free will and determinism

• free will

  Suggest that as human beings we are essentially self determining and free to choose our thoughts and actions. It doesn’t deny that there may be biological and environmental forces that exert some influence on behaviour but implies that we are able to reject these.This is advocated by the humanistic approach.
• determinism

  Says that free will has no place in explaining behaviour

  -The determinist approach proposes that all behavior has a cause and is thus predictable. Free will is an illusion, and our behavior is governed by internal or external forces over which we have no control.
• hard determinism

  suggest that all human behaviour has a cause and it should be possible to identify and describe these causes.Assumes that everything we think and do is dictated by external and internal forces that we can not control.
• soft determinism

  suggests that humans have some conscious mental control over the way they behave.Soft determinism represents a middle ground, people do have a choice, but that choice is constrained by external or internal factors and that there is an element of free will in all behaviour.

  -cognitive approach
• biological determinism

  The belief that behaviour is caused by biological (genetic ,hormonal evolutionary) influences that we cannot control. The biological approach emphasises the role of biological determinism in behaviour. Physiological and neurological processes are not under our conscious control e.g. the influence of the autonomic nervous system during times of stress.
• environmental determinism

  the belief that behaviour is caused by features of the environment (such as systems of reward and punishment) that we cannot control.BF Skinner described free will as an illusion and argued that all behaviour is a result of conditioning. Experience of choice is the sum total of reinforcement contingencies that have acted upon us through our lives e.g teachers and institutions.
• psychic determinism

  the belief that behaviour is caused by unconscious conflicts that we cannot control. Sigmund Freud placed more emphasis on the influence of biological drives and instincts than the behaviourists. This determinism suggests that human behaviour is determined and directed by unconscious conflicts ,repressed in childhood.
• scientific emphasis on causal explanation

  The basic principles of science is that everything in the universe has a cause and that these causes can be explained by general laws. These general laws allow scientists to predict  and control events in the future. Therefore in psychology the lab experiments enable researchers to simulate the conditions of the ‘test tube’ and remove all extraneous variables and attempt to precisely control and predict human behaviour .