free will and determinism

• the debate

  Is our behaviour a matter of free will or are we the product of internal and/or external influences?

  Most approaches in psychology are determinist but disagree on the causes of human behaviour.
• Free will

  The notion of free will suggests humans are free to make choices.

  There are biological and environmental influences on our behaviour - but free will implies we can reject them.

  This is the view of the humanistic approach.
• Hard Determinism

  Hard determinism (fatalism) suggests that all human action has a cause, and it should be possible to identify these causes.
• Soft determinism

  Soft determinism suggests that all human action has a cause but people have freedom to make choices within a restricted range of options.
• Biological determinism

  Biological determinism The biological approach describes many causes of behaviour, e.g. the influence of the autonomic nervous system on stress or the influence of genes on mental health.

  Modern biological psychologists would recognise the mediating influence of the environment on our biological structures
• Environmental determinism

  Environmental determinism Skinner described free will as 'an illusion' and all behaviour as the result of conditioning. Our experience of 'choice' is the sum total of reinforcement contingencies that have acted upon us throughout our lives.
• Psychic determinism

  Psychic determinism Freud emphasised the influence of biological drives and unconscious conflicts repressed in childhood. Even something as seemingly random as a 'slip of the tongue' can be explained by the unconscious.
• science is deterministic

  A basic principle of science is that every event has a cause and these can be explained with general laws. Knowledge of these allows scientists to predict and control events. In psychology, the laboratory experiment allows researchers to simulate the conditions of the test tube and remove all other extraneous variables to demonstrate a causal effect.
• Evaluation

  One strength of free will is that it has practical value. Roberts et al. (2000) looked at adolescents who had a strong belief in fatalism - that their lives were 'decided' by events outside of their control. They were at greater risk of developing depression. Peopie

  -who exhibit an internal, rather than external, locus of control are more likely to be optimistic. This suggests that, even if we do not have free will, the fact that we believe we do may have a positive impact on mind and behaviour.
• Evaluation

  One limitation of determinism is the role of responsibility in law. The hard determinist stance is not consistent with the way in which our legal system operates. In court, offenders are held responsible for their actions. Indeed, the main principle of our legal system is that the defendant exercised their free will in

  committing the crime. This suggests that, in the real world, determinist arguments do not work.
• Evaluation

  One limitation is if we even need determinism. Determinism places psychology on equal footing with other more established sciences and has led to valuable real-world applications, such as therapies. However free will has intuitive appeal. Most of us see ourselves as making our own choices rather than being 'pushed' by forces we cannot control. This suggests that if psychology wants to position itself alongside the natural sciences, determinist accounts are likely to be preferred. However, common-sense experience may be better understood by an analysis of free will.