The tension
between a belief in free will or determinism can be found in many professions,
religions, and cultures. The
assumption of either is fundamental to our understanding of why people behave,
think, and feel the way they do, and how to address problematic behavior and
bring about positive change in people’s lives. My knowledge and understanding gained through the study of
psychology has had a great influence on my personal assumption of determinism
in every aspect of the human experience.
I will use a biopsychosocial framework to illustrate how human behavior,
cognition, and affect can be explained from a deterministic stance, as can
theories of change and modification of each of those aspects.
Scientific
research on the influence of human biology on behavior is extensive, and points
to biological processes being an important piece of understanding and
addressing behavioral change.
Genetic research, in particular, has offered an explanation for many of
the physical and even psychiatric conditions that exist in human beings. We know that along with conditions such
as Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and spina bifida, other conditions such
as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and schizophrenia have a large heritable
component. By having a
genetically-related individual who has one of these conditions, one’s risk of
developing the same condition increases markedly. A significant portion of the variance in intelligence and
personality are also genetic.
Furthermore, biology outlines the potential for change as well as the
limitations or barriers of change.
A person with a physical disability is limited by her or his biology,
and change may not occur at the level of changing biology. One might say that a person’s life
trajectory is determined in part by the opportunities and limitations that
their body (including their genes) offers them. One cannot “will” themselves to be taller, faster, or
more intelligent. The constraints
of biology are always present when considering the ways a person might change
over the lifespan.
Libertarians
assert that whatever the limitations placed on a person by the body and its
biology, humans have freedom to make choices and depart from previously
determined paths simply because there is some part of them that is spontaneous
and not bound to deterministic factors.
However, much of what we know about introspection, memory, and learning
(hence behavioral change) points to the great fallibility of the human mind in
its attribution of free will and choice.
Research shows that people are not good at predicting how they will
behave in the future, and that their memory of the past is always subject to
distortion and selection. Because
people cannot get outside of their subjective experience, it is not always
possible for them to know the reasons behind their actions. The role of the psyche is to make meaning
of, to interpret, and to process the environmental surroundings. The ways it does this are due in
large part to conditioned thoughts, values, and assumptions about the world,
and are not active choices untethered to the natural context.
Libertarians
acknowledge the role of biology and the social environment on human behavior,
but allow some space for spontaneity and free will. In an article entitled “The Unbearable Automaticity of
Being,” Bargh and Chartrand (1999) showed that much of our life experience is
based on conditioned, automatic responses to the various stimuli we
encounter. They contend that we
function automatically most of the time in order to have energetic reserves for
the instances where we actually do have the freedom to choose. I assert that any instances of
“free will” exist in a specific context that must have allowed that sense of
“free will” to occur, and therefore the supposed windows of free will are in
themselves determined.
Finally, the
social and cultural environment has been shown by social psychological research
to greatly determine human behavior.
Principles like social facilitation/loafing, groupthink, diffusion of
responsibility, and deindividuation have been demonstrated by large amounts of
empirical research, and point to the unconscious influence that the presence of
others has on our behavior. People
work more or less, endorse horrific philosophies, fail to help others in need,
and experience a decreased sense of self simply because of group processes
impacting the individual. In
addition, there is a certain amount of cultural determinism in people’s
lives. By virtue of where a person
is born and raised, she or he will hold certain beliefs and experience
particular aspects of the world that would not occur in another place or
time. We are, in large part,
products of our culture.
It makes sense
that people hold on to an idea of free will, because it is empowering, comforting,
and consistent with everyday experience.
However, there is no way to rule out causal forces behind every thought
and behavior, and there is no way to empirically prove freedom of choice. Therefore, it appears that the best
accounting of human behavior results in an acknowledgment of the known and
unknown determinants that lie behind all we see and experience in the world.
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