I still have no idea why everyone’s first reaction was to snap their own fingers.
Important data:
1) Everyone did it.
2) Everyone claimed not to know why they did it (I am taking you at your word—that your dialog is representative)
Both of these point to something close to an involuntary reflex.
Recall the game, “Simon Says”. That game is fun because it is hard (under the right conditions) to avoid doing what someone commands you to do. It takes concentration to hear the command and then not perform the action. One might have thought (and one would have been wrong) that someone playing “Simon Says” would hear the command, then decide whether it was in the right form, then follow it. Everyone wants to play it this way and thus win. But the nervous system has a strong tendency to short-circuit the path from hearing the command to performing the action. You try to consider the command carefully before performing the action, but you fail!
This suggests that the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control. What it takes to suppress, or amplify, this path is presumably not simple.
Did you stop? So I don’t think the difficulty is avoiding compliance with commands in general. Rather, it’s switching between the mental modes of “complying” and “not complying” under time pressure.
The very fact that there is a “compliance mode” rather than individual acts of hearing each command and deciding whether or not to obey each command one at a time I think demonstrates that all is not in accordance with our folk model of voluntary action, according to which each action is willed. Rather, the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control.
By the way the book The Illusion of Conscious Will deeply explores the limitations of voluntary control, which as Wegner demonstrates is in some sense a fiction.
Important data:
1) Everyone did it. 2) Everyone claimed not to know why they did it (I am taking you at your word—that your dialog is representative)
Both of these point to something close to an involuntary reflex.
Recall the game, “Simon Says”. That game is fun because it is hard (under the right conditions) to avoid doing what someone commands you to do. It takes concentration to hear the command and then not perform the action. One might have thought (and one would have been wrong) that someone playing “Simon Says” would hear the command, then decide whether it was in the right form, then follow it. Everyone wants to play it this way and thus win. But the nervous system has a strong tendency to short-circuit the path from hearing the command to performing the action. You try to consider the command carefully before performing the action, but you fail!
This suggests that the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control. What it takes to suppress, or amplify, this path is presumably not simple.
Stop reading this.
Did you stop? So I don’t think the difficulty is avoiding compliance with commands in general. Rather, it’s switching between the mental modes of “complying” and “not complying” under time pressure.
The very fact that there is a “compliance mode” rather than individual acts of hearing each command and deciding whether or not to obey each command one at a time I think demonstrates that all is not in accordance with our folk model of voluntary action, according to which each action is willed. Rather, the mental path from thought to action is only imperfectly under voluntary control.
By the way the book The Illusion of Conscious Will deeply explores the limitations of voluntary control, which as Wegner demonstrates is in some sense a fiction.