2\Alternative
of Free Will to Determinism
What if we did not study psychology through the lens of biological-environmental interactions? Is there an alternative to decomposing human behaviour and thoughts so deterministically? In a class that I took last semester, my lecturer offered an answer: free will.
I’d flown back from Amsterdam to Singapore, to start my next semester in NUS. Contrary to my preferences, I’d enrolled for a class titled Evolutionary Psychology (EP), taught by A/P Stuart Derbyshire. This class was not my top choice. As discussed in my previous post, I had dabbled in EP – most recently in Amsterdam. And I had come to a conclusion: to embrace EP as a comprehensive approach to understanding people. I did not expect this class to change my views about EP much.
Fortunately, A/P Derbyshire proved me wrong. He took a very critical approach to evolutionary psychology. At first, this approach rubbed me the wrong way. I resisted his message that EP was an unsuitable way to understand human beings. But gradually, I warmed up to this critique. A/P Derbyshire devoted many a lesson to the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialist philosopher. Basically, Sartre rejected determinism; he rejected that human beings had any “essence” that pushed them towards certain behaviours. Sartre held that humans were radically free to choose their own thoughts and behaviours. Our freely chosen behaviours define our existence, Sartre believed, not biology or environment.
I was very sceptical about Sartrean existentialism. Sartre’s idea of radical free will contradicted my notion of determinism. At any rate, I thought that people were at the very least influenced by causal factors, either biological or environmental. How could Sartre be right?
While my belief in determinism stood strong throughout the class, my belief in the explanatory power of EP started to shake. We did several essays throughout the class, critiquing the EP approach to different phenomena. For one particular essay, we had to “describe the chain of causal events leading to a conflict or war” and explain how this description could “undermine or support an EP approach to explaining conflict and war”. I chose to examine the Korean War, discussing how a complex mix of geographical considerations, history, ideology, group identification, and conscious decision-making had precipitated the conflict. This explanation challenged a straightforward EP approach to understanding war, and indeed, as a comprehensive approach to understanding all things human.
The conclusion to my essay on the Korean War, discussing how evolutionary psychology was an inappropriate approach to understanding the conflict.
Reflecting further on my Korean War essay, I realised that my account of the war challenges not just EP, but any deterministic approach to understanding human beings. A determinist could say, on hindsight, that our complex mix of geographical considerations, history, ideology, group identification, and conscious decision-making was inevitable. The War had been predetermined to happen since the Universe had begun. This may be technically true or not. But the problem is that analysing human behaviour post-hoc through such disjointed causal events does not help us much in studying psychology. We cannot measure every single event in the Universe, compute them all deterministically, and then predict human behaviour. Another problem is that a deterministic approach undermines our choices. Geographical considerations, history, ideology, and group identification did not conspire to wage the War. These detached factors all passed through the bottleneck of conscious decision-making – that fuzzy human process. Why did Kim Il-sung send his troops past the 38th Parallel? Because of unstoppable physical forces since the Big Bang? Maybe. But such an answer clouds the perspective that Kim chose to mobilise his troops. Kim was able to consider the terrain of the Korean peninsula, the fervour of his communist cause, the potential support of the Russians and Chinese, and the territorial gains that he could achieve – and then choose to invade, or not. Kim might have chosen other actions, which would have altered the course of history. But ultimately Kim made the choice to invade, informed by his motivations, pressures, and circumstances.
So an alternative is choice: to see the human mind as a sort of seemingly indeterministic, free-willed machine. How, then, would this free-willed machine work? Are we all radically free souls embodied in flesh, as dualists like Descartes believed? Did evolution produce in our complex nervous systems some emergent mechanism for defying the course of determinism? If so, how could determinism possibly have produced free will? I have not found a clear path for resolving these puzzles. Indeed, believing in a free will has thrown up more baffling questions than simply maintaining a hard deterministic line.
More than just explaining past behaviour, a free-will approach can also empower individuals. While pondering about determinism in psychology, I reflected on my previous research internship at the HEAD Foundation, a private think tank focused on education and leadership issues. My supervisor at the HEAD Foundation, A/P Henrik Bresman, was a leadership trainer. He tasked me to compile a list of individual qualities (called constructs) that were associated with leadership effectiveness. I pored over books and academic papers, and wrote up a report on my findings.
A paragraph from my report on leadership research at the HEAD Foundation, about how studying specific leader behaviours has been more successful than studying internal traits associated with leadership.
One finding that struck me was the success of the behavioural approach over the early trait approach in leadership research. Many researchers had sought to predict leadership effectiveness based on a leader’s internal traits, such as personality characteristics or competencies. However, this trait approach was ineffective. The behavioural approach met with greater success, focusing on what leaders do exactly: the actions that leaders actually perform to the external world. This finding harks back to Sartre’s stance that we define our own existence through our decisions to act in various ways.
A section from my paper on leadership effectiveness at the HEAD Foundation, discussing an associated trait: internal locus of control.
One trait that did catch my eye was having an internal locus of control: believing that people “are in control of their own destinies and happenings in their lives”. In my research, I found that an internal locus of control was associated not just with effective leadership, but a whole host of other positive outcomes. Apparently, believing in the power of one’s own free will was associated with better job satisfaction, better job performance, and better health. This free-will approach may lead individuals to actively pursue positive behaviours, to act out in defiance of seemingly determining forces, and to live better lives.
In my personal life, I have often lapsed into an external locus of control, blaming my failures on causes beyond my control. When I faltered from my diet and succumbed to a sugary milk tea, I blamed it on my natural preference for sweetness. When I failed to perform well on a particular project, I consoled myself by thinking that it could not have turned out any other way. Of course, I was drowning out the nagging voice that I could have chosen differently. I could have resisted my urge for a drink, or invested more effort into my project. Or, at the very least, I can feel like I could have. And I can potentially take charge of my life even more, instead of ceding sovereignty to other forces.
The idea that we can grasp our free will is more than just New Age psychobabble. Adopting a free-will approach to understanding human beings can shed light on psychological effects from empirical studies. I witnessed first-hand how a free-will approach has challenged an established concept known as ego depletion theory (Baumeister et al, 1998). Ego depletion theory has been the basis of many psychology experiments, including experiments that I have conducted myself. In a proposal for one of my research projects, I summarised ego depletion theory as such:
My summary of ego depletion theory, from my research proposal.
My experiment aimed to find out how mentally challenging tasks could deplete people’s willpower. I recruited participants for my experiment, assigned them to tasks of varying difficulty, and then measured their willpower thereafter. If ego depletion theory were correct, the more difficult the task, the more a person’s willpower would be depleted. The idea was that a person’s willpower was sustained by some innate resource – perhaps a biological fuel, such as blood glucose levels – but drained away through demanding tasks. Unfortunately, my experiment did not find neat effects that corresponded to my hypotheses. I blamed this failure not on ego depletion theory, but on minor features of the experiment’s design.
My thoughts on ego depletion theory have since changed. In a psychology class called Decision Neuroscience, we explored the neural mechanisms behind human decision-making. For one assignment, we critiqued different papers about ego depletion theory. One particular paper by Job et al (2013) found that ego depletion theory did not apply to certain people: those who believed that willpower was unlimited.
Snippets from my paper comparing ego depletion studies, summarising and questioning Job et al’s findings.
And Job et al’s paper was not a lone voice in the wilderness. Other recent studies have cast doubt on whether ego depletion theory holds water. Evidently, people really could choose to believe whether willpower was limited or not. And this choice would really affect how well they persisted on difficult tasks. The importance of a person’s choice is something that deterministic approaches easily miss. What is a choice, after all, in the world of predetermining forces? But adding a free-will approach can emphasise the power of our individual decisions: beginning from something as simple as choosing what to believe about ourselves.
Personally, I still do not believe in free wills as Sartre did, as some radically indeterministic entities cut loose from determinism. But we can view ourselves as “free-willing” agents – whether bound by determinism or not – who can chart our own lives. As a discipline, psychology would do well to empower people with such a free-will approach, while still shedding light on the forces that can influence us.
So much for focusing on the individual. In my next post, I hope to discuss the broader implications of a free-will approach on society.
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