Brass Marcel

This chapter focuses on the relationship between control beliefs and self-control. After providing an overview of the research showing how control beliefs affect self-control performance, the authors present a novel experimental procedure based on a placebo brain stimulation that aims at altering people’s belief about their own self-control. They then describe a heuristic framework that accounts for belief-related changes in self-control performance. The core idea is that beliefs should be conceptualized as metacognitive knowledge about the self and that such metacognitive knowledge is used to predict the success of self-control behavior. When people form the expectation that they can exert self-control but experience failure, they perceive a discrepancy between their expectation and the actual outcome. Under specific circumstances, the perception of such discrepancy or prediction error will motivate people to exert more effort to match their expectation, which will lead to increased self-control.

The subjective feeling of free choice is an important feature of human experience. Experimental tasks have typically studied free choice by contrasting free and instructed selection of response alternatives. These tasks have been criticised, and it remains unclear how they relate to the subjective feeling of freely choosing. We replicated previous findings of the fMRI correlates of free choice, defined objectively. We introduced a novel task in which participants could experience and report a graded sense of free choice. BOLD responses for conditions subjectively experienced as free identified a postcentral area distinct from the areas typically considered to be involved in free action. Thus, the brain correlates of subjective feeling of free action were not directly related to any established brain correlates of objectively-defined free action. Our results call into question traditional assumptions about the relation between subjective experience of choosing and activity in the brain’s so-called voluntary motor areas

Until recently, it was assumed that co-representation of others’ actions, an essential part in joint action, is biologically tuned. However, research demonstrated that we also simulate actions of non-biological interaction partners under certain conditions. In the present study, we investigated whether perceived intentionality or perspective taking is the underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon. Participants saw a short video fragment of a non-biological agent (i.e. a triangle) as main character. The movements of this agent were either described as intentional or as unintentional. Furthermore, participants were instructed to either take the perspective of this non-biological agent or not. Results show that perspective taking and perceived intentionality both lead to action co-representation of non-biological actions. Possible explanations for these findings are discussed.

Believing in free will may arise from a biological need for control. People induced to disbelieve in free will show impulsive and antisocial tendencies, suggesting a reduction of the willingness to exert self-control. We investigated whether undermining free will affects two aspects of self-control: intentional inhibition and perceived self-control. We exposed participants either to anti-free will or to neutral messages. The two groups then performed a task that required self-control to inhibit a prepotent response. No-free will participants showed less intentional inhibitions than controls, suggesting a reduction of self-control. We assessed perceived self-control by asking participants whether the response resulted from a deliberate intention or from an impulsive reaction. Perceived self-control was lower in the no-free will group than in control group. Our findings show that undermining free will can degrade self-control and provide insights into how disbelieving in free will leads to antisocial tendencies