Consciousness

Definition

Consciousness refers to the subjective experience of oneself and one's environment. This experience includes the awareness of one's feelings and emotions and the awareness of, and perceived control over, one's thoughts and behaviors. Conscious processes stand in contrast to subconscious (or nonconscious) processes, which occur outside of awareness and without intentional control.

Background and History

Consciousness is the familiar lens through which humans view their day-to-day worlds, yet no concept has proven more difficult for people to explain or understand. How do thoughts arise? How does subjective experience relate to, or come out of, physical processes in the brain? Such questions are often referred to as the hard problem of consciousness. It is these questions that challenged thinkers like René Descartes many centuries ago (he suggested that the mind is of a nonphysical substance separate from the brain), and it is these same issues that continue to puzzle countless scientists and philosophers in the present day. In contrast, psychologists and other academics have been slightly more successful in addressing the so-called easy problem of consciousness, which refers to questions of how cognitive processes influence behavior and how people react to their subjective experiences. With regard to consciousness, these are the questions that social psychologists are most concerned with today.

[Page 172]Early ideas about the easy problem of consciousness were somewhat scattered in the field of psychology as not all psychologists found conscious processes to be an important phenomenon. Sigmund Freud was famous for addressing the easy problem of consciousness by proposing the conscious ego and superego as functioning separately from the unconscious id, which he described as a reservoir of instincts and desires. However, despite the early emphasis by Freud and others like him on the interaction between conscious and unconscious sections of the mind, a full understanding of conscious processes was delayed by scientists like B. F. Skinner, who emphasized the utilization of observable behavior in the study of psychology. For decades, psychology was dominated by a view of the mind as a black box that receives input and exhibits output but whose contents are irrelevant to scientific study.

Debating the Utility of Consciousness

When social psychologists started to focus more and more on thought processes in the latter decades of the 20th century, many of their surprising findings pointed to a conscious system rife with flaws and inaccuracies. Researchers demonstrated that people are unable through introspection to accurately describe the causation behind their judgments, decisions, and behaviors. In addition, people often misattribute the driving forces behind their current emotions, and in some cases, they mislabel their emotions altogether. Recent research on consciousness has demonstrated that conscious thought can actually be a hindrance to decisionmaking processes, and furthermore, people have been found to misperceive whether their actions did or did not occur under their conscious control. Together, these results paint consciousness as a poor tool for doing the one thing that everyday experience would suggest it does well, which is provide an individual with the awareness of one's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In response to these findings, many psychologists have questioned exactly what function consciousness serves.

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