The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act. Conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought about the action. The thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action, and not be accompanied by other causes. An experiment illustrating the role of priority found that people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that in fact they were forced to perform when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence. Conscious will is a pervasive human experience. We all have the sense that we do things, that we cause our acts, that we are agents. As William James (1890) observed, "the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life... depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago " (p. 453). And yet, the very notion of the will seems to contradict the core assumption of psychological science. After all, psychology examines how behavior is caused by mechanisms—the rattling off of genetic, unconscious, neural, cognitive, emotional, social, and yet other chains that lead, dully or not, to the things people do. If the things we do are caused by such mechanisms, how is it that we nonetheless experience willfully doing them? Our approach to this problem is to look for yet another chain—to examine the mechanisms that produce the experience of conscious will itself. In this article, we do this by exploring the possibility that the experience of will is a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally. Quite simply, it may be that people experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action. This idea means that people can experience conscious will quite independent of any actual causal connection between

The authors tested and confirmed the hypothesis that priming a stereotype or trait leads to complex overt behavior in line with this activated stereotype or trait. Specifically, 4 experiments established that priming the stereotype of professors or the trait intelligent enhanced participants ' performance on a scale measuring general knowledge. Also, priming the stereotype of soccer hooligans or the trait stupid reduced participants ' performance on a general knowledge scale. Results of the experiments revealed (a) that prolonged priming leads to more pronounced behavioral effects and (b) that there is no sign of decay of the effects for at least 15 min. The authors explain their results by claiming that perception has a direct and pervasive impact on overt behavior (cf. J. A. Bargh, M. Chen, & L. Burrows, 1996). Implications for human social behavior are discussed. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.--Christopher Isherwood Some time ago, a few members of the Department of Social Psychology of the University of Nijmegen visited a soccer match. After they had parked their car, they walked the remaining mile to the stadium. The psychologists, behaving calmly and orderly

In a vocal uproar, consumers protested against Amazon.com’s strategy to price discriminate by charging their loyal customers higher prices, thereby extracting greater profits (Rosencrance 2000). Prior to this, the giant online retailer realized, as many others, that some consumers (e.g., its loyal customer base) were willing to pay a higher premium than other consumers. Following a simple economic logic, Amazon.com charged these consumers higher prices. Alas, when consumers found out about this strategy they became enraged: “no company should charge different consumers different prices ” was a common cry. Two interesting and important facts stand out in this story. The first is that Amazon.com’s strategy is on many counts equivalent to other price discrimination approaches commonly used, including the very popular targeted coupon campaigns employed by most retailers on and off line. The second, and central to this work, is the use of the term “should ” in the consumer outcry above. Another example relating to perceived violation of fairness is the Coca Cola Company’s attempt to price discriminate based on the momentary value of the drink to the individual. It was obvious to the company that consumers derive greater pleasure