The Situationalist Cognitive Control Model

There is a widely held assumption in the philosophical community that Normative Competence – consciously weighing evidence, effectively deliberating and making a decision - is a prerequisite for attribution of responsibility. According to this idea decision making below the level of conscious awareness compromises Normative Competence. John Doris and others have pointed to evidence from Situationalist social psychology that shows behavior is highly influenced by situational factors. Accordingly they espouse a diminished – Frail Control depiction of human behavior. Suhler and Churchland (2009) respond to this claim by arguing that to understand human decision-making properly we need to expand the concept of control to include unconscious processes. Thereby distancing themselves from the Normative Competence prerequisite. Following in Suhler and Churchland’s footsteps I propose an expanded notion of Normative Competence that takes situational variation and unconscious processes into account but does not diminish the role of choice in human behavior.

Most people’s thoughts and behaviors change as a result of situational factors as opposed to thinking long and hard about something and then ‘willing’ themselves out of that behavior. Haidt (2001) and Stich (2006) point to the lack of evidence in the psychological literature that people ever change their minds or behaviors as a result of private reflection, though neither of them deny that it is possible to do so only that it is extremely rare (in fact both point to evidence by Kuhn (1991) that philosophers do sometimes undergo change in strongly held opinions through private reflection). The problem for human rationality (which is what’s under threat by the situationalist model) is not whether people’s behavior is strongly affected by situational and unconscious factors but whether the effect is adaptive. Take for example an alcoholic whose compromised judgment eventually leads to a car accident. This ‘situation’ could act as a wake up call for this individual that he needs to change his behavior. In between the eliciting situation of the car accident and the final behavior change to sobriety lay many crucial steps that elucidate the adaptive features of unconscious processes and situational variations.

The first of these steps is the actual decision for him to change his behavior. Calling up unconscious-emotional processes to contribute to the decision-making is of crucial importance for adaptive decisions to be made. The adaptive role of unconscious emotional processes was elucidated by Damasio (1994) and his VMPFC patients. Since then several studies from neuropsychology, neurology, and social psychology have shown the adaptive nature of unconscious emotional processes, without which the adaptivity of our behavior would be extremely compromised. In the case of the alcoholic who just got in to an accident it would have to be the rush of emotions, such as fear and panic for instance, that must play a role in his ‘wake-up call’. If unconscious emotional processes aren’t strongly biasing his decision how else could he have changed his mind? What new information has he now calculated and weighed in a thoughtful conscious deliberative way that he couldn’t have, or possibly didn’t, do before the accident? It seems more probable that he was flooded with emotions that biased him to arrive at the conclusion that he needs to change his behavior.

The biasing of decision-making by emotions isn’t its only adaptive feature; it certainly plays a role in goal achievement. It is our emotions that give us the drive to commit to our decisions and allow us to ultimately achieve the goal we set out to accomplish. Emotional processes can help us commit to our goals but situations or environments can play a huge role in our ability to effectively reprogram our behavior. Looking back at the case of our alcoholic, once he’s arrived at his decision his next step will be to find the right situation or environment that will allow him to off-load his effort. He might for instance go the Betty Ford Clinic, or join an Alcoholics Anonymous group, he may have to give up his social circle of drinking buddies and find new social groups and alternative environments to spend his time in. By making the choice to find the best situations to put himself in he has off-loaded the effort from his conscious control or ‘will power’ and is allowing the environment to play upon his unconscious which biases he decision-making and behavior towards his goal.

Ultimately the change will happen as a result of the underlying neural circuitry changing. The neural circuitry that will change will be the unconscious, automatic system that guides much of our day-to-day mundane thoughts, mood, cognition and emotion. The argument that environment wires-up much of our automatic processes stems from developmental psychology studies of social learning and unconscious imitation and mimicry but also by anthropologists who suggest that enculturation works by this very same process. In much the same way our protagonist, the alcoholic, has adaptively changed, possibly even re-enculturated himself, with the aid of situational contingencies and unconscious processes. Despite the huge roll such aforementioned factors played it is important to note that choice was never compromised in the process and therefore neither was control.

References

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New

York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Doris, J.M. (1998) Persons, situations, and virtue ethics. Nous. 32, 504–

530

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist

approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834

Kuhn, D. (1991). The skills of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sripada, C., & Stich, S. A Framework for Psychology of Norms. The Innate Mind:

Culture and Cognition. Oxform University Press, 2006. Pp. 280-301.

Suhler, C., & Churchland, P. (2009). Control: conscious and otherwise. Trends in

Cognitive Sciences. 8, 341-347.