Free Will and Autism

Only a handful of prominent historical figures denied the existence of free will (at least for non-religious reasons).  Yet a disproportionately large number of them had many symptoms associated with the autism spectrum.

Einstein, Russell, and Spinoza (ERS) each denied the existence of free will, and each has been repeatedly “diagnosed” with Asperger’s Syndrome.  Einstein and Russell are two of only 20 historical figures diagnosed in the book Asperger’s Syndrome and High Achievement.  Spinoza is one of only 21 historical figures diagnosed in the book The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger's Syndrome And The Arts.  Here is a great video explaining the link between Einstein and autism.

If you’re willing to entertain that idea, then we reach the following conclusion: (1) ERS didn’t believe in free will and (2) ERS had many characteristics associated with the autism spectrum.  My thesis is this: the combination of (1) and (2) was not a coincidence.

Putting aside for the moment the problem of “diagnosing” historical figures with autism or Asperger’s, let’s ask the question: why would there be a link between autism and denying the existence of free will?  I have many different ideas for why there might be a link between the two.  Here, I’ll mention a few:

1. If affect irrationally biases compatibilists toward believing in free will (as Nichols and Knobe famously suggested), and if people with autism/Asperger’s are less emotional and more coldly rational, as they are often portrayed, then they may be more likely to be incompatibilist.
2. If pessimism about moral responsibility and determinism is the result of the objective attitude, as Peter Strawson suggested, and if people with autism/Asperger’s have a greater degree of “scientific objectivity,” as Tyler Cowen has suggested, then those people may be more likely to be pessimistic.
3. If people on the autism spectrum are more inclined to systematize the world and view it as a complex machine (as suggested by Simon Baron-Cohen), and if understanding people in terms of neurology (mechanical) instead of psychology (mental) inclines people to disbelieve in free will, as Nahmias and others suggested, then those on the autism spectrum might tend to disbelieve in free will.
4. If the fundamental attribution error is one reason why people tend to believe in free will, then people on the autism spectrum might be less likely to do so, because at least one study shows that people on the autism spectrum are less vulnerable to the fundamental attribution error.
5. The thesis that people on the autism spectrum are more skeptical about free will is consistent with Feltz, Cokely and Nadelhoffer’s data showing that compatibilists are more extroverted.

I also conducted a preliminary study with 21 random subjects outside the local public library. I found that a composite score, averaging 10 primary features of Asperger’s Syndrome, was significantly correlated with incompatibilism.  Self-reported difficulty with making friends was also significantly correlated with incompatibilism.

I find all of that fascinating, if only suggestive.

There is, however, a puzzle remaining.  I’ve previously called anti-realism about free will a form of “empathy too extreme for most.”  But people on the autism spectrum have famous difficulties with empathy.  How can anti-realists about free will both have lots of empathy (for people without free will) and have empathy deficiencies (because of autism spectrum traits)?

I believe that there are answers to those riddles, and that the answers are both subtle and fascinating.  But I’ll leave that for another post.

Gardeners, I would like to hear what thoughts, if any, you have about my hypothesis that there is a link between autism and beliefs about free will?

Comments

[Adam Lerner]

Kip,

Thanks a lot for posting this. I find this all very suggestive and promising.

First of all, what was the general setup of your study? Were you testing people for (in)compatibilist intuitions specifically about free will or moral responsibility?

In any case, do you intend to “blow up” your preliminary study to systematically test people from across the autism spectrum? I am curious to see whether there is some point at which the expected high rate of incompatibilist intuitions drops off, perhaps suggesting that a particular autism-related neurological process accounts for incompatibilist intuitions (or, more likely, that a particular neurological process that autistic people lack accounts for compatibilist intuitions). Of course, I’m sure individual differences across the autism spectrum vary along more than one dimension, but even if it’s a gradual change across several different autistic traits – and this relates to the puzzle you mentioned at the end of your post – I’m curious to know whether and how much the features of autism that produce incompatibilist intuitions are tied (or even identical) to those features that account for empathy deficiencies. Do those of us who lean towards pessimism about free will and/or moral responsibility (and further believe that this has some important social ramifications) share some autism spectrum traits but not others?

I suspect that the story is somewhat less exciting than that. I think it’s plausible that at least part of what makes people with Asperger’s more likely to report incompatibilist intuitions is that they more readily engage a particular concept of moral responsibility that is more amenable to hard determinism or hard incompatibilism than those who report compatibilist intuitions (where these differing concepts are not mutually exclusive). I offer this suggestion as part of a more general suspicion I have that most experimental work in free will and moral responsibility can’t, or at least hasn’t thus far, told us much about whether people actually hold conflicting intuitions regarding determinism’s compatibility with free will/moral responsibility. Generally, this suspicion echoes an objection forwarded by Ernest Sosa against Nichols and Knobe’s affect hypothesis. According to Sosa, it could just be that those who took Nichols and Knobe’s surveys and reported compatibilist intuitions were using a different concept or “sense” of moral responsibility than those who reported incompatibilist intuitions. He suggests this might break down along Watson’s attributability/accountability distinction. I tend to think it’s a bit more complicated than that, but I’ve done some experimental work that suggests that some kind of interpretive diversity regarding the phrase “moral responsibility” may account for the apparent (in)compatibilist differences that Nichols and Knobe attribute to affect. With further research, this idea might be plausibly extended to subsume Feltz, Cokely, and Nadelhoffer's extroversion explanation as well.

Furthermore, I think this general line of thought is also made plausible in light of recent work by Coleen Macnamara (“Holding Others Responsible”) and Neal Tognazzini and John Martin Fischer (“The Physiognomy of Responsibility”) which aims to elucidate how philosophers themselves use “moral responsibility” differently and how this can lead to confusion and/or stalemate. But if philosophers aren't always clear on their terms, why should we expect the folk to be? Perhaps the majority of the folk regularly fluctuates between different senses of moral responsibility but some feature or set of features of autism merely makes autistic people more likely to coalesce around one sense of moral responsibility that happens to have incompatibilist presuppositions but does not conflict with other senses of moral responsibility that do not?

Please pardon my ignorance regarding Asperger's, but do you know if there’s any evidence that those with Asperger’s (or autism more generally) have a tendency to interpret interpersonal terms differently than those without?

Thanks again for the thought-provoking post,
Adam

[S.M.]

Interesting. I have Asperger's Syndrome (though self diagnosed). I absolutely do not believe people have free will, in any sense. After reading the wikipedia entry on compatibilism I feel that compatibilism is just saying "we don't have free will but lets pretend anyway".

Also I do feel empathy. If I see someone hurt I have a strong desire to help, so much so it can hurt. I have trouble expressing it/hide it. If empathy is caring to hear about what someone did on the weekend then I guess I would appear to lack empathy. Its a matter of defining empathy.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Kip, I'd be curious to hear what you and others think would follow if your suggestion were confirmed. That is, if we discover strong correlations between beliefs about free will and Asperger spectrum (or various other personality/cognitive/emotional traits), what might we conclude about the concept of free will and the reality of free will?

[Justin Coates]

Matt,

You'll find your comment deleted because we're not really interested in anonymous sniping. If you have substantive criticisms that aren't needlessly personal, feel free to voice them.

Eddy,

Thanks for addressing the concern.

S.M.,

For a better account of what compatibilists are committed to, I'd recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry. You can find it here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

[Mihai Martoiu Ticu]

Well I don’t believe in free will and I have two comments.

Firstly: During the developing of my thoughts of non existence of the free will I came to have less empathy with the rest of the people. This is rationally so. While I rationally understand that people feel in some ways in certain situations and my mirror neurons react when seeing blood, I don’t feel the empathy that one usually feels with others when hearing stories of bad incidents in others' life. So the causality of the two might be the other way around. Thinking rationally might lead to less empathy.

Secondly: I find it a little bit denigrating to be somehow diagnosed with a "syndrome", or in any way depicted as dysfunctional. The whole tone of the discussion feels like there is one sort of humans that are normal and believe in free will, and another sort, species, race of people that are abnormal, Asperger-like, and who don’t believe in free will. So why would one talk like that, while it might be the other way around? From my perspective the believers in free will are psychically disturbed, because they believe in non existing entities, like mermaids, unicorns, phlogiston, ether etc. So which of the two camps gets the right to decide who’s normal en who’s dysfunctional? Therefore I’d protest against the formulation of the thoughts in such a manner that disqualifies the other camp.

[Jorgen Hansen]

This is interesting. I wonder also about the implications this would carry with it, should a significant correlation be shown. If intuitions are supposed to reflect any truth about free will, once we begin splintering off certain sets of intuitions into different factions, then it seems (though I may be overshooting a bit) that a situationist interpretation may be in order. If we're to claim that the folk hold intuitions about free will, but those with Asperger's do not, and those with disorder x hold A, and those without y or z hold B, it seems that our intuitions may just reflect our circumstance, rather than something meaningful about human nature.

Just a thought... I would like to see more work on this, though.

[Jennifer McCrickerd]

Interesting thoughts.

Temple Grandin is someone who has been diagnosed with autism and has embraced this diagnosis (people with Asperger's sometimes call themselves "neurally atypical" and others advocate "neural diversity"). She has a PhD in Animal Science and has written many books in which she discusses her autism and the insights she has in virtue of being "neurally atypical".

I've only read her first book Animals in Translation but she does have others. She has some theories about how folks along the autism continuum view and understand the world different from those of us who are so typical as to not be on the continuum at all.

From the book I have read of her's and what I've read of intellectual development theory, I think some people with Asperger's have a tendency to view the world (including people) mechanistically whereas most of us need to go through some sort of intellectual exercise to even get to the possibility that people are mechanistic.

This is certainly interesting insofar as better understanding how our relationship with the world might shape the theories we are ultimately willing to accept about the world.

[Kip]

Adam:

1. The question was specifically about free will, not moral responsibility.
2. I, too, share your concern that only some of the AS traits may be associated with beliefs about free will. I have not done a regression analysis (if that's the right term) to see if only a minority of the AS traits, used to form the AS composite score, are causing the correlation. I intend to collect a lot more data, though. One problem is that very few people say that free will doesn't exist.
3. You suggest that, following Sosa, maybe some groups of people just use a different definition of moral responsibility (or free will). Here are my thoughts on that.

A. Even if that's true, it's still very exciting. I hardly see how it would be less exciting than an alternative explanation.
B. I am completely open to that possibility. My only concern is that I cannot think of *why* people with Asperger's would use a different definition of a term than others.
C. Despite B, I don't think Sosa's explanation of different definitions and Nichols & Knobe's affect hypothesis are mutually exclusive. I think it's quite possible that a person could feel motivated to say that "free will exists and people are responsible for their actions," and to adjust their definitions of freedom and responsibility accordingly.
D. Even if Sosa's explanation could be applied to an autism-free will link (assuming the data supports that link), I doubt that it is the only explanation. I suspect that autism spectrum traits influence beliefs about free will in a large number of ways, only half of which are mentioned in my original post.

[Kip]

Eddy,

Great question.

I wish I could give you a simple, short answer. But that's impossible. So let me share some of my thoughts on where this research might lead.

1. I find the link interesting for its own sake. Just the fact that a mental "disorder" might affect a person's philosophical views (and not just by altering mood, as depression would), and that this disorder may help explain the views of prominent thinkers in history, is fascinating to me. So I'm not necessarily trying to target a further hypothesis, beyond the link between autism and free will itself.
2. If I were to venture beyond the link itself, we can ask why it exists. I mention a variety of explanations above, and there are many other possibilities.

For each candidate explanation, we can ask: is the AS person or the neurotypical going to be more accurate?

Autism is associated with both cognitive weaknesses and cognitive strengths (perhaps more weaknesses than strengths). If the reason that AS types are more incompatibilist or more anti-realist is due to a weakness, then that probably counts against their view. Similarly, if the reason that AS types are more incompatibilist or anti-realist is due to a strength, then that probably supports their view.

For example, if AS types are truly less vulnerable to the fundamental attribution error, and if independent research establishes that self-professed believers in free will are more vulnerable to that error, then that should count against free willism. Alternaitively, if AS types are more skeptical about free will because of weak central coherence, or some other cognitive weakness, then that might count against anti-realism.

[Kip]

Mihai:

1. For whatever it is worth, my experience has been exactly the opposite. Coming to feel that people lack free will, and that I lack free will, has led me to feel greater empathy. For me, the two are intimately related: the denial of free will is simply the expression of extreme empathy (see also Brian Park's Self-Switching Scenario).

Your interpretation is consistent, however, with research showing that people who doubt free will also cheat more and cooperate less.

2. There is a whole movement, called Neurodiversity, dedicated to the idea that people with atypical mental development (e.g. Asperger's) deserve as much respect and recognition as neurotypicals.

Personally, I think that, if you observe Asperger's or autism is its strongest (diagnosed) form, and witness the profound suffering that these people experience, it becomes clear that the condition is a disorder.

[Adam Lerner]

Kip,

Thanks for the response.

In seeking more data, are you going to try to find subjects specifically on the autism spectrum? If it’s feasible, it seems like a pretty direct way to test your hypothesis (and, if your hypothesis is correct, gather data about those hard-to-find pessimistic intuitions).

I agree that tying autism to a particular definition of free will would still be exciting as a descriptive account, but I don’t think that what would follow would be as dramatic a research program as you lay out in (2) of your response to Eddy (which is what I had in mind when I said it wouldn’t be as exciting). That is, we wouldn’t have to try to provide reasons to trust or doubt the reliability of the respective sources of incompatibilist or compatibilist intuitions since these intuitions wouldn't be in conflict. It could just be that the folk are incompatibilists with respect to one sense of free will, compatibilists with respect to another, and people on the autism spectrum more readily engage the former sense when asked to answer survey questions about free will.

I agree that Sosa’s explanation and the general affect hypothesis aren’t mutually exclusive, but as advanced by Nichols and Knobe, affect is supposed to play a role in producing conflicting intuitions, not intuitions about different content altogether. You seem to suggest affect could motivate people to shift their definitions (and thereby the content of their intuitions) - I actually think that’s exactly what’s happening.

But I also agree, even if we manage to tease out different senses of free will, there may be particular senses about which those with Asperger’s still hold incompatibilist intuitions more than those without. I look forward to future posts in which you elaborate on the different ways autism spectrum traits may play a part in producing these incompatibilist intuitions.

[sarah]

I don't understand why, if the correlation exists, that this would be an interesting finding. Is it anymore significant than determining that a certain personality type maybe be more likely to hold a given belief than another personality type? I hope this comment isn't obnoxious, I just think I am not understanding.

[Kip]

Adam,

I probably will not look for people with specific diagnoses of Asperger's Syndrome. For one, that's extremely hard to do. When I first suggested this idea to Josh Greene, he mentioned how hard it would be to get access to a group of people diagnosed with AS or autism. Second, the DSM diagnosis is famously narrow. Third, many people exhibit enough of a cluster of AS symptoms (a "subclinical" diagnosis) to show a link. 50% of the members of a family of someone diagnosed with Asperger's show many symptoms, but not enough for a diagnosis. People like Spinoza and Einstein may be more like these family members than those with full-blown Asperger's or autism. I'm hoping, and tend to think, that there is enough variation in the general population to find the link, if it exists.

Your main point is that, if the AS-free will link is semantics, as Sosa suggests, then it is less interesting, because it wouldn't tend to show that one group was right another was wrong. I see your point. I'll have to think about it.

My gut feeling is that, even if people are using different definitions of free will, someone is still making an error somewhere. Perhaps, for example, one group is starting out with one definition and moving to another out of convenience or irrationality.

But, as I said in response to Eddy, the link is fascinating regardless of whether it helps anyone win the debate. I have about 8 different ideas for how the link would work. Many of those idea, on their face, would be neutral, or even count against, the incompatibilist/skeptic.

I look forward to future posts in which you elaborate on the different ways autism spectrum traits may play a part in producing these incompatibilist intuitions.

I'll post more if people are interested to hear more. It would be good to get some more data to confirm the link, and then some more data to explore why the link exists. Maybe some of the conference participants in Florida will have some ideas.

[Kip]

Sarah,

Shuan Nichols asked me that same question.

I guess interest is relative. I'm not interested at all in the design of paper clips or the socio-political situation in East Timor. But I'm sure that some other people are.

You may be right that the AS-fw link is no more interesting than a personality-fw link. But I find those fascinating, too! That research is interesting enough to get published, as the authors of the extroversion-fw article showed.

The main source of interest, I think, is that the findings are counterintuitive: we usually think that people adopt philosophical views (especially philosophers) because of rational argument and logical analysis, not because of accidents of birth and the whims of personality. Of course, we acknowledge that these things can play a role, but want to think that role is minimal. Otherwise, the adoption of any philosophical view may be just arbitrary: no right or wrong, just happy or sad, extroverted or introverted, mentally disordered or neurotypical.

Another source of interest is that these links may provide the entry-way to further, even more interesting research exploring the causes of the links. It is one thing to know that extroverted people are more compatibilist. It is another thing to explore *why* they are more compatibilist. Are they more compatibilist because of a cognitive strength or weakness? Or are they more compatibilist because of some other neutral, but much more complicated and nuanced, set of reasons?

All of that fascinates me. But it doesn't fascinate everyone. It certainly doesn't fascinate the rest of my family.

[sarah]

Thanks Kip, I think I better understand where you're going with this now...

[Kip]

Corrections:

Shaun Nichols's first name is not spelled Shuan.

Adam Feltz reminds me that "Cokely and I were the only authors on the Consciousness and Cognition personality paper—however, Nadelhoffer, Kvaran, and Nahmias wrote a reply to it in the same issue."