Free Will in the World Cup

Since I am having withdrawl symptoms now that there are no World Cup games to watch, I figured I would write something about it.  In case you missed the final yesterday, Italy beat France in penalty kicks--and if you did miss it, I will try to suppress my reactive attitudes towards you since I realize it is irrational for me to care so much about other people's lack of interest in soccer (sidenote for another post--doesn't it seem like most of our second-order desires are really about other people's first-order desires?). 

Anyway, here are two events from the game that raise some relevant questions (which people may or may not feel like addressing, but this blog has been too quiet all summer!):

1) Compare French star Zidane's made free kick, which hit the crossbar and bounced in a foot over the line with Trezeguet's missed free kick in the shootout, which hit the crossbar and bounced on the line (losing the game for the French).  A micro-difference in initial conditions that had a huge effect on the game and hence (most of) the world.  When people say, as millions surely did in one form or another, "He [Zidane] got lucky--he could have missed that" or "He [Trezeguet] could have (or should have) made that", do many (any) of these people have beliefs about that statement (or event) that commit them to the claim that determinism is false?  If they believe indeterminism is required for these events to have happened otherwise, is it indeterminism in the agent or outside the agent or either, or is it anything like agent-causation?  Do they think that these events are different in some important way from, say, a dog jumping and just missing a frisbee ("She could have caught that") or, say, a lottery turning out a certain way?  If engaged in Socratic dialogue, would they be willing to use "backtracking counterfactuals" on the dog and lottery case in a way that they would not with the human case (e.g., the dog would have caught it only if certain conditions had been different and those conditions would have been different only if...)? 

2) Now compare Zidane's header in overtime that was barely saved by the Italian keeper Buffon with the Zidane's "header" into the chest of Materazzi a few minutes later--the latter has become the story of the game, driving people (like me) to compulsively wonder what could possibly have led Zidane to trash his legacy and perhaps the game (he got thrown out of his last international performance)--what could Materazzi have said to set him off?  When we perform actions we control partially but far from perfectly (and without much conscious consideration) like the header during the course of the game, do people think of those actions in terms of free will and if so, in the same terms as actions people perform that at least seem to allow for some foresight, like his deliberate attack (see the film to see what you think about how much control he had)?  Why do people think (want to think) the header is controlled less than the attack on another person?  While the missed header is at least as important to fans (it would have likely won the game) than the attack, why is he not blamed for the former as much as the latter (I suspect even by people who think he had as much or as little control over both)?  It's amazing how much we want to apply a principle of charity in this case--people want to know what Materazzi said because they can't believe Zidane would do such a foolish thing without sufficient provocation (reports are that perhaps he called him a terrorist, though I suspect it had something to do with his momma).  For that matter, why is it that in the case of other foolish and seemingly irrational acts, like suicide terrorism, people are so much less interested in applying their theory of mind modules to figure out what drives the behavior and so much less to just say it's evil (is there a boundary past which we give up trying to explain or simply cannot explain certain actions)? 

Anyway, my own suspicion for most of these questions is that people don't have any theory or implicit beliefs or intuitions that would commit them to particular views about these philosophical questions, and as such few philosophical theories would conflict with their views (or seem counter-intuitive or revisionary).  But I have mainly been thinking about the questions, not the answers.

Well, thanks for indulging my attempt to transition back from soccer to philosophy.

Comments

[Neil]

Zou Zou's two headers are not all that analogous. With regard to the first, he did everything that could be expected of him; it was Buffon that prevented it going in, not his lack of control. Why do people apply TOM to some actions and not others? My guess is that there are multiple factors at work. Zidane is not known for his aggression, so when he loses his cool we look for an explanation (and we look to folk psychology, sometimes quite wrongly. There is evidence that glucose depletion lowers self-control, so the explanation may simply be in terms of physical exhaustion). With a suicide bomber we lack the background to make the action (in)explicable. In addition, of course, mere familiarity (lot's of evidence on this) makes people feel more warmly toward someone or something, so we may sympathise more with Zidane than with a suicide bomber.

Only another 3 years and 50 weeks to go...

[Kip Werking]

Eddy, you ask:

"Do they think that these events are different in some important way from, say, a dog jumping and just missing a frisbee ("She could have caught that") or, say, a lottery turning out a certain way? If engaged in Socratic dialogue, would they be willing to use "backtracking counterfactuals" on the dog and lottery case in a way that they would not with the human case (e.g., the dog would have caught it only if certain conditions had been different and those conditions would have been different only if...)?"

There seems to be evidence of precisely this distinction. On Shaun Nichols website, one finds his paper "Folk Concepts and Intuitions: From Philosophy to Cognitive Science." The relevant excerpt reads:

"In a second study, adults and children were asked about physical events, e.g., a pot of water coming to a boil, and moral-choice events, e.g., a girl stealing a candy bar. Participants were asked whether if everything in the world was the same up until the event occurred, the event had to occur. In this setting, both adults and children were more likely to say that the physical events had to occur than that the moral choice events had to occur. This provides preliminary evidence that the folk have a concept of free will on which agents could have done otherwise."

Moreover, as I've mentioned here before, the fundamental attribution error (FAE) is a bedrock principle of social psychology, according to which observers overestimate the disposition of another's behavior, and underestimate situational constraints, when explaining that other's behavior. So, according to the FAE, one might be willing to trace the causes of an action back to the person's disposition but be unwilling to scrutinize the situational constraints that led to that person's having that disposition.

Finally, there is large body of work defending libertarianism. If libertarianism represents, in part, actual perception of human action, then this large body of work would be evidence that people do think in this way. Alternatively, if libertarianism is a rationalization, in the face of other problematic intuitions (e.g. TNR), then people might not necessarily think of others in this way. Perhaps it is some mix. I (and others, e.g. Smilansky) suspect, however, that libertarianism comes close to capturing some natural or instinctive intuitions about how people perceive or understand human action.

To answer your question about "why" people sometimes (or often) show an eagerness to demonize others and an unwillingness to scrutinize the antecedent conditions that caused this "evil" behavior, my humble suggestion is simple: evolution. This particular bias may have evolved as a useful heuristic because it is cheap and fast (Kahneman and Tversky) and/or because the relative costs of false positives and false negatives were asymmetrical throughout human evolution, in accordance with Error Management Theory (Buss and Haselton).

I discuss how a multitude of cognitive biases, with possible relevance to the free will problem, might have evolved in my new draft (work in progress) "The View from Nowhere Through a Distorted Lens: The Evolution of Cognitive Biases Favoring Belief in Free Will", which is available here:

http://people.wm.edu/~ktwerk/viewnowhere.pdf

[Kevin Timpe]

Eddy,

I like the World Cup, and like things free will, but I'm not sure I have much to say about the two of them together. I would think that a team's fans are willing to over-blame when their team looses (did you see the Enlgish press after the Portugal game?), but I think that's likely to be because of the high level of affect involved. I doubt that most fans even consider the truth of determinism or related issues when watching a game--they just want the pints and goals to keep coming.

[Kevin Timpe]

Here's a question about Zidane: how can you apologize for doing X if you "don't regret at all" doing X?

[Eddy Nahmias]

Kevin, good question about how you can apologize for X if you don't regret doing X (and actually quite relevant to understanding the reactive attitudes). Of course, this seems to be the model for public apologies these days, especially by politicians ("I am deeply sorry if anyone was offended by my comment..."). I suspect what Zidane meant was, "I am sorry billions of people saw the incident but I am not sorry for doing it--i.e., I wish it hadn't been caught on camera."

Kip, thanks for your responses. The evolutionary explanation is interesting. I disagree, however, about the likelihood that people have a libertarian conception of agency (or experience choice as indeterministic). (See my phenomenology of free will paper). Shaun's data is interesting but I have responded to its application to this debate and run some studies that suggest people seem to think of both physical and human events as indeterministic in some cases and deterministic in others. (These papers are out in latest Journal of Cognition and Culture and forthcoming with Jason Turner in Mind and Language.) Of course, the debate is far from settled and, I think, one of the more interesting areas for experimental work--i.e., trying to figure out how people understand 'could have done (happened) otherwise' for both human choices and non-human events. I'm not convinced that people think of them as fundamentally different (though of course they think--rightly--that we have lots of powers/capacities non-human things don't have). I'm not sure if the FAE is relevant here, but I'll think about it more.

Neal, I think there is clearly a sense in which Zidane's two headers are similar. I think most people want to say he could have put the header a couple feet to either side and then Buffon would not have saved it. The 'could have' here seems different in some ways than the 'could have controlled himself when Materazzi called his momma a whore.' In any case, I am interested in how those 'could haves' are different (metaphysically!) and how people understand them to be different (if they do, beyond the obvious differences in the situations, the motives of Zidane, and the amount of time involved).

Tamler, I'm trying man, but I suspect everyone's busy and perhaps a bit blogged out.

[Kip Werking]

Eddy,

I'll be sure to look over your paper (scanning it now, it looks very impressive). I anticipate that this issue, about how humans understand their own agency, is going to be *hotly* contested. I am also very curious to know (perhaps this is in your paper) why, if humans don't actually think of human agency in this way, why so many people have claimed that we do? What is your error theory for libertarian presumptions?

I am starting to favor what might be considered a dual process theory of human agency and responsibility practices. For example, Steven Pinker writes that "I believe that the mind is organized into cognitive systems specialized for reasoning about object, space, numbers, living things, and other minds." These domain specific circuits provide fast and cheap computation in fitness-sensitive contexts---like the instinct to demonize Zidane without reflecting on what circumstances might have mitigated his guilt. Joshue Greene defends a very similar dual process error theory of deontology in the The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul, which is available here:

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-KantSoul.pdf

I share your reservations about overusing the FAE when explaining belief in free will and moral responsibility. For example, in accordance with the self-serving bias, the converse of the FAE seems to apply to people's understandings of their own behavior: they overestimate the importance of constraining factors and underemphasize the importance of one's disposition. But there are many other biases which would favor belief in free will and moral responsibility, as I try to show in my new draft paper.

[Paul Torek]

Why not blame Zidane much if he could have put the header a couple feet to either side and then Buffon would not have saved it? Because to reach that level of performance would tend to indicate that he was a super duper phenomenal player instead of a "merely" super phenomenal player. That's a very tiny difference in character, compared to the difference between someone who head-butts an insulting opponent and someone who ignores it. It's not the ability that's different, it's the character (or diagnosis of character).