Daniel Wegner
Professor of Psychology
Harvard University, United States (until 2013)
Profile – Daniel Wegner (1948–2013)
Having started a degree in physics, Daniel Wegner changed to psychology as an anti-war statement in 1969, and became fascinated with questions of self-control, agency, and free will. He did numerous experiments on how the illusion of free will is created, and on the effects of trying not to think about something. ‘Try not to think about a white bear’, he suggests.
From the age of fourteen Wegner helped his mother, a piano teacher, run her music studio and taught piano twice a week after school. He not only played the piano but had four synthesisers for composing techno. When Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, he started all his classes with music. A colleague called him ‘one of the funniest human beings on two legs’. He enjoyed studying ‘mindbugs’, those foibles of the mind that provide fundamental insights into how it works, and believed that conscious will is an illusion.
More biographical information
Profile on Social Psychology Network
Touching and informative obituary by Peter Reuell for Harvard Gazette, July 2013
Tribute by Maria Konnikova for Scientific American, July 2013
Tribute by Bryan Marquard for the Boston Globe, July 2013
Publications
List of books on Wikipedia
Publications list on Social Psychology Network
Citations on Google Scholar
Quotes on Goodreads
Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Wegner, D. M. (1989). White bears and other unwanted thoughts: Suppression, obsession, and the psychology of mental control. New York: Viking Penguin. Amazon preview here.
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Books preview here.
Wegner, D. (2005). Who is the controller of controlled processes? In R. R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman and J. A. Bargh (Eds), The new unconscious (pp. 19–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Books preview here.
Wegner, D. M., and Wheatley, T. (1999). Apparent mental causation: Sources of the experience of will. American Psychologist, 54, 480–492. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Pronin, E., Wegner, D. M., McCarthy, K., and Rodriguez, S. (2006). Everyday magical powers: the role of apparent mental causation in the overestimation of personal influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,91, 218–231. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Video
The joy of . . . theorizing. Association for Psychological Science annual convention, September 2011
Unravelling the mysteries of the brain and mind in the aftermath of Terri Schiavo and related cases. Talk on consciousness in anaesthesia for FABBS Science Café, 2011