Futurism logo

Who Is Really in Control of Your Actions?

The Issue of Free Will and How It Affects Your Life

By Ele DudaPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
Like

Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you had given a different answer in a conversation, or if you had made a different choice in a certain situation? Was the course of events predestined, or was it really up to you? Many philosophers and psychologists have tried to address this issue, along with the question “who is the decision-maker?” if you go on cruise-control. For example, when you went home from work and realized that you had no memory of making your way there. Turns out that, more than the real answer to those questions, it’s our opinion about it that determines the way we act and judge other people.

The reasons why I said that our opinions are more important than the issue itself are that:

  1. Scientists have not been able to measure the extent to which we choose independently of any outside or inside influences (you can call it free will.)
  2. Despite this, scientists have discovered that we behave and attribute blame on others based on our subjective assumption of how much free will we and others have, and on our subjective definition of it.

Some people argue that we have a soul that is our decision-maker. Others claim that there is no soul and that everything we do is based on our biological processes. Others think that it might be a mixture of biological and environmental influences. And regardless of our certainty about where our decisions come from, we are always ready to attribute blame. I'm gonna expand on this problem here.

Just like laypeople make up their minds about this matter, so do psychologists. Except that psychologists base their viewpoints on research, and go on creating schools of thought, like Behaviorism. Behaviorists are strong believers in Determinism, which is the theory that everything that happens could have never happened in a different way. You could say, all things are predestined because each event has its one and only necessary consequence.

One of the most famous Behaviorists is Albert Bandura, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. Bandura carried out a study, in 1961, that demonstrated how cause and effect are closely related, even in a context that most of us are familiar with—family. Children grow up to resemble their same-sex parent, in terms of behavior. More in the specific, kids who are brought up by aggressive parents observe their aggression and imitate it.

Will you blame the child for his hostile behavior or will you blame the parent? Did the child ever have a say in what he should imitate from his parent? Most people argue that the right attribution of responsibility has to do with how conscious you are about the consequences to your actions. Therefore, children may not be as responsible for their behavior as adults are, just because they still don't realize how their actions affect the world around them.

Obviously, as aggressive children grow up, they come to realize the negative consequences of aggression, so they should consciously decide to do something about their learned tendency. Then, to what extent do we assume that one has control over their external and internal stimuli? In other words, do you have a soul or a conscience that acts as your primary decision-maker and allows you to decide independently, or do you act based on stimuli from the environment and from your body?

Andrew E. Monroe, fromFlorida State University, and his colleagues suggest that, when it comes to blaming others, people do not seem to care about whether or not someone has a soul as a decision-maker. In a study they conducted in 2014, people tended to judge an agent based on how much the agent was aware of the situation and whether or not they could act independently, regardless of the presence of a soul. This means that people give more importance to one’s capabilities in a given situation than the dilemma of where free will comes from.

Basically, people believe that if you're not aware of your actions, or if you can'tchoose for yourself—maybe because you have a mental illness—you should not be held responsible. Here it seems that biological factors are weighed more heavily than influences from the outside world, and that overcoming these very influences means having free will. Philosopher and Cognitive Scientist Daniel Dennett explained how important it is to believe that we are in control of our internal stimuli, and, therefore, believe that we have free will.

Dennett argues that neuroscientists, by claiming that they found ways to prove that free will is nothing but an illusion, are just harming people by giving them a reason to lose their sense of responsibility. To illustrate this, he created an imaginary scenario, in which a neurosurgeon cures an OCD patient of his unpleasant condition. Before discharging the patient, the neurosurgeon informs him that he is cured, and jokes with him saying that, from now on, her team is also going to be able to control his mind. But the patient believes her and goes on with his life thinking that his decisions will never again be his own. Eventually, he gets in trouble with the law and justifies himself saying that he doesn’t have free will, but that he is controlled by the team of neurosurgeons that cured his brain. Though this is only a thought experiment, the end-point is that people are less concerned about their actions when they don’t believe in free will. There are empirical studies that have actually proven this to be true.

One of the experiments that tested this assumption was carried out by Davide Rigoni and his colleagues at Ghent University. They divided participants into two groups and let them read a passage from the same book. One piece was denying the existence of free will and the other did not mention free will. The group that read the passage against free will made more mistakes than the other group in the same cognitive task. Does this mean that believing in free will makes you smarter? Probably not. Rigoni argues that simply leading his subjects to think that people are not in control of their actions made them less careful about not making mistakes. So, it seems like theless you believeyou’re incontrol, the less you care about the consequences of what you do.

This perspective makes sense. Why would you put effort into something, if the way things go is not up to you anyway? Yes, logic tells us that an action leads to its consequences. But denying free will also means that anything you do depends on the circumstances that led you to do that action, and the outcomes of that action… well, they are pre-destined. So, we went back to the concept of determinism.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, the existence of free will has not yet been proven, but we established how important it is that we have an opinion about free will. Whether you believe that your choices come solely from you, or whether you think that someone or something makes you do what you do, is up to you. But whatever your opinion is on it, ironically enough, is probably going to influence your next choice.

References:

Bandura, A. Ross, D., & Ross,S.A (1961). Transmission of aggression through the imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582

Monroe, A. E., Dillon, K. D., & Malle, B. F. (2014). Bringing free will down to Earth: People’s psychological concept of free will and its role in moral judgment. Consciousness and Cognition, 27, 100-108. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.04.011

Rigoni, D., Pourtois, G., & Brass, M. (2014). ‘Why should I care?’ Challenging free will attenuates neural reaction to errors. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(2), 262-268. doi:10.1093/scan/nsu068

Slattery, T. (2015, January 11). Daniel Dennett, Stop Telling People They Have Free Will! Retrieved from https://breakingthefreewillillusion.com/dennett-stop-telling-tales-about-free-will/

psychology
Like

About the Creator

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.