Conscious Affect in Epistemic Feelings

The second kind of misattribution studies helps settle precisely this issue (Topolinski and Strack 2009c,a). While in the first kind of studies the subjects misattribute non-affective properties on the basis of affect, in the second kind of studies the misattribution goes the other way around: informative affective reactions are discounted by being misattributed to an irrelevant source. In these studies, the experimenters ask subjects to make semantic coherence judgments by discriminating between word triads that either share a common remote associate (e.g. SALT, DEEP, FOAM implying SEA; coherent triad) or not (e.g.

DREAM, BALL, BOOK; incoherent triad). In the fluency-reattribution condition, the subjects are told that the “easiness of reading and the fluency with which the meaning of words is recognized” (Topolinski and Strack 2009a, p. 614) is due to a task-irrelevant source: background music. In the affect-reattribution condition, the subjects are told that the positive affect that might arise in the course of the task is due to the background music. The authors show that while misattributing fluency has no effect on performance, misattributing affect essentially strips subjects of the ability to detect the seemingly non-affective property of semantic coherence (above chance level). This seems to imply that the positive affect belonging to an epistemic feeling is prompted by the presence of a non-affective property: semantic coherence.

Importantly, the aim of the researchers was to find out what is felt in the task: the increased processing fluency triggered by processing semantically coherent items itself or the transient positive affect that (in this context) is triggered by the processing fluency.

The authors conclude that their “finding strongly suggests that it is not the fluency that is used as internal cue in intuitive judgments of semantic coherence, but rather the fluency-triggered positive affect” (ibid., p. 615). This is a crucial finding in two respects.

First, this strengthens the initial case made on the basis of the findings in Duke et al.

2014 and Topolinski and Strack 2009b by suggesting that the phenomenology of epistemic feelings essentially consists in context-specific, transient positive or negative affect and

164And if there is both, fluency and positive affect, then the subject might use both in a (weighted) additive way to inform judgment (Topolinski and Strack 2009b).

that there are probably no non-affective epistemic feelings or “subjective experiences of fluency”.¹⁶⁵ Fluency is not a cue available in experience to use for judgment. What is available is the result of fluency: positive affect. The researchers additionally back this conclusion with the finding that coherent triads are liked more than incoherent triads, but are not rated as more fluent in processing (Topolinski and Strack 2009a, experiment 1). Commenting on this work, Winkielman and colleagues and Chetverikov independently note that:

[T]his work shows that participants cannot report and re-attribute chang-ing levels of fluency (facilitation due to semantic coherence) but are only aware of affective (hedonic) consequences of changed fluency. (Winkielman, Ziembowicz, et al. 2015, p. 2)

[I]t is affect but not fluency that influences subsequent judgements. Thus, it is unlikely that such a kind of non-affective feeling exists or has any functional significance. (Chetverikov 2014, p. 409)

Reinforcing and extending this point, Balas and colleagues find that altering the se-mantic coherence task to include word triads that themselves are neutral but have an affect-laden common remote associate has a characteristic impact on judgments of se-mantic coherence:¹⁶⁶ there is an increase in accuracy and speed for triads with positive associates relative to those with neutral and negative ones. On this basis, the authors argue that “fluency-based positive affect can be strengthened or weakened by affective responses induced through partial activation of an affectively valenced memory content (i.e., solutions to triads).”(Balas et al. 2012, p. 318) This, in turn, makes the crucial point (in line with Duke et al. 2014 and Topolinski and Strack 2009b) that “fluency of processing is not the only source of affective response that can influence intuitive judgements” (Balas et al. 2012, p. 312). Together these findings imply that seemingly non-affective epistemic properties are (sometimes) detected on the basis ofaffective epis-temic feelings.¹⁶⁷

165There are “subjective experiences of fluency” if the term is meant to emphasise the (contingent) aetiology of the experience but not the phenomenology.

166An example for a positive/negative coherent triad is: COMPETITION, FINISH, ROUND implying MEDAL; CANDLES, NOVEMBER, STONE implying GRAVE.

167As in the case for what we mean when we talk of “intuitions” (in philosophy), nothing precludes that the mentioned non-affective epistemic properties are also sometimes assessed via judgments that are based on something else than (epistemic) feelings:

[I]t is worth keeping in mind that in some cases judgments of familiarity, rightness, tip-of-tongue, and imminence, do not reflect underlying feelings, but are simply judgments.

Such a non-phenomenological approach would suggest that these judgments are like [...]

This is shown by the fact that in specific contexts (e.g. cognitive tasks) positive or negative affect correctly or incorrectly signals the presence or absence of the task-relevant property, be it affective or non-affective.

Indeed, although it is common to ask reasoners to express answers to logic or probability problems as judgments of validity or probability, it is possible to measure affective responses to such stimuli. (Thompson 2014, p. 62)

Second and perhaps even more important: The valence in epistemic feelings needs to be conscious in order to make them affective experiences. However, I discussed in section 4.3.1 that valence does not need to be conscious in order to bias (epistemic) behaviour.

That is, the epistemic behaviours observed in the experiments might not be the result of conscious epistemic feelings but of some unconscious action-biasing valenced states that are functionally analogous to epistemic feelings, say, “epistemic nudges”. That such epistemic nudges occur is, I think, very plausible.

However, we cannot explain the present experimental findings by relying on them. On the contrary, the mentioned studies demonstrate that there is a phenomenology, i.e.

that the affect integral to epistemic feelings is conscious. This is because the subjects are able to misattribute the conscious affective signals that they would usually use to make conscious judgments. This contrasts with e.g. their inability to misattribute and use theunconscious processing fluency directly. Subjects cannot misattribute something that is unconscious since there is nothing to (correctly or incorrectly) attribute in the first place. The present finding, thus, rules out something that might seem like a possible explanation when one considers unconscious valence. Instead, what we observe in the experiments appears to be the result of affective experiences—epistemic feelings. It seems that epistemic feelings are plausibly part of what James bracketed out in his famous analysis of emotions:

That there are feelings of pleasure and displeasure, of interest and excitement, bound up with mental operations, but having no obvious bodily expression for their consequence, would, I suppose, be held true by most readers. [...]

Certain sequences of ideas charm us as much as others tire us. It is a real

inferences from rudimentary changes in processing fluency. (Reber, Fazendeiro, et al. 2002, p. 11)

However, even in many cases like these it is plausible that “rudimentary changes in processing fluency”

are often not directly observed in a way as we e.g. visually observe a car driving by fast. Rather, we become aware that some sub-personal process is fast indirectly because it’s speed leads to a positive evaluation in the form of positive affect.

intellectual delight to get a problem solved, and a real intellectual torment to have to leave it unfinished. The [...] set seem to depend on processes in the ideational centres exclusively. Taken together, they appear to prove that there are pleasures and pains inherent in certain forms of nerve-action as such, wherever that action occur. (James 1884, p. 189)

To sum up: In this section, I first strengthened the case for the covariation between epistemic feelings and affective properties being not just a correlation but a constitution relationship (section 6.3.1). For that, I presented studies that observe false positives of epistemic properties on the basis of incidentally induced affect. That is, inducing non-diagnostic affect leads subjects to incorrectly judge that an epistemic property is present. This speaks in favour of an affective constitution of epistemic feelings. Secondly, in section 6.3.2 I made the case that the affect in question isconscious. It thus not only causally biases epistemic behaviour but phenomenally constitutes epistemic feelings that provide conscious guidance for the subject’s epistemic behaviour. To make this idea plausible I recounted studies where the following happens: the experimenters make the subject believe that the affect they experience in a given epistemic task isnot diagnostic for the presence of an epistemic property. As a consequence, the subject loses her ability to accurately detect the epistemic property. This does not only indicate that epistemic properties are at times detected on the basis of affect but also that the affect in question is conscious. The fact that the affect can be misattributed when making a conscious judgment points towards the possibility that the affect is, in fact, consciously available to the subject. On the basis of the reviewed empirical findings I conclude that epistemic feelings are affective experiences. In the remainder of this chapter, I will here and there provide additional theoretical and phenomenological considerations that further support this conclusion.

6.4. Understanding Epistemic Feelings better as Affective