The effects of being conscious: looking for the right evidence Marco Mazzone University of Catania Department of Human Sciences Abstract: Huang and Bargh's general picture might underestimate the role played by conscious self and overestimate the behavioural inconsistencies at the personal level. This follows from how they delimit the goals under consideration: their theses that goals are not consciously selected and that the conscious self is involved just in post-hoc rationalization should also be tested against concrete and long-term goals. Since I find that in Huang and Bargh's paper there is much that is agreeable, my point is not whether their notion of Selfish Goal is correct and useful but rather to what extent it is. Another way to put this is to say that their paper attempts to draw distinct conclusions that are not equally supported. Specifically, it is one thing to say that (i) “goals influence a person as if the goals themselves were selfish and interested only in their own completion” (p. 1), it is another to say that (ii) “a person's behaviors are indirectly selected at the goal level but expressed (and comprehended) at the individual level” (p. 1), it is yet another to say that (iii) the conscious self “is not so much involved in the guidance of our purposive behavior so much as it is in the business of producing rationalizations” (p. 45). The first conclusion is strongly supported by Huang and Bargh's arguments, especially by what the authors dub the “reconfiguration principle”: the evidence that goals constrain “the person's cognitive and affective machinery for the purpose of facilitating goal pursuit” (p. 29) irrespective of whether those goals are conscious or not. That conclusion, however, does not imply that goals are never selected at the individual – or, as I would say, the “personal” – level. And the claim that goals are not selected at the personal level does not imply that, once selected, conscious goals cannot have a role in guiding behaviour over and beyond mere rationalizations. The fact that those conclusions are not equally warranted is somehow concealed by the authors' choice to limit their considerations to a specific subset of the goals underlying actions. Huang and Bargh make it explicit that they are “more interested in time-limited instrumental behaviors enacted in the current situation” than in long-term, chronic goals; besides, they are less focussed “on the very concrete actions that can be described in fully objective terms (e.g., pressing a button; opening a door)” than “on higher-level end-states that provide those actions with meaning” (p. 9). A typical example of the goals they are concerned with is the goal of being either cooperative or competitive in a given time-limited task. Here the first thing to note is that abstract goals of this sort are not the ones which are ordinarily expected to fall within the focus of attention. Any human action involves the representation of a multiplicity of goals at different levels of abstraction, not all of which can be consciously attended during processing (Mazzone & Campisi 2013). Since it is possible that we consciously attend concrete goals more than higher-level ones (e.g., the goal of performing a task more than the goal of being cooperative or competitive while performing that task), then by restricting considerations to the latter the authors may have failed to look in the right place in order to assess the role of consciousness in guiding behaviour. To be sure, Huang and Bargh insist that there are strong similarities between conscious and unconscious goals (they call it the “similarity principle”). But this can hardly mean that it makes no difference whether conscious processes are involved in guiding behaviour or not. The authors implicitly acknowledge this point insofar as they recognize in passing that conscious processes are superior to unconscious ones “in serving integrative functions” (p. 41) and allow for “metacognitive abilities” and “tighter executive control over the initial impulses to action” (p. 17). Moreover, the