Daniel M. Wegner

Introduction

Daniel Merton Wegner (28 June 1948 – 5 July 2013) was an American social psychologist who made the study of mental control a central topic in psychology. He is best known for showing that attempts to suppress a thought can make it more intrusive rather than less, a pattern he formalised as ironic process theory, and for arguing in The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) that the everyday experience of willing an action is a construction rather than a report of causation. He also originated the concept of transactive memory, the idea that couples, teams and organisations hold knowledge jointly by keeping track of who knows what, and co-developed action identification theory with Robin Vallacher. A professor at Trinity University, the University of Virginia and finally Harvard, Wegner received the major awards his field could offer in a single year and continued working until weeks before his death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Early Life and Education

Wegner was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. He later described forming, at the age of eleven, a theory of two kinds of scientists: "bumblers, who plod along, only once in a while accomplishing something but enjoying the process even if they often end up being wrong, and the pointers, who do only one thing: point out that the bumblers are bumbling." He regarded himself firmly as a bumbler.

He entered Michigan State University intending to study physics and engineering, and friends remembered him as a boy sitting in the attic with a chemistry set and a copy of Popular Mechanics. Toward the end of his undergraduate career he decided he preferred building theories to building machines, and switched to psychology, taking an M.A. and then a Ph.D. at Michigan State, completed in 1974.

Academic and Professional Career

After his doctorate Wegner spent sixteen years at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, becoming a full professor in 1985. From 1990 to 2000 he taught and conducted research at the University of Virginia, and in 2000 he moved to Harvard University, where he held the John Lindsley Professorship of Psychology in Memory of William James.

His awards cluster at the very end of his life. In 2011 he received the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology; in 2012 he received the Donald T. Campbell Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He was elected a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After his death SPSP renamed its annual prize for theoretical innovation the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize.

Wegner was diagnosed with ALS in 2010. Over the following two and a half years he lost the ability to stand, sit, move, speak and finally breathe, but continued to mentor students and publish. He described his final period as "the world's longest wrap party," and died at his home in Winchester, Massachusetts, on 5 July 2013, aged 65.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Ironic process theory and thought suppression

In the "white bear" studies, participants asked not to think of a white bear reported more such thoughts, not fewer, once the instruction to suppress was lifted. Wegner and his colleagues replicated the pattern with implausible targets, with emotional material, and in people under cognitive load. In a 1994 Psychological Review article he proposed ironic process theory to explain it: mental control requires two processes, an effortful operating process that searches for distracters to occupy consciousness and an automatic monitoring process that scans for signs of the unwanted thought intruding. As long as cognitive resources are available the operating process keeps the thought at bay; when it is disrupted by load, stress or the end of the suppression period, the monitoring process is left running and keeps the forbidden content hyperaccessible.

The theory has been applied well beyond the laboratory, to dieting, smoking cessation, performance under pressure, and to clinical conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, where the effort to push thoughts away is itself part of the problem.

Transactive memory

In 1985 Wegner introduced the concept of transactive memory: a group memory system in which individuals combine what each person knows with a shared metaknowledge of who holds which expertise. Couples, work teams and organisations, on this account, remember more than any member could alone, not because they store more but because they can route queries to the right person. The idea has become a standard framework in organisational behaviour and team science. With Betsy Sparrow he extended it to technology: their 2011 Science paper with Jenny Liu, widely reported as the "Google effect," found that people are less likely to remember information they expect to be able to look up again, and better at remembering where to find it, exactly the division of labour a transactive system predicts.

Action identification

With Robin Vallacher, Wegner developed action identification theory, which holds that any action can be identified at many levels, from "moving my arm" to "writing a letter" to "keeping in touch," and that people tend to adopt the highest level of identification they can maintain. When a high-level identification breaks down, people shift down to the mechanics, and the action becomes harder rather than easier. The theory supplied a general account of self-regulation, learning and the felt difficulty of skilled performance.

The illusion of conscious will

Wegner argued that the experience of conscious willing is inferred, not perceived. He proposed that people attribute authorship to themselves whenever three conditions are met: priority, the thought precedes the action; consistency, the thought matches the action; and exclusivity, no other plausible cause is present. In experiments using a rigged Ouija board and related setups, participants readily experienced themselves as having caused movements that were in fact produced by someone else, and conversely failed to feel authorship of movements they had caused, when the cues were manipulated. Wegner's conclusion was not that conscious thought can never cause action, but that the feeling of will is a fallible inference from those cues, and that the connection between conscious thought and action is an empirical question rather than something settled by introspection.

Major Publications

Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., III, & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13.
Wegner, D. M. (1989). White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control. New York: Guilford Press.
Wegner, D. M. (1986). Transactive memory: A contemporary analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R. Goethals (Eds.), Theories of Group Behavior (pp. 185–208). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Wegner, D. M., & Pennebaker, J. W. (Eds.). (1993). Handbook of Mental Control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34–52.
Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1987). What do people think they're doing? Action identification and human behavior. Psychological Review, 94(1), 3–15.
Wegner, D. M., & Wheatley, T. (1999). Apparent mental causation: Sources of the experience of will. American Psychologist, 54(7), 480–492.
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wegner, D. M., Fuller, V. A., & Sparrow, B. (2003). Clever hands: Uncontrolled intelligence in facilitated communication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(1), 5–19.
Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 776–778.

Note: the transactive memory paper often listed as a book is in fact a chapter in Mullen and Goethals's edited volume.

Impact and Legacy

Wegner's influence rests less on any single finding than on the problems he invented. Transactive memory, action identification, ironic processes and apparent mental causation were each, in the Harvard memorial tribute's phrase, areas he "single-handedly designed and developed." The SPSP renamed its theoretical innovation prize after him precisely to reward the kind of conceptual risk-taking he embodied.

The empirical standing of his best-known claim is contested. Three meta-analyses of the white bear paradigm have confirmed a rebound effect of small to medium size, but a large share of individual experiments fail to find it, with one analysis reporting the effect numerically reversed in 46 per cent of the cases examined. That analysis also detected small-study bias, and after correction for it the rebound effect was no longer statistically significant, while the immediate enhancement effect under cognitive load survived. Critics add that the paradigm's central measure is self-reported thought frequency, which is vulnerable to demand, reactance and ambiguity about what counts as an instance of the thought. Competing accounts, including the motivational inference model, explain parts of the data that ironic process theory does not. Most significantly, Michael Anderson's think/no-think paradigm has repeatedly shown that instructing people to suppress retrieval can produce durable forgetting, the opposite of the ironist result, so the strong claim that suppression generally backfires is not supported; what remains is a conditional effect that depends on load, mood and instruction.

The Illusion of Conscious Will has drawn sustained criticism from philosophers and psychologists. Alfred Mele has argued that Wegner's experiments show at most that the feeling of authorship can be dissociated from actual causation in contrived settings, not that conscious intentions are never among the causes of the corresponding actions, and that the everyday case is better explained by the intention causing the action than by both sharing a common cause. Sven Walter and others have pointed out that Wegner's own text concedes the experience of will can be causally effective in other respects, making him a very limited epiphenomenalist, and that even a complete demonstration that the feeling of willing does no causal work would leave untouched the question of whether decisions and actions are free. The debate over how far Wegner's data bear on free will remains open.

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References

Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101(1), 34-52.