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Asked by anon-328472 on 6 Jun 2022.
Question: Is free will real or just an illusion?
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Jake Sallaway-Costello answered on 6 Jun 2022:
We ask this question a lot when we’re using psychology to design public health programmes. Most people think they have total control over what they eat and drink, but research overwhelmingly shows us the structural influences on health behaviour (i.e., society, economy, culture, politics, traditions, warfare, family – things we can’t easily avoid) are vastly more influential than individual decision making. So, in my area of work we generally assume free will is so hard to access that it effectively doesn’t exist. We can’t realistically design public health programmes that only work if people knowingly make healthy choices, if those people don’t realistically have the ability to make choices in the first place.
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Melanie Smart answered on 6 Jun 2022:
Hi Sophie,
Both! That’s such a cheesy psychologist answer… 🙂
Essentially we all make micro choices every second and most of these are value driven and take us towards our goals. But we are heavily influenced as Jake says below, subconsciously and blatantly by lots of variables – peer pressure, advertising, self sabotage and millions of other things. Psychology is like being a human being detective – if we can spot these things and know why they influence us, we can feel more in control and act in accordance with our goals more often… -
Agata Dymarska answered on 6 Jun 2022: last edited 6 Jun 2022 10:00 pm
In addition to the influence that the outside world has on us, you can try to answer this question by thinking about the way the brain works. This is a very complicated issue though so I will only attempt to explain one of the theories!
Let’s do a thought experiment (which means, let’s imagine that we’re doing this experiment in real life and think it through): I take you out for ice cream to a place that has all the flavours in the world, and ask you to pick one. You can pick whatever you like, you have a free choice! You pick strawberry – great.
The problem is, for you to know that you want strawberry, your brain had to do some behind the scenes processing, maybe simulate different tastes, maybe recall previous times you had each flavour… Of course you will try to think hard to make the best decision, but ultimately, all of the details are not in your control. You can’t decide that you will assign a lot of importance to the time you had bubble gum ice cream with a friend and hated it, and very little importance to the time you had pistachio and loved it. You can’t decide that your brain will remember having strawberries in the summer with family, and not the chocolate cake you got for your birthday – it just happens.
So all of these processes are happening outside of your decision making, and you just receive the result: your brain makes you feel like having strawberry ice cream, and then makes you think that you made a rational, free decision. That’s why some people think that free will is an illusion.
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Kareena McAloney-Kocaman answered on 7 Jun 2022:
Hi Sophie. I think everyone has choices that they can make, and so free will. But we often don’t think about how many of our life experiences, and our relationships and beliefs shape the choices we make and influence those. We can go with those influences, or against them – that is a choice to make as well.
So yes we have free will to make choices and decisions – but there is some influence on what those choices and decisions will be.
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Garrett Kennedy answered on 7 Jun 2022:
There are really good answers in this thread.
I think part of it comes down to where our motivations come from. We want to have nice things and live in a big house because our world tells us that those things are evidence of of our worth (psychologically). But if we lived in a world that told us success was measured in some other way then we would all be probably happy living somewhere small and out of the way.
There is also the fact that we are the biological creatures who have evolved to be what we are – who need food, safety, and a place to sleep. We are probably hard-wired to seek those things out and feel comfortable when we have them because that keeps us alive, so we don’t even think about them as motivators. But you could argue that we want more money, bigger houses, and nicer food because it taps into our basic need for being ‘more safe and better looked after’.
I like to live life as though I have free will, but accept that it is probably an illusion. There are definitely features of ourselves that we have not chosen, but life would get dull if we lived like we weren’t able to make choices.
-G
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Jasna Martinovic answered on 7 Jun 2022:
This is a very interesting question – but whether it belongs to philosophers or psychologists hinges on the possibility of studying free will – or indeed consciousness more generally – with scientific methods. This is very difficult and many have tried to come up with a good quantitative indicator of free will in action, but this has not been without problems. For example, the famous Libet study on free will, which instructed participants to spontaneously decide whether to move a finger on left or right hand and then measured brain activity related to hand movements – these authors found that the brain activity predicted which movement would occur almost a second before the participants became aware of the decision, but the clever work of Aaron Schurger and colleagues has shown that the brain activity itself is likely to be the internal shifting of activation patterns in the brain which in the absence of any external cue to move is something our decision-making process uses to make its judgment – thus, it was wrong to conclude the decision to move had been made and we become aware of it with a delay, but rather the decision to move itself is based on this internal build up of activity. hopefully this example illustrates nicely how difficult it is to study these phenomena.
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Caroline Wesson answered on 7 Jun 2022:
Great question and one that has no definitive answer (that’s psychology for you!). Free will suggests that we have control over our actions but do we really? Studies show that many people do think they have free will….or at least live as if they have.
Free will is especially interesting if we consider this from a forensic perspective. Free will is entwined within law – defendants are thought of as being responsible for their own actions (although there are some circumstances where this is not the case such as in cases where the mental health act comes into play). As free will is linked to the law this in turn that makes it linked to forensic psychology. The law assumes free will but we know that there are many, many underlying factors that can contribute to someone behaving in the way that they do and this is what forensic psychologists seek to understand.
Interestingly, your own beliefs in free-will (e.g. whether you believe in it or not or what form of free will you believe in) can shape your attitudes towards others including the authoritarian and punitive attitudes you hold (for example how strict your views are and how strongly you feel someone some be punished). In forensic psychology practice this is important as it can shape how you interact with clients. Do you think it’s possible to put your own views to one side? Have a think next time you see TV coverage of a court case and think about whether your views on free will have an impact on how you have viewed the case.
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Cody Porter answered on 8 Jun 2022:
That is a really interesting question! There are entire books on this topic.
For me, free will in the sense that we actually mean is a very real thing. If nothing else, it gives us hope. As someone who teaches forensic psychology it is important for students to know that free will is a choice – governed by laws, moral codes, and social norms. That said, people very often have the power to act however they choose to. That doesn’t mean their actions are free from punishment.
In sum, I think it would be a very boring world if we didn’t have free will.
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Mona-Lisa Kwentoh answered on 22 Jun 2022:
I think free will is real . However consequences can guide decisions that are made making it feel at times somewhat like an illusion .
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