Free will v. determinism

• What is the free will and determinism debate?

  • Is our behaviour a matter of our own choice selected without constraint or are we the product of a set of internal and/or external influences that determine who we are and what we do?
  • Most approaches in psychology are determinist yet they disagree on what the precise causes of behaviour are
• What is free will?

  • Suggests human beings are essentially self-determining and free to choose their own thoughts and actions
  • Belief in free will doesn't deny external forces that influence behaviour but implies that we can reject these if we wish because we are in control of our thoughts and behaviours
• What is determinism?

  • Proposes that free will has no place in explaining behaviour
  • Soft determinism - the view that behaviour may be predictable by internal/external factors but there is also room for personal choice from a limited range of possibilities
  • Hard determinism - all human behaviour has a cause and everything that we think or do is dictated by internal/external factors that we cannot control, seeing free will as an illusion
• What is biological determinism?

  • The belief that behaviour is caused by biological influences that we cannot control such as genetic, hormonal, and evolutionary influences
  • Modern biological psychologists recognise the mediating influence of the environment on our biological structures
• What is environmental determinism?

  • The belief that behaviour is the result of conditioning - we may think we are acting independently but our experience of 'choice' is merely the sum total of reinforcement we have acted upon throughout our lives
  • Features of the environment like systems of reward or punishment that we can't control causes our behaviour
• What is psychic determinism?

  • The belief that behaviour is determined by unconscious conflicts that were repressed in childhood that we cannot control
  • Believed free will was an illusion and there is no such thing as an accident, even a slip of the tongue known as a 'Freudian slip' can be explained by the influence of the unconscious
• What is one strength of free will?

  • Practical value: thinking that we exercise free choice can improve our mental health
  • Roberts et al. (2000) found that adolescents who strongly believed in fatalism (their lives were decided by events outside of their control) were at a significantly greater risk of developing depression
  • People who exhibit an external locus of control are less likely to be optimistic, suggesting the fact that we believe in free will may have a positive impact on mind and behaviour
• What is one limitation of free will?

  • Difficult to test: the concept of free will is vague and there are problems operationalising the concepts of humanism such as self-actualisation, meaning the theory lacks reliability
  • Could also be incompatible with certain cultures that place emphasis on community and duty rather than individualism, meaning it could lack cultural relativism
• What is one strength of determinism?

  • Research support from brain scans: Libet et al. (1983) told participants to choose a random moment to flick their wrist while he measured their brain activity, and ppts. had to say when they felt the conscious will to move
  • Found that unconscious brain activity came around half a second before the participant consciously felt they had decided to move, meaning even our most basic experiences of free will are determined by our brain before we are aware of them
• What is one limitation of determinism?

  • Law: hard determinism stance is that individual choice is not the cause of behaviour, but this is not consistent with how our legal system operates
  • In courts of law, offenders are held responsible for their actions and the main principle is that a defendant exercised their free will in committing the crime
  • This suggests that in the real world determinist arguments do not work as it would be rare for individuals trying to appeal to a jury that their offences were biologically, environmentally or psychically determined