Non-Conscious Goal Pursuit and the Effortful Control of Behavior

2 We haven't really solved the problem of consciousness until that executive is itself broken down into subcomponents that are themselves clearly just unconscious underlaborers which themselves work (compete, interfere, dawdle,…) without supervision (Dennett, 2001, p. 228) A significant proportion of human behavior is determined by non-conscious goal pursuits. This assertion is easily derived from two well-established and highly consensual observations about human nature. First, much of human behavior is purposeful, or goal directed. Our goals range from very trivial (e.g., to make a cup of coffee) and a little less so (e.g., to get to work), through more complex (e.g., to write an interesting chapter) to extremely difficult ones (e.g., to be a good parent). It is not completely unlikely that goals direct behavior at virtually every moment of our lives. Second, our consciousness is very – but very – limited in its processing resources. Memorize simple cooking instructions, count the number of knives you put on the table, or just think a simple thought – and your conscious capacity drops substantially. In fact, even reading THIS trivial sentence is likely to consume much of your conscious processing resources. This grave limitation on conscious processing suggests that a big chunk of the mental processes related to goal-pursuits have to occur outside of conscious awareness. Considered in tandem, then, these two observations imply that much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious goal pursuit, and hence that the dynamics of non-conscious goal(s) pursuit are important determinants of the psychology of action. We begin this chapter by discussing the existing literature on automatic, non-conscious goal pursuit. We then present the adaptiveness paradox: On the one hand, we argue, in order to be effective non-conscious goal pursuit must be adaptive. On the other hand, non-conscious, automatic processes are widely believed to rely on existing networks of associations, and are hence thought to be inflexible. We then propose 3 three new hypotheses. These help to resolve the paradox because at their core lies the contention that working memory (WM) is involved in non-conscious goal pursuit. Given the nature of WM, we argue, its involvement in non-conscious goal pursuits allows them to be flexible. We review a series of studies that support our predictions. The studies focus on one particular type of automatic processes – non-conscious goal pursuit. The resolution that we offer to the adaptiveness paradox – i.e., the involvement of WM in …