Reward and Punishment

• Free will states that all behaviour results from a person's own active volition- we are 'self-determining'
• Free will thinks that we are free from causal influences, each person has the freedom to control what they do
• When people are acting with free will, they are not acting in response to any external or internal pressures
• Humanism states that we make choices about how we behave and we should pursue what we find fulfilling
• Humanism believes in free will
• Humanism states that a person's inborn potential influences their behaviour and then we seek out experiences to fulfil that potential
• A problem with humanism is that we cannot always do what will fulfil us as it can lead to immorality and crime
• If we aren't in control, we can't be held responsible for our actions
• Cognitive neuroscience states that our minds, thoughts and ideas can all be tracked back to the brain's inner workings
• Neural activity is governed by the laws of physics
• Determinism is the position that all thought and behaviour is controlled by forces which are outside of a person's individual control or choice
• Determinism includes internal and external influences
• Many of our physiological and neurological processes are not in our control: fight or flight, mental disorders, temperament
• Behaviourists believe that actions can be explained through external forces within the environment
• Psychic determinism

  • Freud's psychodynamic approach
• Freud's psychodynamic approach emphasises the role of the unconscious in determining behaviour
• Freud states that our personality is formed as a result of innate drives and early experiences
• Freud argues that fixation during psychosexual development causes fixations, which can determine aspects of our personality
• Hard determinism: suggests all human behaviour has an internal or external cause that can be investigated
• Fatalistic- the behaviour is fixed
• Soft determinism- sees behaviour as having a cause but we have mental control over the way we behave
• Predictable- the behaviour is likely to happen
• One of the basic assumptions of science is causality
• Causality in science allows general laws to be established and phenomena to be predicted or controlled and experimented on
• Determinism assumes that behaviour has a cause
• Free will is hard to measure and control