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Why psychological scientists should disdain determinism
Abstract
This essay strives to challenge a conceptual foundation of psychology that is questioned all too rarely: causal determinism. Specifically, the issue we have an argument with is the idea that human behavior is characterized by strict and inevitable sequences of cause and effect. We make two arguments against this notion. First, we argue that, even if true, this conception of determinism is useless and misleading for psychological theories, because psychological theories typically must explain how agents respond to situations defined by having multiple alternative possible outcomes. Second, we argue that this determinism is probably wrong, outdated, and circular in its reasoning. Alongside these arguments, we present results of a survey among fellow researchers, assessing their beliefs on the topic. Results show that psychologists are indeed discordant about this issue, and tendencies to endorse notions of causal determinism are more prevalent in younger than older scientists. We respect this diversity of opinion and seek to make the case that psychology theory would be best served by abandoning the wrongheaded idea of human behavior being inevitable and physically predetermined and replacing it with a brain-based agent operating in a world defined by multiple genuine possibilities and probabilistic causation.
... The appeal of determinism may be much like the appeal of a psychic: it appears to reduce uncertainty about the future. Indeed, Baumeister and Lau (2021) found that junior psychological scientists tended to endorse determinism more than senior scientists. Uncertainty is an ubiquitous and critical adaptive challenge (e.g., Hirsh et al., 2012), and likely very prevalent in a taxing context like starting a scientific career. ...
... Some of us have written sharp criticism of determinism from a psychological-science standpoint (Baumeister & Lau, 2021). (Another of us has criticized notions of free will [Clark, 2020]). ...
Determinism is the theory that all events in the universe are completely caused by prior events, such that every occurrence was inevitable from the start of the universe, ranging from the intricate blast of every supernova, to the precise path each leaf travels as it flutters to the ground, to the very words we are writing in this encyclopedia entry. It is a brilliant, elegant, controversial, and challenging theory. Philosophers and scientists disagree profoundly about whether determinism is true and whether it applies to human behavior.
Possibilities are deeply engrained in psychology’s attempts to understand human behavior. This special issue offers diverse and novel insights into the role of possibilities. Two articles on morality show surprising links to mental illness and to counterfactual outcomes: People think doing immoral things is a sign of mental illness, and morally unwelcome outcomes stimulate retroactive imputation of more alternatives. Three articles address classic questions of determinism and choice: Possibilities are shaped by prior events, but pure determinism is useless for psychological theory, and meanwhile some perspectives in modern physics clash with psychological observations and experience. Imitation promotes prosociality but people are highly selective as to what they imitate.
The present work covers causality and development broadly toward unifying psychology, which is considered an ongoing project. The present work emphasizes the causal mechanism of activation-inhibition coordination and its application to laterality while integrating systems and network modeling; the developmental concept of neo-stages, and a 25-step (sub)stage model of development over the lifespan, while attempting to integrate psychology under the rubric of causality (and development). This chapter presents a recent literature review on the core ideas in the book series on the topic (Young, Development and causality: Neo-Piagetian perspectives. Springer, New York, 2011; Unifying causality and psychology: Being, brain and behavior. Springer, Cham, 2016; Causality and development: Neo-Eriksonian perspectives. Springer, Cham, 2019). In the year since the original six chapters were written (Chaps. 2– 7), the literature in these areas has continued to burgeon, and is reviewed in this chapter. The review deals with the book’s core ideas as well as developmental research relating to them.
There are two ways for a situation to be uncertain. Subjective uncertainty refers to not knowing facts. Objective uncertainty refers to future events that have not been determined yet. A wide ranging literature review finds that subjective uncertainty inhibits behavior, increases conserving resources and willpower, and stimulates search for information – though in crude, sometimes dysfunctional fashion. In contrast, objective uncertainty calls for action, reflected in agentic control, increased arousal, and greater willingness to take risks. Again, some responses are irrational, such as exerting more effort for less expected reward, and betting more on uncontrollable future than past events. With both kinds of uncertainty, attention is mobilized and emotion is prolonged. Our review uncovered multiple signs that some uncertainty is beneficial and heightens enjoyment as a kind of spice of life, or, in some cases, as a welcome hope that a bad outcome might still be avoided.
Thinking about the future highlights the constructive nature of consciousness, as opposed to merely representing what is there — because the future is not yet available to be seen. We elaborate this point to emphasize how consciousness deals in alternative possibilities, and indeed preconscious interpretation confers meaning by recognizing these alternatives. Crucially, the goal of prospection is less to predict what is sure to happen than to prepare for action in situations defined by sets of incompatible alternative options, each of which might or might not come true. We review multiple lines of evidence indicating that people conceptualize the future as just such a matrix of maybe. Thus, people think of the future as highly changeable. Most prospective thinking involves planning, which is designed to bring about one outcome rather than alternatives. Optimism may often reflect an initial, automatic response that is soon followed by conscious appreciation of obstacles and other factors that can produce less desired, alternative outcomes. People moralize the future more than the past, presumably to promote the more desirable outcomes. Anticipated emotion helps people evaluate future possible outcomes. People specifically anticipate the matrix of maybe and sometimes seek to preserve multiplicity of options. We integrate these patterns of findings with a pragmatic theory of prospection: Thinking of the future as a multi-maybe matrix is useful for guiding action.
Animal brains have evolved to predict outcomes of events in the immediate environment [1–5]. Adult humans are particularly adept at dealing with environmental uncertainty, being able to mentally represent multiple, even mutually exclusive versions of the future and prepare accordingly. This capacity is fundamental to many complex future-oriented behaviors [6, 7], yet little is known about when it develops in children [8] and whether it is shared with non-human animals [9]. Here we show that children become able to insightfully prepare for two mutually exclusive versions of an undetermined future event during the middle preschool years, whereas we find no evidence for such a capacity in a sample of chimpanzees and orangutans. We gave 90 preschool children and 8 great apes the opportunity to catch an item dropped into a forked tube with two bottom openings. Children’s performance improved linearly across age groups (2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, and 4 years), with none of the youngest group but most of the oldest group spontaneously covering both openings the first time they prepared to catch the item. The apes performed like 2-year-olds on the first trial, with none of them covering both openings. Some apes and 2-year-olds eventually passed the task, but only in a manner consistent with trial-and-error learning. Our results reveal the developmental trajectory of a critical cognitive ability that allows humans to prepare for future uncertainty, and they also raise the possibility that this ability is not shared with other hominids.
A Metaphysics for Freedom outlines the case for the view that agency itself-and not merely the special, distinctively human variety of it-is incompatible with determinism. It argues that determinism is threatened just as surely by the existence of powers which can be unproblematically accorded to many sorts of animals, as by the distinctively human powers of action on which the free will debate has tended to focus. A tendency to approach the question of free will solely through the issue of moral responsibility has obscured the fact that there is a quite different route to incompatibilism available, based on the idea that animal agents above a certain level of complexity possess a range of distinctive 'two-way' powers, not found in simpler substances. Determinism, it is contended, is not a doctrine of physics, but of metaphysics; and the idea that it is physics which will tell us whether our world is deterministic or not is argued to presuppose what must not be taken for granted-that is, that physics settles everything else. An outline of a variety of top-down causation which might sustain the idea that an animal itself, rather than merely events and states going on in its parts, may bring something about, is explored. The whole is an argument for a distinctive and resolutely non-dualistic, naturalistically respectable version of libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of organization might make possible in the way of freedom.
Individuals often feel anxious in anticipation of tasks such as speaking in public or meeting with a boss. I find that an overwhelming majority of people believe trying to calm down is the best way to cope with pre-performance anxiety. However, across several studies involving karaoke singing, public speaking, and math performance, I investigate an alternative strategy: reappraising anxiety as excitement. Compared with those who attempt to calm down, individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement feel more excited and perform better. Individuals can reappraise anxiety as excitement using minimal strategies such as self-talk (e.g., saying "I am excited" out loud) or simple messages (e.g., "get excited"), which lead them to feel more excited, adopt an opportunity mind-set (as opposed to a threat mind-set), and improve their subsequent performance. These findings suggest the importance of arousal congruency during the emotional reappraisal process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
Researchers have used terms such as unrealistic optimism and optimistic bias to refer to concepts that are similar but not synonymous. Drawing from 3 decades of research, we discuss critically how researchers define unrealistic optimism, and we identify four types that reflect different measurement approaches: unrealistic absolute optimism at the individual and group levels and unrealistic comparative optimism at the individual and group levels. In addition, we discuss methodological criticisms leveled against research on unrealistic optimism and note that the criticisms are primarily relevant to only one type: the group form of unrealistic comparative optimism. We further clarify how the criticisms are not nearly as problematic as they might seem, even for unrealistic comparative optimism. Finally, we note boundary conditions on the different types of unrealistic optimism and reflect on five broad questions that deserve further attention.
The present research tested the hypothesis that perception of others' self-control is an indicator of their trustworthiness. The authors investigated whether, in interactions between strangers as well as in established relationships, people detect another person's self-control, and whether this perception of self-control, in turn, affects trust. Results of 4 experiments supported these hypotheses. The first 2 experiments revealed that participants detected another person's trait of self-control. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that participants also detected the temporary depletion of another person's self-control. Confirming the authors' predictions, perceived trait and state self-control, in turn, influenced people's judgment of the other person's trustworthiness. In line with previous research, these findings support the positive value of self-control for relationships and highlight the role of perceived self-control for the development of a fundamental relationship factor: trust.
We ordinarily think that we human beings have agency: we have control over our choices and make a difference to our environments. Yet it is not obvious how agency can fit into a physical world that is governed by exceptionless laws of nature. In particular, it is unclear how agency is possible if those laws are deterministic and the universe functions like a mechanical clockwork. In this short paper, I first explain the apparent conflict between agency and physical determinism (referring to recent work by Helen Steward), then review some salient responses one might give to this conflict, and finally sketch a response that rests on a distinction between “physical” and “agential possibilities.” Agency, I suggest, is a higher-level phenomenon, which comes with its own level-specific notion of possibility, and it cannot be adequately analyzed in physical terms alone or just through the lens of physical possibility.
The independent variables for all studies published in odd-numbered volumes of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology were recorded. The variables were then sorted on the basis of resemblance into an emerging scheme of categories. This procedure resulted in a list of 51 categories; this list arguably contains all dimensions of situational structure that have been shown to exert a significant effect on behavior. The 51 categories were then organized into a scheme of situational structure. The following 5 aspects of situational structure were suggested: the stimulus environment, which is comprised of the physical environment and the situation's temporal and spatial structure, as well as any social structure that is external to the subject; characteristics of the subject, which involve all relevant attributes of the subject as well as relevant prior experience; cognitive and affective dynamics, which involve the subject's attentional, interpretive, and emotional states and processes, as well as the subject's expectancies and goals; relationship background, which involves prior or incipient interactions between the subject and other people in the situation; and matrix of possibilities, which involves the range of behavioral alternatives available to the subject as well as the potential consequences and implications of various alternatives. The scheme is discussed in terms of issues of environmental psychology, especially environmental controllability.
Baumeister, Sparks, Stillman, and Vohs (2007) sketch a theory of free will as the human ability to exert self-control. Self-control can produce goal-directed behavior, which free will conceptualized as random behavior cannot. We question whether consumer psychology can shed light on the ontological question of whether free will exists. We suggest that it is more fruitful for consumer psychology to examine consumers' belief in free will. Specifically, we propose that this belief arises from consumers' phenomenological experience of exercising self-control in the face of moral or intertemporal conflicts of will. Based on extant literature in philosophy, psychology, and economics, we offer both a narrower conceptualization of the nature of self-control problems and a more general conceptualization of self-control strategies, involving not only willpower but also precommitment. We conclude with a discussion of the consequences of consumers' belief in free will.
Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science.
The general notion of relative freedom is introduced. It is a kind of freedom that is observed everywhere in nature. In biology, incomplete knowledge is defined for all organisms. They cope with the problem by Popper's trial-and-error processes. One source of their success is the relative freedom of choice from the basic option ranges: mutations, motions and neuron connections. After the conjecture is adopted that communicability can be used as a criterion of consciousness, free will is defined as a conscious version of relative freedom. The resulting notion is logically self-consistent and it describes an observable phenomenon that agrees with our experience.
I show that physical devices that perform observation, prediction, or recollection share an underlying mathematical structure. I call devices with that structure "inference devices". I present a set of existence and impossibility results concerning inference devices. These results hold independent of the precise physical laws governing our universe. In a limited sense, the impossibility results establish that Laplace was wrong to claim that even in a classical, non-chaotic universe the future can be unerringly predicted, given sufficient knowledge of the present. Alternatively, these impossibility results can be viewed as a non-quantum mechanical "uncertainty principle". Next I explore the close connections between the mathematics of inference devices and of Turing Machines. In particular, the impossibility results for inference devices are similar to the Halting theorem for TM's. Furthermore, one can define an analog of Universal TM's (UTM's) for inference devices. I call those analogs "strong inference devices". I use strong inference devices to define the "inference complexity" of an inference task, which is the analog of the Kolmogorov complexity of computing a string. However no universe can contain more than one strong inference device. So whereas the Kolmogorov complexity of a string is arbitrary up to specification of the UTM, there is no such arbitrariness in the inference complexity of an inference task. I end by discussing the philosophical implications of these results, e.g., for whether the universe "is" a computer.
What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? Determinism
- J A Coyne
Why we shouldn’t bet on having free will-A reply to William Edwards
- J A Coyne