Latest research indicates we unconsciously pursue goals

The notion that humans often take actions and pursue goals due to subconscious desires and instincts dates back to Sigmund Freud, who suggested, among other things, that repressed sexual urges underlay some human behavior. Freud’s theories were later judged unreliable and largely nonfalsifiable. In any event, until recently it was assumed that conscious decisions are essential for the mental processes involved in setting and pursuing a goal. Indeed, goal pursuit has been considered nearly synonymous with conscious thought.

But a number of recent studies suggest otherwise. In one of the first studies of this sort, some U.S. students were seated at a table to work on two apparently unrelated puzzles. For some students, the first puzzle included words related to achievement (such as “win” or “achieve”), but for others it did not. The researchers found that students who were exposed to the achievement-oriented words outperformed the other group of students on the second puzzle. Interviews with students after the test showed that the students were not aware of any influence of the first task on the second. Somewhat disconcertingly this works equally well with subliminal cues.

In some other studies, researchers found that subjects reading words related to money-making occupations (e.g., “stockbroker”), or even watching another person’s actions such as operating a slot machine, are more likely to work harder on tasks where money is at stake.

Even subtle cues in a working environment can influence behavior. For example, upon entering an office, people become more competitive when they see a leather briefcase placed on a desk. They talk more softly when there is a photo of the interior of a library on the wall. They clean their table more often when there is vague scent of cleansing agent in the air.

It is important to note that in many of these studies, subjects were asked afterwards whether they felt motivated to pursue the goal in question. These retrospective checks indicate that while subjects may become conscious of their motivation after the behavior is performed and when they are explicitly asked to reflect on it, they were generally not aware of it when they participated in the test.

In short, a large and growing body of research indicates that the pursuit of specific goals can be initiated or amplified outside of our conscious awareness. Understanding how this happens is not well understood at the present time, but is an area of active research. At one level this growing body of research confronts our current understanding of consciousness and challenges conventional notions of free will.

One intriguing question is whether the productivity of scientific research can be enhanced by subtle cues in the research environment. If so, how can one take advantage of such subtle effects in a positive way?

More details on these intriguing findings can be found in an informative and readable article [Custers2010] in a recent issue of Science, from which the above note is summarized. The authors do propose a mechanism to explain recent findings and emphasize  that attention and consciousness are not synonyms.  The review article contains a reproduction of Ruebens painting Achilles Slays Hector and notes that in the Iliad no reference is ever made to either consciousness or intention. Current discoveries make Julian Jaynes’ thesis in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [Jaynes1976] seem less audacious.  Likewise they are highly consonant with the developing sophistication of behavioral economics in recent best-selling books such as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness [Thaler2009] and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational [Ariely2008].


  1. [Ariely2008] Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, Harper Perennial, 2008. See also Amazon listing and Wikipedia article.
  2. [Custers2010] Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts, “Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness,” Science, vol. 329, no. 5987 (2 Jul 2010), pg. 47-50, available at Online article (for fee).
  3. [Jaynes1976] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin, 1976. See also Wikipedia article.
  4. [Thaler2009] Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness, Penguin, 2009. See also Amazon listing and Wikipedia article.

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