On the Benefits of Believing in One's Own Free Will

My antipodean friend and colleague Allan McCay sent me the link to this article, which describes a study on the ethical benefits of believing in free will. Gardeners may be interested to take a look.

Comments

[Eddy Nahmias]

The Vohs and Schooler article is here (though you may need to access it through your library): http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x

The article is interesting. Three quick points about it:
1) They do not prime people to believe they don't have free will by discussing determinism. Rather, the Crick excerpt subjects read is about how a scientific, reductionistic view of the mind demonstrates that free will is an illusion. (I predict that if they had used a determinism prime, the effect would not occur.)

2) The authors say they have controlled for mood, but I'm not sure that they've ruled out the alternative explanation that the cheating behavior is being driven in part by people reading something that says one of their cherished beliefs is shown by science to be an illusion. A good control would be to see if, among religious people, reading an article saying that science has shown that God is an illusion, slightly increases their cheating behavior.

3) The behavior, while statistically significant, comes immediately following the prime and is not huge. It does not do much to show that, if people really internalized the idea that we do not have free will (or perhaps not the robust sort we may have thought we had), they become more likely to behave anti-socially or immorally in general. That more Smilanskian idea would be much more difficult to show but much more significant. [Thomas Nadelhoffer discusses these points in several papers.]

[Neil]

The authors responds to criticism from Dennett in their contribution to Are We Free? Psychology and Free Will , just out from OUP. Chapter available here:
www.psych.ubc.ca/~azim/shariffschoolervohs.pdf

[Joe Campbell]

Question: In the posted article, it says: "Prior to the math test, Vohs and Schooler used a well-established method to prime the subjects' beliefs regarding free will: some of the students were taught that science disproves the notion of free will and that the illusion of free will was a mere artifact of the brain's biochemistry whereas others got no such indoctrination."

But do they know anything about the beliefs of the folks who "got no such indoctrination"? Or the beliefs of those who got the indoctrination, for that matter?

Also, during the indoctrination was anything about our lack of moral responsibility mentioned or were the students just told that we had a lack of control?

[Neil]

Joe, I'm not sure what the passage from Crick actually is; the authors paraphrase it as follows:
participants read statements claiming that rational, high-minded people—including, according to Crick, most scientists—now recognize that actual free will is an illusion, and also claiming that the idea of free will is a side effect of the architecture of the mind.
I believe responsibility was not mentioned. It would be interesting to replicate this study with non-US subjects (Western and South-Asian). I suspect Americans link free wlll to responsibility more than other Westerners, and South-Asians less still.

[Eddy Nahmias]

I have a copy of the passage Vohs and Schooler used from Crick (excerpts from various parts of his Astonishing [sic] Hypothesis). As I mentioned, it is all put in terms of reductionism, and anti-dualism, including that science shows we do not have souls (that point may have pissed off subjects more than the free will stuff), plus some claims about the Wegner-style view that our brain makes decisions for us that we then rationalize. There is no discussion of moral responsibility. Here are a couple relevant passages (first half is all about soul, second half is about free will, most of which is included below):

It [today's common view] is inclined to believe that the idea of a soul, distinct from the body and not subject to our known scientific laws, is a myth.... there is no need for the religious concept of a soul to explain the behavior of humans and other animals.
...

The first assumption [about free will] is that part of one’s brain is concerned with making plans for future actions, without necessarily carrying them out. The second assumption is that one is not conscious of the “computations” done by this part of the brain but only of the “decisions” it makes...

So, although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that. The actual cause of the decision may be clear cut or it may be determined by chaos, that is, a very small perturbation may make a big difference to the end result. This would give the appearance of the Will being “free” since it would make the outcome essentially unpredictable. Of course, conscious activities may also influence the decision mechanism.

One’s self can attempt to explain why it made a certain choice. Sometimes we may reach the correct conclusion. At other times, we will either not know or, more likely, will confabulate, because there is no conscious knowledge of the ‘reason’ for the choice. This implies that there must be a mechanism for confabulation, meaning that given a certain amount of evidence, which may or may not be misleading, part of the brain will jump to the simplest conclusion.

[Tom Clark]

What's interesting about Vohs and Schooler's characterization of the anti-free will position (what they say scientists believe and that more and more lay people are buying into) is that it leaves out or dismisses the agent as the proximate source of behavior.

Some quotes, my emphasis:

"Yet the view from the scientific community is that behavior is caused by *genes underlying personality dispositions, brain mechanisms, or features of the environment* (e.g., Bargh, in press; Crick, 1994; Pinker, 2002)."

"What would happen if people came to believe that their behavior is the *inexorable product of a causal chain* set into motion without their own volition?"

“If reducing people’s sense of control also reduces the amount of effort they put toward improving their performance, then advocating a deterministic worldview that *dismisses individual causation* may similarly promote undesirable behavior.”

"Although some people have speculated about the societal risks that might result from adopting a viewpoint that *denies personal responsibility* for actions, this hypothesis has not been explored empirically."

What these quotes highlight are external influences or internal sub-personal mechanisms, and what's downplayed is the idea of person-level intentional agency. The authors' working assumption seems to be that in a “deterministic worldview” such agency and the attendant (compatibilist) responsibility don't survive, because once causally explained, the agent herself contributes nothing and can't be held responsible. But of course this doesn’t follow. If external factors have causal power, which they do since they cause the agent, then there's no reason to deny the agent at least equal causal power. I take it this is one element of the compatibilist position. Since the agent is a proximate locus of control and causation, we're justified in holding her responsible at least as a means of guiding goodness. Determinism isn’t a universal excuse. It’s distressing that the authors seem to have no inkling of (or fail to mention) compatibilist notions of agency and responsibility, and thus mischaracterize what determinism (or more broadly the denial of libertarian free will) entails.

Lastly, they say: “If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative."

This position seems untenable, since there’s no practical or ethical way to insulate people from scientific, cause and effect understandings of themselves. Doing so would deny them both the empirical truth about themselves and the enhanced control stemming from knowing their actual causal story. Besides, the worry that belief in determinism will encourage unethical behavior may, as the authors acknowledge, be overblown. If people can be brought to see (and this isn’t rocket science) that there are robust compatibilist notions of agency, ethics and responsibility and that determinism isn’t demoralizing, but rather moralizing and empowering in some important respects (as the authors acknowledge might be the case), then there’s no reason not to spread deterministic messages in the first place.

[boris]

An Israeli behavioral scientist named Jesus from Nazareth predicted the results of Vohs and Schooler about two thousands years ago, as he said, that everybody will be given according to his belief. Who believes that he or she does NOT have a free will, really does not have it.