Free will and Determinism

• Free will

  The notion of free will suggests humans are free to make choices. There are biological and environmental influences on our behaviour - free will implies we can reject them. This is the view of the humanistic approach. We’re free to choose our thoughts & actions.
• Determinism

  Notion that behaviour is shaped by internal and external forces.

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

  * Soft determinism suggests that all human action has a cause but people have freedom to make rational choices within a restricted range of options.
• Types of determinism 1/3

  • Biological - the biological approach describes many causes of behaviour. Modern biological psychologists would recognise the mediating influence of the environment on our biological structures.
• Types of determinism 2/3

  • Environmental - 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.
• Types of determinism 3/3

  • Psychic - Freud emphasised the influence of biological drives and unconscious conflicts repressed in childhood: Even a slip of the tongue can be explained by the unconscious.
• Causal explanations

  A basic principle of science is that every event has a cause and these can be explained with general laws, this knowledge allows scientists to predict and control events. Laboratory experiments allow researchers to stimulate the conditions of the test tube and remove all other extraneous variables to demonstrate a causal effect.
• Hard determinism

  * Behaviourist

  * Biological

  * Psychodynamic

  Soft determinism

  * Cognitive

  * Social Learning Theory (SLT)

  Free will

  * Humanistic