Imitation, conscious will and social conditioning
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Imitation, conscious will and social conditioning Daniel Rueda Garrido1 Received: 27 September 2019 / Accepted: 3 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This essay aims to explore imitation in social contexts. The argument that summarizes my claim is that the perception of other people’s behaviour conditions the agent in imitating that behaviour, as evidence from social psychology holds (Bargh and Chartrand in J Pers Soc Psychol 76(6):893–910, 1999; Bargh and Ferguson in Psychol Bull 126(6):925–945, 2000; Bargh and Ferguson in Trends Cogn Sci 8(1):33–39, 2004), but what the agent perceives and experiences becomes potential motives for her actions only through her identification with a particular way of being and acting. Therefore, although the agent’s actions are conditioned by perceptual stimuli, the latter are not the cause of the actions. The agent is the ultimate cause. That is, a convergence between perceptual stimuli and conscious will. I take this latter conclusion to suggest a compatibilist approach whereby action in a social situation would require the perceptual conditioning as much as the freedom and consciousness of the agent. Keywords Conscious will · Self-image · Perception-behaviour link · Motives · Social conditioning · Compatibilism
1 Introduction In this essay, I propose an account on human free will that is compatible with conditioning in social contexts. The argument that summarizes my claim is that the perception of other people’s behaviour conditions the agent in imitating that behaviour, as evidence from social psychology holds (Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Bargh and Ferguson 2000, 2004), and thus, what the agent perceives and experiences becomes the motive for her actions. However, in opposition to other interpretations, I endorse that although the actions of the agent have their potential motives in the perceived actions, these only become motives through the consciousness of the agent. For * Daniel Rueda Garrido [email protected] 1
Cultural Studies and Philosophy, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Hebei Normal University, No. 20, Road East of 2nd Ring South, Yuhua District, Shijiazhuang 050024, Hebei, China
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the agent, by willing to act in the way that she does, reveals an identification with those actions that she imitates. This essay takes up the experiments conducted by a group of social psychologists led by John Bargh, which endorse the imitation of other agents as a mechanical response. On the contrary, I propose that all imitation requires a pre-reflective consciousness of identification with the agents and behaviour perceived. If this identification is not given, the imitation is not obtained, which means that the experienced behaviour has not been taken as a motive of any behaviour. Identification would, therefore, be a sort of disposition to identify with certain people and attitudes. A disposition that, however, is only revealed in the imitation itself. The identification is not the motive,
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