Scientists say
free will probably doesn't exist, but urge: "Don't stop believing!"
Suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that you
have agreed, as a secret agent in some confidential military
operation, to travel back in time to the year 1894. To your astonishment, it’s
a success! And now, after wiping away the magical time-travelling dust from
your eyes, you find yourself on the fringes of some Bavarian village, hidden in
a camouflaging thicket of wilderness against the edge of town, the distant,
disembodied voices of nineteenth-century Germans mingling atmospherically with
the unmistakable sounds of church bells.
Quickly, you survey your surroundings: you seem to be
directly behind a set of old row houses; white linens have been hung out to
dry; a little stream tinkles behind you; windows have been opened to let in the
warm springtime air. How quaint. No one else appears to be about, although
occasionally you glimpse a pedestrian passing between the narrow gaps
separating the houses. And then you notice him. There’s a quiet, solemn-looking
little boy
nearby, playing quietly with some toys in the dirt. He looks to be about six years
old, a mere kindergartner, in the modern era. It’s then that you’re reminded of
your mission: this is the town of
What would you do next?
This scenario is, rather unfortunately for us, in the
realm of science fiction. But your answer to this hypothetical question, and
others like it, is a matter for psychological scientists, because among other
things it betrays your underlying assumptions about whether Hitler, and the
decisions he made later in his life, were simply the product of his environment
acting on his genes or whether he could have acted differently by exerting his
“free
will.” Most scientists in this area aren’t terribly concerned over whether
or not free will does or doesn’t exist, but rather how people’s everyday
reasoning about free will, particularly in the moral domain, influences their
social behaviors and attitudes. (In fact, the
Templeton Foundation has just launched a massive funding initiative designed to
support scientific research on the subject of free will.)
One of the leading investigators in this area,
So with this understanding of what psychologists
study when they turn their attention to people’s beliefs in free will, let’s
return to the Hitler example above. In your role of this time-travelling secret
agent from the twenty-first century, you’ve been equipped with the following
pieces of information. First, the time-travelling technology is still in its
infancy, and researchers are doubtful that it will ever succeed again. Second,
you have only ten minutes before being zapped back into the year 2010 (and two
of those minutes have already elapsed since you arrived). Third, you’ve been
informed that seven minutes is just enough time to throttle a six-year-old with
your bare hands and to confirm, without a doubt, that the child is dead. This
means that you have only one minute left to decide whether or not to
assassinate the little boy.
But you have other options. Seven minutes is also
enough time, you’ve been told by your advisors, to walk into the Hitler
residence and hand-deliver to Alois and Klara, Adolph’s humorless father
and kindly, retiring mother, a specially prepared package of historical
documents related to the Holocaust, including clear photographs of their son as
a moustachioed Führer and a detailed look at the
Third Reich four decades later. Nobody knows precisely what effect this would
have, but most modern scholars believe that this horrifying preview of WWII
would meaningfully alter Adolph’s childhood. Perhaps Klara
would finally leave her domineering, abusive husband; Alois,
unhappy with the idea of his surname becoming synonymous with all that is evil,
might change his ways and become a kinder parent; or they might both sit down
together with the young Adolph and share with him disturbing death camp images
and testimonies from Holocaust survivors that are so shocking and terrifying
that even Adolph himself would come to disdain his much-hated adult persona.
But can Adolph really change the course of his life? Does he have free will? Do
any of us?
One of the most striking findings to emerge recently
in the science of free will is that when people believe, or are led to believe,
that free will is just an illusion, they tend to
become more antisocial. We’ll get back to little Adolph shortly (which do you
think is the antisocial decision here, to kill or not to kill the Hitler boy?).
But before making your decision, have a look at what the science says. The
first study to directly demonstrate the antisocial consequences of
deterministic beliefs was done by
Prior to taking the math test, half the group (15
participants) were asked to read the following passage from Francis Crick’s
book The Astonishing Hypothesis (Scribner): ‘’You,’ your joys and your sorrows,
your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free
will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast
assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing
but a pack of neurons … although we appear to have free will, in fact, our
choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.’
In contrast, the other 15 participants read a
different passage from the same book, but one in which Crick makes
no mention of free will. And, rather amazingly, when given the opportunity this
second group of people cheated significantly less on the math test than those
who read Crick’s free-will-as-illusion passage above. (The study was cleverly
rigged to measure cheating: participants were led to believe that there was a
“glitch” in the computer program, and that if the answer appeared on the screen
before they finished the problem, they should hit the space bar and finish the
test honestly. The number of space bar clicks throughout the task therefore
indicated how honest they were being.) These general effects were replicated in
a second experiment using a different, money allocation task, in which
participants randomly assigned to a determinism condition and who were asked to
read statements such as, “A belief in free will contradicts the known fact that
the universe is governed by lawful principles of science,” essentially stole
more money than those who’d been randomly assigned to read statements from a
free-will condition (e.g., “Avoiding temptation requires that I exert my free
will”) or a neutral condition with control statements (e.g., “Sugar cane and
sugar beets are grown in 112 countries”).
Vohs and Schooler’s
findings reveal a rather strange dilemma facing social scientists: if a
deterministic understanding of human behavior
encourages antisocial behavior, how can we scientists
justify communicating our deterministic research findings? In fact, there’s a
rather shocking line in this Psychological Science article, one that I nearly
overlooked on my first pass. Vohs and Schooler write that:
If exposure to
deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then
identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes
imperative.
Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but
the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming
that the public “can’t handle the truth,” and that we should somehow be
protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. Perhaps they’re right. Consider the following
example.
A middle-aged man hires a prostitute, knowingly
exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted infection and exploiting a young
drug addict for his own pleasure. Should the man be punished somehow for his transgression?
Should we hold him accountable? Most people, I’d wager, wouldn’t hesitate to
say “yes” to both questions.
But what if you thought about it in the following
slightly different, scientific terms? The man’s decision to have sex with this
woman was in accordance with his physiology at that time, which had arisen as a
consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a
particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular genotype,
which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants
of similar traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. Even his
ability to inhibit or “override” these forces, or to understand his own behavior, is the product itself of these forces! What’s
more, this man’s brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness;
rather, his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioral algorithms that responded, either normally or in
error, in ways that had favored genetic success in
the ancestral past.
Given the combination of these deterministic factors,
could the man have responded any other way to the stimuli that he was confronted
with? Attributing personal responsibility to this sap becomes merely a social
convention that reflects only a naive understanding of the causes of his behaviors. Like us judging him, this man’s self merely
plays the role of spectator in his body’s sexual affairs. There is only the
embodiment of a man who is helpless to act in any way that is contrary to his
particular nature, which is a derivative of a more general nature. The self is
only a deluded creature that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in
fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member.
If this deterministic understanding of the man’s behaviors leads you to feel even a smidgeon more sympathy
for him than you otherwise might have had, that reaction is precisely what Vohs and Schooler are warning us
about. How can we fault this “pack of neurons”, let alone punish him, for
acting as his nature dictates, even if our own nature would have steered us
otherwise? What’s more, shouldn’t we be more sympathetic of our own moral shortcomings?
After all, we can’t help who we are either. Right?
In fact, a study published
last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply by exposing
people to deterministic statements such as, “Like everything else in the
universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be
understood in terms of the movement of molecules” made them act more
aggressively and selfishly compared to those who read statements endorsing the
idea of free will, such as, “I demonstrate my free will every day when I make
decisions” or those who simply read neutral statements, such as, “Oceans
cover 71 percent of the earth’s surface.” Participants who’d been randomly
assigned to the deterministic condition, for example, were less likely than
those from the other two groups to give money to a homeless person, or to allow
a classmate to use their cellular phone. In discussing the societal
implications of these results, Baumeister and his coauthors echo Vohs and Schooler’s concerns about “insulating the public” against a
detailed understanding of the causes of human social behaviors:
‘Some philosophical analyses may conclude that a fatalistic determinism is
compatible with highly ethical behavior, but the
present results suggest that many laypersons do not yet appreciate that
possibility.’
These laboratory findings demonstrating the
antisocial consequences of viewing individual human beings as hapless pin balls
trapped in a mechanical system, even when, in point of fact, that’s pretty much
what we are, are enough to give me pause in my scientific proselytizing.
Returning to innocent little Adolph, we could, of course, play with this
particular example forever. It’s an unpalatable thought, but what if one of the
children slaughtered at Auschwitz would have grown up to be even more despised
than Hitler, as an adult ordering the deaths of ten million? Isn’t your ability
to make a decision a question fundamentally about your own free will? And so
on. But the point is not to play the “what if” Hitler game in some infinite
regress, but rather to provoke your intuitions about free will without asking
you directly whether you believe in it or not. As any good scientist knows,
what people say they believe doesn’t always capture their private
psychology.
In this case, it’s not so much your decision to kill
the child or to deliver the package to his parents that research psychologists
would be interested in. Rather, it’s how you would justify your decision (e.g.,
“I’d kill him because [fill in the blank here]” or “I’d deliver the package
because [fill in the blank]") that would illuminate your thinking about
Hitler’s free will. On the face of it, strangling an innocent six-year-old
seems rather antisocial, and so perhaps hearing a deterministic message before
answering this question would lead you to kill him (e.g,
“ Hitler is evil, he will grow up to murder people no matter what, he has no
free will to do otherwise”) . For some people, however, the decision not to
kill the innocent boy is the antisocial one, because it may well mean the
unthinkable for over six million fellow human beings.
I, for one, wouldn’t hesitate to gleefully strangle
that little prick in 1894
But you might opt for a less homicidal way to spend
your time with little Adolph. For example, if you spare the life of this pasty,
forlorn kid and decide to deliver the package to his parents because, you say,
had the Hitlers known what was to become of their
troubled son, they would have raised him otherwise, and this change in his
early environment would almost certainly have prevented mass genocide, this
entails that you subscribe more to the principle of causal determinism.
In any event, your minute is up! So what’s it going
to be, and why ? With millions of future lives at
stake, do you murder the innocent six-year-old boy as a pre-emptive homicide?
Do you deliver the package to his parents, in the hopes that the shocking
vision of the Holocaust will lead Adolph, one way or another, to choose a
different career path, or even to flub his own rise to fame from all the
pressure? Or, like those who lived in Nazi Germany and who were bombarded with
(false) deterministic messages about the Jews, do you simply not intervene at
all?
By Jesse Bering
Apr 6, 2010
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=scientists-say-free-will-probably-d-2010-04-06