When Skill Becomes Automatic

How losing conscious access to the details of an action can weaken monitoring and voluntary control

Loss of voluntary control over the details of an action seems to follow a loss of conscious access to those details. Langer and her co-workers conducted some elegant experiments to support this point. They were pursuing the hypothesis that perceived competence affects performance: the more skilled we think we are, the better we perform, provided that we cannot monitor our performance directly.

One way in which we lose touch with our own competence is through automatization. When we become skilled readers, musicians, or truck drivers, we lose conscious access to many details of our own actions and therefore become more vulnerable to false attributions about our performance.

This line of reasoning led Langer and Imber to devise a simple coding task that people could learn to the point of automaticity in a matter of minutes. Letters of the alphabet were recoded into a two-symbol system. The letters A through I were represented by a triangle plus the nth letter after A; letters J through R were represented by a circle plus the nth letter after J, and so on. Thus, the letter “B” became “triangle plus 2,” while “L” became “circle plus 3.”

A preliminary group reported that they were still conscious of the task details after recoding two sentences. After six sentences, they were no longer conscious of the steps. The task had become automatic.

Langer and Imber then compared the effects of conscious access and automaticity. A Moderate Practice group recoded only two sentences, reported being conscious of the details, and could specify more steps in the task than the High Practice group, which recoded six sentences and reported automaticity.

The researchers then introduced an arbitrary manipulation. Some subjects were called “Bosses,” others were called “Assistants,” and a third group received no label. In fact, all three groups performed the identical task. The assumption was that the labels would affect their self-confidence.

Afterward, they were asked to perform the coding task again. Bosses performed much as before, no differently from the no-label group. But Assistants performed much worse when the coding task had become automatic. Highly automatic Assistants made four times as many errors as before and took 40 percent longer to finish.

In the Moderate Practice condition, where the coding task was not automatic and remained consciously accessible, Assistants performed as well as Bosses.

The simplicity and effectiveness of this study are quite remarkable, and the interpretation is clear. When we have no conscious access to our own performance, and a seemingly reliable source indicates that we are doing badly, we tend to accept the misleading feedback because we cannot check our performance directly.

With direct conscious access to our performance, we are much less influenced by misleading labels. These results suggest that three things go together: losing voluntary control over the details of an action, losing consciousness of those details, and losing the ability to monitor and edit them.

Indeed, the ability to monitor and edit a planned act may be the essence of voluntary control.

While we may speak of “conscious” monitoring and editing, we are generally not conscious of the rules and criteria by which that monitoring occurs. If we detect a syntax error in inner speech, we do not consciously say, “Aha! A lack of number agreement between noun and verb!” Not even linguists do that.

Rather, we simply “know” immediately that the conscious plan is in error. The rule systems that detect the error remain silent in their details.

Thus, consciousness does not itself perform the monitoring and editing. Instead, conscious experience of an event facilitates monitoring and editing by making its contents available to many unconscious rule systems, just as global workspace architecture allows many specialized processes to review a global message.

Any complete theory of voluntary control must therefore explain the automaticity dimension: why, with practice, we lose both conscious access to and voluntary control over the details of an action.

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