Intentionality versus automaticity

Aristotle being corrected by a teenager...

I'm always interested in tensions and apparent paradoxes. At present I am thinking about the tension between Intentionality and automaticity.

A lot of my work involves helping people to clarify their intentions, and develop options or strategies in pursuit of those intentions; and to use their time and other resources in a mindful way, to accomplish those goods to which they aspire.

Further, I remember as a teenager, thinking that Aristotle had got it wrong (ok, so I was precocious...) when he talked about virtues as habits. Surely for an act to be virtuous, one has to have a good intention, not merely be acting out of habit.

However, as I understand a little more about how the brain works, I am increasingly clear about the value of automaticity. We cannot attend to everything intentionally, as we simply don't have the cognitive capacity. So building good habits - automating a number of activities - is clearly an important strategy; and of course that is something else that I have long sought to help my clients to do. As well, of course, as my children. This is about building strong neural pathways, that fire automatically: hence automaticity.

So habits reduce cognitive load, leaving our brains free to be intentional about non-recurrent choices. Additionally, habits make good choices more reliable. My strong habit (which took a long time to build) of getting out of bed early and going up the hill on my bike is now sufficiently robust that even if the weather is challenging (the feels-like temperature here was -9 this morning) I don't faff about or bottle out. Though, to be strictly honest, I did go for a shorter than usual ride this morning.  And I realise that was what Aristotle was getting at, so maybe he wasn't such a fool as my teenage self had imagined. 

Viktor Frankl

Yet I remain convinced of the importance of intentionality; not least because of Viktor Frankl's great wisdom and insight: 'Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.' 

One way to address this tension, of course, is to be very intentional about the creation of habits that support us in becoming the person we aspire to be: habits of thought (thinking well of others, for example) as well as habits of behaviour.

But habits can erode over time, and we may grow over time, so I think that is insufficient. So I think another thing to think about is the conscious competence model. We can develop a discipline (or even a habit) of bringing our habits out of unconscious competence into conscious competence to examine them, polish them, re-establish them at the highest level (all highly intentional activities) and then return them to unconscious competence in a better state, where we can rely on them, and allow that automaticity to free up cognitive capacity for other challenges we may face.