and react flexibly to ‘crises’ and fine-grained changes in situational demands. In doing so, it discusses the role played by conscious control, reflection, and bodily awareness in maintaining performance proficiency. It suggests that skill maintenance and continuous improvement are underpinned by the use of both automated procedures (acknowledging that these are inherently active and flexible) and metacognitive knowledge. The chapter concludes by briefly considering how skill-focused attention needs to be applied in both training and performance contexts in order to facilitate continuous improvement.

People generally remain unaware of many of their own actions, in part because, even when an action is consciously executed, its memory trace does not last long and is thus quickly forgotten. Some actions are executed automatically and others under conscious control. This chapter examines actions that are executed automatically to understand why and how a given action does or does not become conscious. It looks at evidence showing that ongoing actions are primarily controlled unconsciously by the brain, with the subject’s consciousness being kept informed only after the event, and then more as a professional courtesy than anything else. After considering consciousness of the goal, the chapter focuses on one’s awareness of how a movement is performed. It then compares automaticity and conscious control of an action and describes a possible neural model for consciousness of action. Finally, it comments on the classical Two Williams Debate pitting Wilhelm Wundt against William James.

This chapter examines conscious control in relation to violence in the media, unconscious imitation, and freedom of speech. In particular, it discusses whether public policy decisions such as the censorship of violent entertainment should be based on scientific evidence suggesting that people unconsciously imitate actions they see. The chapter first reviews the literature about the link between exposure to media violence and aggressive behavior. It then considers why, in the context of work in cognitive science and neuroscience on imitation, this link is not surprising. It also explores William James’s ideomotor theory and the chameleon effect (whereby behavior is automatically assimilated into the social environment). Finally, it looks at the mechanisms and functions of imitation, including mirror neurons, language, and cultural transmission.

The ideal of conscious control of social phenomena has made its greatest influence felt in the economic field. This chapter explores the universal demand for “conscious” control or direction of social processes, which expresses perhaps more clearly than any of its other clichés the peculiar spirit of the age. That anything is not consciously directed as a whole is regarded as itself a blemish, a proof of its irrationality and of the need completely to replace it by a deliberately designed mechanism. Yet few of the people who use the term conscious so freely seem to be aware of precisely what it means; most seem to forget that conscious and deliberate are terms that have meaning only when applied to individuals, and that the demand for conscious control is therefore equivalent to the demand for control by a single mind.

This chapter explains the “just-do-it principle” (the central target of the book), categorizes the various positions on expertise encountered in the prior chapter, and pulls apart the different kinds of mental processes that are proscribed by just-do-it advocates (such as self-reflective thinking, planning, predicting, deliberation, attention, monitoring, conceptualizing, conscious control, trying, effort, a sense of the self, and acting for a reason). It also distinguishes the descriptive aspect of the principle (the aspect that tells us what experts do) from the proscriptive claim about what experts ought not to do, and explains the widely held “principle of interference,” which asserts, in short, that thinking interferes with expert action. Beyond this, it identifies moderate forms of the just-do-it principle and contrast these moderate views with extreme views. Finally, this chapter presents the “cognition-in-action principle,” which captures the view that the book aims to defend.

A common view is that a core feature of addiction is loss of conscious control. We present an alternative view in which we emphasize the role of conscious control and self-regulation in both sustaining and ending an addiction. In our model, addictive behaviors occur because addicts self-regulate successfully to fulfill problematic desires. Therefore, the most crucial step in treatment is that the addict consciously decides to stop fulfilling those desires. The addict must then self-regulate to quit. We describe the self-regulatory steps an addict must take to quit using drugs (set clear standards, maintain motivation to quit, maintain self-efficacy to quit, train willpower, and avoid depleting willpower through avoiding too many concurrent uses) and to avoid relapse (make lifestyle changes to minimize temptation, and avoid losing motivation after a lapse).

The present popularity of “economic planning” is directly traceable to the prevalence of the scientistic ideas. As in this field the scientistic ideals manifest themselves in the particular forms that they take in the hands of the applied scientist and especially the engineer, it will be convenient to combine the discussion of this influence with some examination of the characteristic ideals of the engineers. This chapter describes how the influence on current views about problems of social organization of this technological approach, or the engineering point of view, is much greater than is generally realized. Most of the schemes for a complete remodelling of society, from the earlier utopias to modern socialism, bear indeed the distinct mark of this influence. In recent years, this desire to apply engineering technique to the solution of social problems has become very explicit; “political engineering” and “social engineering” have become fashionable catchwords that are quite as characteristic of the outlook of the present generation as its predilection for “conscious” control. These phrases suggest a confusion about the fundamental differences between the task of the engineer and that of social organizations on a larger scale, which make it desirable to consider their character somewhat more fully.