1\Determinism
from Physics to Psychology
Before I became a Psychology undergrad, I’d considered myself a “science” student. In secondary school, I gravitated towards subjects with hard, straightforward answers – without the mess of subjective theories. I liked math. I loved classical physics. I loved that we could unravel mysteries about how the universe worked, in a precise formulaic fashion. And I believed that this brand of objective thinking could unravel most questions, even questions of human behaviour and cognition. I thus set my mind to read Psychology in university, armed with my “scientific” approach.
My “scientific” approach to human behaviour shone through while I spent a semester abroad at Amsterdam University College (AUC). AUC was a small liberal arts college, populated by international students from all over the world, and with a keen focus on the natural sciences. I took the class Evolution and Origin of Human Diseases under theoretical biologist Dr. Cor Zonneveld. In his lessons, Dr. Zonneveld explained how evolutionary perspectives could unravel many mysteries, such as the relatedness among different species, the prevalence of certain diseases, and – yes – even the causes of human behaviour. The class appealed to me greatly: it provided a “scientific” account of psychology, one that married hard biological explanations with observable environmental stimuli. In a strange way, I found this “scientific” account uplifting too. Whether the people in the class were from the Netherlands or Singapore or Mozambique, we were all Homo sapiens with nearly identical evolutionary histories, subject to the same biological baggage and environmental influences. Below is a slide from one of Dr. Zonneveld’s classes, suggesting that biological evolution can be applied to understanding human behaviour, on top of environmental perspectives.
Slide from Dr. Cor Zonneveld’s class, attempting to reconcile biological and environmental influences on human behaviour.
When Dr. Zonneveld assigned us to write a paper about the evolutionary accounts of any disease, I jumped at the chance to research on something behavioural, something psychological. I wanted to see how biological explanations could untangle the messy realm of the mind. I wrote a paper on psychopathy, a personality disorder popularly characterised by callous aggression and deceitfulness. I discussed how biological evolution may have interacted with environmental influences to maintain a small proportion of psychopaths in the human population. In other words, my paper sought to explain psychopathy through the lens of biology and environment.
A snippet from my psychopathy paper, discussing the relative importance of biological and environmental influences.
At the same time, I took another class in AUC called Knowledge of Learners and Learning. Every week, the class would discuss a particular issue related to learning. On one particular week, we discussed “learning myths”. The class had split into groups to present on specific assumptions about learning. Some of these assumptions had gained traction in education systems. For example, some educators may assume that boys have a particular learning style, while girls learn better another way. Despite having little evidence for this gender difference, the educators may then structure their schools based on this assumption.
At the end of the semester, I wrote a reflection piece about the class. I reflected on how educators could subscribe so readily to such assumptions – to the detriment of their students.
Part of my reflection on the adverse impact of assumptions, in the context of learning.
This reflection made me question whether I held any “myths” about my general field of study. Were there any assumptions about my approach to psychology that I could challenge? As mentioned, I was writing my psychopathy paper at around the same time in Amsterdam. I thus reflected on whether I was assuming any simplistic belief in my approach to psychopathy, or to any other questions of psychology. I then realised that I did have an underlying assumption about psychology, which would colour the way I understood people. My general approach was to understand human behaviour and cognition as stemming purely from an interaction of biological and environmental factors. In other words, I was assuming the formula:
Biology x Environment = Psychology
This understanding of psychology seems completely reasonable. A person is a biological creature, living in a physical environment. Before the person was conceived, there was no such person. But minuscule chunks of matter interacted in the womb to form a zygote, directed by genes and shaped by the uterine environment. As this newly conceived zygote develops, from embryo to toddler and even to elderly person, the person is still inevitably shaped by an internal biology and an external environment. Any thought that the person thinks or any action that the person does must have some prior cause, that can ultimately trace back to something before the person even existed. How could the person’s psychology come from anything else?
Underlying this formulaic approach is determinism, the belief that every event in the Universe is inevitably caused by prior events (tracing back to some first cause, if any). Determinism implies that any event that happened must necessarily have happened, because prior events had already determined that it would happen. Similarly, whatever will happen in the future has already been determined and cannot be altered. Que sera, sera.
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Lecture notes on determinism from my introductory philosophy class.
I encountered this specific definition of determinism in my first semester of university. The topic of determinism came up in an introductory philosophy class. I must admit that I took this class mostly just to fulfill my graduation requirements. I had to choose one introductory humanities class from among the Departments of Philosophy, History, and English Language. And I chose what I thought would be the most objective, straightforward class: the most “science”-like. I had always felt there was an assured elegance to philosophical reasoning, working out problems through sound logical steps. Philosophy, to me, was science’s wise but armchair-bound grandfather.
Contrary to my expectations, this philosophy class turned over rocks that I had comfortably left alone, throwing up perplexing questions with no straight answers. For example, my lecturer claimed that determinism was “controversial”: some philosophers subscribed to determinism, while others did not. There was no proof from either camp that settled the matter. I must admit that I had not struggled much previously with accepting determinism. The idea just seemed natural to me – appealing, even, to the young “science” student in me.
As a physics student throughout my schooling years, I had always implicitly subscribed to determinism. Determinism was the bedrock of classical physics. To predict what would happen to an object at a certain time from now, we can calculate certain variables, plug them into some equations, and then receive our predictions. Of course, physics problems are hardly quite as neat as this approach seems. Often, we have to abide by some theory that simplifies the messiness of reality. In essence, that was what classical physics was: a theory that simplified the messiness of the underlying quantum mechanics. The determinism of classical physics sweeps aside the seeming indeterminism of quantum effects. But determinism worked well for physics, predicting many real-life problems with practical accuracy. And so I borrowed the lens of determinism to look at human behaviour and cognition.
I was certainly not alone in borrowing determinism for psychology. As a field of scientific inquiry, psychology started fairly recently in the Western world. In the late 19th century, German physician Wilhelm Wundt established the first independent research laboratory for psychological experiments, weaning psychology off the other experimental sciences before it. Psychology was thus born as a younger sibling to physics, to chemistry, to biology. And psychology may have inherited the implicit lens of determinism, which has shown up even as the discipline matured. Over the years, popular psychological theories such as behaviourism or the computational theory of mind continue to view the mind as some sort of deterministic machine. And raging still today is the nature-nurture debate. How much of behavioural variation can be attributed to biology? How much to environment? How much to an interaction of both?
So what’s wrong, then, with approaching psychology through the lens of determinism? First of all, determinism may be false. Many people may struggle with this statement. I certainly still struggle to consider how something other than straightforward cause-and-effect can operate in the Universe. (What, pray tell, is this ghostly mechanism?) Indeed, determinism underlies many of our commonsensical beliefs, and even our entire field of classical physics. But the lack of philosophical proof and the strangeness of quantum mechanics do nag at determinists. Personally, I have gone from being a card-carrying determinist to being more agnostic about determinism (translation: I still think so… but I don’t know). I am willing to hear about how indeterminism could be true, although I have not heard a convincing argument thus far. But the point I wish to make here is that determinism is an unproven assumption that underlies much of our academic inquiry – even in psychology. Just as “learning myths” can devastate students, so too can our academic assumptions distort our inquiry.
So determinism may be technically true or not. But borrowing determinism from classical physics has led me to approach psychology in a similar way – which may not necessarily be the best approach in psychology. In classical physics, determinism means that we can reduce our predictions to preceding variables, and come to a reliable prediction based on this reductionism. How does this approach look like in psychology? To predict how a certain person might behave in the future, we can look to their background: their biological makeup and the environmental stimuli that have impinged upon them over the years. To understand psychopathic behaviour, we can look at genes and upbringing. But just because all psychology can be technically reduced to biology-environment interactions does not mean that psychology is best understood by Biology x Environment. In fact, all biological and environmental factors can themselves be reduced to physical motions of particles and energy flows. However, claiming that biology, for example, is best understood through the lens of physics would make little sense. We cannot replace cell theory and evolutionary theory with any all-encompassing physics theory, and expect to obtain a better understanding of life on Earth.
My implicit assumptions in studying psychology had been 1) that determinism holds true, and following from that 2) that biology-environment interactions are the best approach to understanding psychology. As discussed, these assumptions seem to underlie much of psychological inquiry, and not just my own. In my next posts, I shall discuss an alternative lens to understanding psychology, and how this lens could affect the world beyond the academic field of psychology.
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