Future-Minded

The Psychology of Agency and Control

Magda Osman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137022264
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350312197
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

What drives us to make decisions?

Future-Minded explores the psychological processes of agency and control. If you've ever wondered why we think of coincidences as matters of fate rather than the result of the laws of probability, this book provides the answer. From memory and reasoning to our experiences of causality and consciousness, it unpicks the mechanisms we use on a daily basis to help us predict, plan for and attempt to control the future.

Future-Minded
- Features a wealth of real world examples to help you engage with this fast-developing area.
- Provides clear analysis of psychological experiments and their findings to explain the evidence behind the theory.

Thought-provoking and highly topical, Future-Minded is fascinating reading for psychology students studying cognition or consciousness, and for anyone interested in understanding how we try to determine the future.

1
Agency and control: psychological tools for making the future

When people’s choice over their own lives is interfered with, even when it is for the greater good, it can lead to some rather bizarre behaviour. Take for instance the switch from incandescent bulbs to compact florescent lamps (CFL), that is, energy saving light bulbs. Governments introduced regulations to phase out incandescent bulbs. The switch was motivated to improve energy efficiency in the home and in the workplace. When people were aware that the switch over was coming, and that CFLs were going to be made standard, they reacted rather badly. Various news reports (Daily Mail, September 2009; New York Times, May 2011; USA Today, February 2011) claimed that people were stockpiling incandescent bulbs. This is in spite of the fact that CFLs not only save energy, but also save money in the long run.

Why might that be? The arguments for stockpiling incandescent bulbs suggested that people simply couldn’t do without them. Various claims were made, such as incandescent bulbs emit more heat than CFLs (actually not true, the difference is negligible), they are brighter than CFLs (not necessarily), and they create better ambiance than CFLs (a matter simply of taste). More to the point, for many consumers, the need to defend their right to use incandescent bulbs led to various campaigns (e.g., see US legislation concerning Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act, Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, South Carolina Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act). In fact the debate is still going on (New York Times, April 2013).

Again, the question is, why? Why would anyone care for a light bulb? Is it because people have a special attachment to incandescent bulbs? Surely this can’t be the reason. What about a lack of choice? We come to believe that having choice, amongst many things, is what makes us happy; though there are some doubts as to whether we know exactly what and how to make ourselves happy.¹ Our choice is being defined externally to some degree because we are now being encouraged to change our behaviour and switch from one option (e.g., incandescent bulbs) to another (e.g., CFLs), but we aren’t being given a FREE choice in the matter. Also, perhaps we may be acting defensively because of the fact that we are being told what to do? The advice from government is that we should switch over because it is better for us in the long run, but this in effect is an instruction to change. This may in part also explain why in this case we defend our choice of action (stock piling light bulbs) against reason. This point can be illustrated using another example. The case of wearing seat belts is another situation with parallels with the first for the reason that it takes a huge amount of persuasion to get us to do what we should do, and it takes a lot of persuasion because we simply don’t like being told what to do. If we look back at what happened, our first reaction to legislation that made wearing seat belts compulsory for passengers and drivers was overwhelmingly bad. People felt they ought to defend their right not to wear seat belts in cars. In fact in the UK it took more than 10 years from trying to encouraging people to use seat belts in cars to eventually enforcing this through legislation.² Clearly, there is something very important to us about acting on our own volition (our own sense of agency and control) which leads us to behave in defensive ways when it is undermined.

AGENCY AND CONTROL

Agency, in very broad terms, means a capability or belief that we can cause things to happen, particularly desirable things. Control is a related phenomenon, and refers to planning and deciding which actions will achieve desirable outcomes and help us avoid negative ones. These collections of behaviours fit together to allow us to bridge the situation we are currently in with future situations in which we get what we want. In other words, a sense of agency and control are goal directed behaviours that transport us from the here and now to a situation that has not yet happened. Agency and control are such powerful psychological experiences, as the examples just described show, that when challenged, they result in us reacting rather badly, and even aggressively sometimes. Moreover, when these same behaviours are repeatedly undermined, they can lead to psychologically unhealthy states such as depression, anxiety, and impulse control problems.

OBJECTIVES OF THIS BOOK

Given the importance of these processes, this book asks some core questions that help us understand agency and control: What are agency and control? What are the psychological processes involved in them? How does psychology investigate the processes involved in agency and control? Where do we find examples of agency and control in the real world?

Objective 1

One of the objectives of this book is to suggest that it pays to have an understanding of the psychological processes that underpin agency and control in order to understand the principles behind the behaviour of ourselves and others.

Objective 2

The second objective of this book is to develop the argument that fundamentally the function of agency and control is to anchor the future, so that our uncertainty of it is reduced. Hence we are essentially future-minded creatures and agency and control are a means of driving us forward into the future armed with some expectations of what we will face.

How does agency and control make us future-minded?

Agency and control help us psychologically to pin down the future by developing expectations for what we think will happen, so that we act in ways that can make them likely to happen. Fundamentally we have an array of psychological operations that are directed to operate over goals which deliver us from the present to the future. This array of tools includes our capacity to predict events (learning), our sense or feeling that we can bring about changes in future events (agency), our ability to choose actions that achieve future goals (control – internal control and external control), our ability to represent past, current, and future events (consciousness), and our ability to detect patterns and interpret their structural relationships that helps us understand future events (contingency learning, causality). However, there is always a cost to such a beautiful array of elegant tools, which is that sometimes they operate inaccurately and lead to error. For instance, when we make errors, we can misperceive events that we experience and this can lead us to act in ways that lead to illusions of control, and illusions of chaos. Also, as a consequence of a highly tuned system that is designed to make sense patterns in order to predict future events, we often end up seeing patterns that don’t have causal connections, even if they are implied – namely coincidences. Nevertheless, some of the errors we experience are reasonable trade-offs for a combination of psychological processes that enable us to achieve the remarkable things that we can do.

Two basic assumptions made in this book

The strong claim made in this book is that agency and control, and other associated features of our psychological behaviour direct us into the future, that is, they help reduce uncertainty about what is to come. With the exception of this chapter and the last, the book focuses on psychological research and key findings that reveal aspects of our behaviour (agency, control, illusion of control + illusion of chaos, causality + coincidences, consciousness) and explains them by referring to a general framework: the future-minded machine. In order to make this argument I will assume two things. First, that agency and control are fundamental to our survival. This is not a new or controversial idea. Second, that we are predominately conscious of, or can recover conscious access to, the intentions behind our actions. This is not currently a well-liked idea, especially not in popular science circles, but it matters from the point of view of what I’m arguing. By understanding the processes of agency and control, this book will show that we are more in control of our selves and our behaviours than we often care to admit. More to the point, there is more good evidence to support this position than the kind of evidence that suggests that a lot of what we do is driven by unconscious processes, which in turn implies we are not in control of ourselves.

The aim of this chapter is to take psychological research beyond the laboratory and discuss it in connection to everyday examples in order to illustrate the general and far-reaching implications that psychological research has with respect to agency and control.

CHALLENGING SOME POPULAR IDEAS

Agency and control are subjects that have made it into several bestseller books. This is because they invite speculation about who is fundamentally in control, and how we can achieve more control. They also lend themselves to philosophical questions about whether or not free choice is ultimately illusory. The many ideas that have been made popular in recent times have implications for the issues discussed in this book. The aim of this particular chapter is to consider various popular ideas and illustrate them with real world examples and discuss them in relation to one of the key assumptions I’ve made, namely: We are predominately conscious of, or can recover conscious access to, the intentions behind our actions.

Many theorists’^{3,4,5,6,7,8,9} Big Ideas that have made it into the public domain place a heavy emphasis on shifting the responsibility of control away from the conscious individual to our unconscious selves. Given that this type of position has strong implications for our understanding of agency and control, the Big Ideas are worth thinking about and evaluating. Here I have summarized some of the Big Ideas that matter for agency and control.

Big Ideas

1. Thinking hard is bad, thinking intuitively is good: Our unconscious processes do a lot of our decision making for us, and when we do think consciously it can set us in the wrong direction.
2. Unconscious thinking is bad, thinking consciously is better: We are ruled by our unconscious, which is often highly biased and sets us in the wrong direction, so we should try to think more evaluatively and deliberately.
3. Our brains are controlling us, we don’t have much conscious control of ourselves: There is no self in control, our brains are mostly doing all the work and so control is illusory.

Each of these ideas has implications for agency and control in a practical sense, and in a scientific sense. As you can see, they are very bold ideas that clearly do have a strong message behind them, but they are not necessarily compatible with each other. This is a problem given how prevalent they are in the public domain and so several big but confusing messages are being presented to people. So, let’s consider how they affect day to day matters in the real world.

Example: weight

Imagine individuals who have been for a check-up, and have been told that their BMI (body mass index) shows that they are now in the overweight category. This is a big deal because it increases their chances of various medical problems: they also have a family history of heart disease and high blood pressure. So, these people really should start exercising a lot more, and try to lose weight.

In actual fact, the World Health Organization in 2008 published statistics forecasting that by 2015 there will be 2.3 billion overweight adults in the world, and an additional 700 million will be obese. Increased weight through poor diet has been identified as one of the most important health problems the world now faces.

In general, the basic message is that we are consuming more than we are expending. There are several reasons why this is the case. It might be as a result of the increased presence of sugars and salts in processed foods that may in turn make them highly addictive. It could also be because we have a more sedentary lifestyle in which our work patterns have taken us out of manual jobs to more office based jobs. There are also arguments that genetic factors mean many of us are susceptible to putting on weight (though see Tim Spector for an alternative view¹⁰). Psychological sciences can also give us some indication of factors that might be relevant in the weight debate:

1. Neuroscience will tell you that the reward centres in your brain light up when you eat sugary or fatty foods,¹¹ suggesting that we might be hard wired to receive pleasure from eating bad food. So, the presence of these foods will automatically appeal to us and this will lead to higher consumption.
2. Cognitive psychologists will tell us that we aren’t conscious of the influences of advertising, which strongly affect our consumer behaviour.¹² This means that we are often likely to buy food we hadn’t intended to buy, or crave for foods that we don’t need. Because we are unaware of the influences on our behaviour, it is very hard for us to resist the strong forces that bombard our senses from the minute we wake up to just before we sleep.

Any intervention programme that is designed to incorporate some of the suggestions from psychological science would have to deal with two Big Ideas: our unconscious is bad, and our brains control us. This is where we could, if we wanted to, give up any ideas of self-control. Why should we try to lose weight? The odds are stacked against us because we are at the mercy of advertising which surrounds us every day of our lives, right? How can we possibly live in a world without it? Also, the reward centres in our brains are nicely set up for us to feel better and happier when we eat something sugary and fatty, so how can we resist the feelings that come from that? We also aren’t conscious of the choice to buy unhealthy foods, so the forces that influences are hard to manage, so we simply can’t control our impulses to buy foods that are bad for us.

If we go back to the example of the individual who has been told by their doctor to lose weight, looking at the evidence from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Agency and control – psychological tools for making the future
• 2. Agency – claiming future events as our own
• 3. Control – achieving and maintaining a desirable future
• 4. Causality and coincidence – links between past, present, and future
• 5. Consciousness – mental episodes of the past, present, and future
• 6. Illusion of control and illusion of chaos – mistaking the future
• 7. Goals and values – ways of anchoring the future
• 8. Where does future-mindedness stand in psychology?
• References
• Index