The topic of free will has challenged thinkers and inspired debate across multiple disciplines for centuries. What can social psychology contribute? Social psychology is unlikely to provide a convincing answer to questions about whether people have free will. However, social psychology can provide considerable information about the inner processes and the control of behavior. To thinkers who believe in free will, social psychology provides vital evidence about how it happens and is used. To thinkers who disbelieve in free will, social psychology can provide evidence about what real phenomena are mistaken for it.
Free will is worth studying regardless of whether you believe in it. In fact, I think it is not even especially important to decide whether you believe in it. There are many different definitions and concepts of free will. I suspect that some of them are correct and others are not, so simply saying “I believe in free will” or the opposite is not terribly informative. Some definitions are indeed as simple as believing that people genuinely make choices, in the sense that they are capable of acting in different ways in a given situation. Free will in that sense seems difficult to reject (though some thinkers do reject it). Other definitions require lavish metaphysical assumptions, such as that people have souls that intervene into biological processes to alter the course of behavior. Those versions of free will are difficult to accept (though some thinkers do accept them). Personally I suspect that a middle path and moderate view is most likely to be correct, but I am not yet fully convinced about what the truth is. I am, however, fully convinced that there is plenty for social psychology to do. Let’s take a look.
What is Free Will in Practice?
Most social psychologists have some understanding of human beings as social animals with advanced intelligence, who make choices and guide their behavior in complicated ways. Humans respond to situational influences but also plenty of internal influences such as expectations, motivations, prejudices, and self-concepts. They manage their behavior so as to set and reach goals within the opportunities and constraints presented by their social world.
In that context, free will is most likely a set of inner capabilities for controlling action. It is the inner faculty that makes choices. Freedom means the ability to resist various particular influences, such as external pressure or strong inner impulses.
My own interest in free will emerged from my research on self-regulation. Many animals have some limited capacity for controlling themselves, but in humans this capacity is marvelously advanced and powerful (though not as powerful as we might like!). Self-regulation is essentially the capability to change oneself or one’s responses, such as one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. The term to regulate means more than random change, however: It entails change that is designed to reach some sort of goal or standard. Human culture is awash with standards of all sorts, and people are remarkably flexible and capable in altering themselves to fit these.
Thus, one important version of freedom is inherent in the idea of self-regulation or self-control. (I use the terms interchangeably.) If you override one response, you interrupt the flow of behavior and prevent something from happening. That allows you to do something else instead. Stifling the prepotent response to enable a different response is thus an important and highly adaptive form of freedom. Without that capability, human animals would always act on the first or strongest impulse. Self-regulation frees them from doing that, thereby producing the great flexibility and diversity of human behavior.
Experimental studies on self-regulation carried out by my colleagues have gradually revealed vital things about how it functions. The folk notion of willpower appears to have considerable validity. That is, self-control depends on a form of energy (the will’s power) whose amount fluctuates. In our lab studies, after people exert self-control in one context, they tend to perform worse on a subsequent act of self-control, even if it seems completely unrelated to the first. For example, after people try to control their emotional reactions, their physical stamina is reduced, as an early study showed (Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998). In that study, participants watched a video and were told either to amplify or stifle their emotional responses, or they were given no instructions and just let their emotions happen. Compared to the no instructions condition, participants who had tried to change their emotional response later showed deficits on a handgrip endurance test.
Likewise, after participants resist tempting foods, they give up relatively easily on a difficult, frustrating task (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998). In that study, hungry participants who resisted the temptation to eat chocolates and cookies and instead made themselves eat radishes later gave up faster on a difficult, frustrating task.
The implication of such laboratory findings is that people use up some of their willpower on the first task. That explains why they perform worse on the second task. For present purposes, the key point is that there is some energy resource that underlies self-control and thus one core form of free will.
Choice and Initiative
Most serious works on free will include self-control as an important category. But there are others. If there are several different behaviors that fit the general idea of free will and, crucially, that share some common psychological processes, then perhaps it is reasonable to start thinking that we are on the trail of understanding what free will is in practice.
Rational choice is one of the most important human traits. It signifies the ability to figure out what is the best thing to do and then to change behavior so as to do it. In philosophical writings about free will, rational choice is as prominent as self-control, if not more. Yet the philosophers had no way of knowing what social psychologists could establish with laboratory studies — that rational choice relies on the same “willpower” resource used in self-control.
Several sets of studies have shown the links. Let’s begin with being smart, which is one aspect of being rational. Logical reasoning and intelligent thought require willpower. After participants have engaged in an act of self-control and thereby depleted their willpower, their performance on intelligence tests was significantly reduced (Schmeichel, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2003). To be sure, some mental functions remained intact, but those requiring controlled processes such as reasoning were affected.
A next series of studies showed that people performed relatively poorly on tests of self-control if they had recently made choices (Vohs & Schooler, 2008). For example, after going through a list of pairs of consumer goods and choosing one from each pair that they would like to have, participants performed worse on the cold pressor task (trying to hold one’s hand in ice water for as long as possible), as compared to people who had thought about and rated all the same consumer goods but not made choices. The implication was that willpower was depleted by choosing, leaving less of it available for self-control. The will (free or otherwise) is thus involved in choosing as well as self-control.
A third series of studies showed effects in the other direction. That is, after people have exerted self-control, their decision processes change (Pocheptsova, Amir, Dhar, & Baumeister, 2009). When willpower has been depleted by acts of self-control, people seem less willing to invest the effort in choosing. They postpone choices. They favor simple solutions over complex compromises. They succumb to irrational biases. In these studies, the depleting tasks were often rather short and simple, such as watching a CNN-style news broadcast for five minutes with instructions not to read the printed headlines at the bottom of the screen. But doing one of those tasks was enough to make people dodge a choice afterward. For example, some were presented with a selection of items they might hypothetically choose to buy, and they could either choose the best one or simply say (as genuine consumers can) that they could not make a decision now and would prefer to keep looking in the future.
In my view, these studies highlight the sort of contribution social psychology can make to the free will debate. None of these studies proves or disproves the idea that people have free will. But people have something that is sometimes called free will, which is evident in their acts of self-control and rational choice, and social psychology can illuminate how those happen. Moreover, philosophers had lumped rational choice and self-control in the same category on a priori conceptual grounds or empirical impressions, but only social psychology studies were able to establish the empirical basis for the connection. Self-control and rational choice really do share some vital inner processes. Doing one of them uses up energy needed for the other.
Initiative may be yet another important form of free will. In many situations, people have a low-effort or default option of simply going along with the situation or, indeed, doing nothing and waiting for whatever happens to happen. Taking initiative to steer events in a different direction takes more energy than the passive or default option, and in that sense it may be considered an effortful “freeing” of oneself from the default or passive response. A recent series of lab studies by Vohs and Baumeister (2009) found that initiative relies on willpower, just like self-regulation and rational choice. After acts of self-control, initiative was reduced in favor of passive and default responding. In one study in that investigation, initiative was measured in the following way. Participants were seated at a computer and told to follow its instructions. The experimenter hit “start” and left the room, but the computer went to a blank blue screen and never provided any instructions or other stimulation. At some point the participant had to get up and tell the experimenter that the apparatus was not functioning. Participants who had previously exerted self-control were slower to take the initiative to report the problem.
Likewise, creativity, which represents a culturally valued form of initiative, was reduced among people whose willpower had been depleted by acts of self-control. Several studies have shown that people who have depleted their willpower by acts of self-control later perform worse on a creativity task. That is, what they created was rated by others as lower in creativity.
What People Believe
One of social psychology’s ongoing success stories is its exploration of people’s beliefs. Historians trace this back to the “New Look” movement in perception back in the 1940s, which took a key step of moving into areas that did not require a firm criterion of accuracy. This opened up tremendous opportunities for social perception. For example, it was possible to show that participants in one condition rated a target’s aggression as 8 on a 10-point scale, unlike those in another condition who rated the same behavior as a 6, without having to have an objective way of proving that one or the other was correct.
Several psychologists have recently used the same approach to study free will. It is not essential to know whether people really have free will or not. We can measure or manipulate different levels of belief in it and see what consequences ensue. Paulhus and Carey (2009) developed a trait scale to assess what people believe about free will. Vohs and Schooler (2008) pioneered several procedures for increasing or diminishing participants’ belief in free will. Again, these studies are agnostic with regard to whether free will is a reality or in what sense people have it, but they provide useful insights into the dynamics and consequences of beliefs about it.
One conclusion is that most people seem to believe in free will to some extent. On Paulhus and Carey’s (2009) scales, most people score above the midpoint in belief in free will. There are certainly variations, and these are meaningful, but the belief in free will seems to be a widespread social fact.
The Vohs and Schooler (2008) studies showed that belief in free will has behavioral consequences. Participants who were induced to disbelieve in free will showed an increase in antisocial behavior: They cheated on a test and thereby effectively stole money from the researchers. Subsequent work in our laboratory using their procedures has found other disturbing effects, including aggression, reductions in helpfulness, and mindless conformity (e.g., Baumeister, Masicampo, & DeWall, 2009).
Once again, the social psychology findings are of interest regardless of whether one believes in free will. For those who reject the reality of free will, these studies suggest why society supports the false belief in it: Belief in free will contributes to prosocial, responsible behavior. The belief in free will is thus a highly useful fiction. Meanwhile, for those who believe in free will, these findings fit the view that free will is an adaptation for culture — that is, an advanced form of behavior control that facilitates the sort of actions that are needed in order for human society and culture to function.
Free Will as Self-organization
If humans have free will, how did they get it? Here again, developing a scientifically plausible account depends on what notion of free will you hold. If one wants to regard free will as a form of supernatural power, it is hard to offer a scientific theory for how humans would have acquired it. But if we understand it as an advanced form of action control that encompasses effortful self-regulation, rational choice, and initiative, then the project becomes somewhat more viable.
One intriguing approach would rely on dynamical systems theory, as discussed by Michaels and Vallacher (2009) among others. One core idea is that patterns form out of random variation and that these can then exert causal influence. The process is one of self-organization: higher-order units emerge from random events. Once the higher-order units emerge, they tend to perpetuate or reproduce themselves. Instead of regression to the mean (as in, quick drift back into randomness and disorder), self-organization has a ratcheting effect of staying in place and possibly permitting further forward steps. (For those not familiar with ratchets, these are tools with rotating wheels that have a lock against rotating backward; thus, the point of the metaphor is that forward movement is retained and preserved.)
Self-organization has certainly been a major theme in the natural history of the world. One can view the Big Bang itself, or the events immediately following it, as self-organization on a colossal scale. Out of random chaos emerged a universe following the laws of physics. (A lucky break for us!) Among those laws is entropy, however: physical systems slip ever backward toward randomness.
Life brought a new direction, however, or at least a big step forward in self-organization. As the Nobel laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1944) wrote, life is itself based on “negative entropy.” That is, the very essence of the inner processes of living things is that they pull away from randomness and disorder, toward self-organization. Evolution, too, has been one long progress of progressive organization, with more complex organisms emerging from simpler ones.
Agency probably began with the transition from plants to animals, and it represents another step forward in self-organization. Plants do not have to make decisions and so they do not need brains. But animals do.
What many people call free will can be understood as a further step in this process of self-organization and negative entropy. Free will could be regarded as “Agency 2.0.” It developed from the action control systems that many animals have, but it has added some new capabilities, such as the ability to adjust behavior on the basis of logical reasoning and rational analysis, complex mental simulations of possible future events, physically invisible influences such as (human) laws and norms, and other symbolic relationships. Put more simply, the human action control system had the capabilities to function in culture.
Functioning in culture requires multiple advances that can fairly and reasonably be called increases in freedom. A cultural being must be able to override certain natural forms of response, which would otherwise have the person acting like an animal rather than a civilized being. After all, what is it that enables us to operate in civilized society? One must be able to control one’s impulses and urges according to the rules of society. One must be able to coordinate one’s actions with other people’s, often in a flexible manner based on the exchange of symbolic information. One must be able to maintain one’s self-interest and satisfy most of one’s needs and wants while contributing enough to the group to keep the system going. One must be able to overcome here-and-now impulses and their prepotent behavioral tendencies in order to decide one’s behavior flexibly on the pursuit of rewards in the distant future.
These behavioral adjustments to culture are much of the bread and butter of social psychology. Our field studies how people learn and follow norms, how they delay gratification, how they develop attitudes and values and why they only sometimes act consistently with them. It studies how people perform roles and maintain membership in groups while pursuing self-interest. It studies how they form into groups and collectively decide, undertake, and perform.
Conclusion
Social psychology has much to contribute to the scientific study of free will. The argument about whether people have free will or not is probably not something we should become heavily invested in. There are versions of the concept of free will that are quite compatible with prevailing scientific opinions about the physical universe and causal processes. Social psychologists would do best to focus on what they do best, namely illuminating the inner psychological processes that enable people to live, work, and thrive in the complex social environments that humans create and that are among the major biological strategies of our species. The belief in free will is conducive to prosocial behavior and cultural functioning. Self-control, rational choice, and initiative are important classes of behavior that social psychologists have shed much light upon, including their links to common underlying processes.
References
Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D.M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1252-1265.
Baumeister, R.F., Masicampo, E.J., & DeWall, C.N. (2009). Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 260-268.
Michaels, J. & Vallacher, R. R. (2009). The Ghost in the System: Where Free Will Lurks in Human Minds. In-Mind Magazine, 9.
Muraven, M., Tice, D.M., & Baumeister, R.F. (1998). Self-control as limited resource: Regulatory depletion patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 774-789.
Paulhus, D.L., & Carey, J. (2009). The FAD-Plus: Measuring lay beliefs regarding free will and its alternatives. Manuscript submitted for publication, University of British Columbia.
Pocheptsova, A., Amir, O., Dhar, R., & Baumeister, R.F. (2009). Deciding without resources: Resource depletion and choice in context. Journal of Marketing Research, 46, 344-355.
Schmeichel, B. J., Vohs, K. D., & Baumeister, R. F. (2003). Intellectual performance and ego depletion: Role of the self in logical reasoning and other information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 33-46.
Schrödinger, E. (1944). What is life? New York: Macmillan.
Vohs , K.D., & Baumeister, R.F. (2009). Initiative uses the self-control resource for active, instead of passive, behavior. Manuscript submitted for publication, University of Minnesota.
Vohs, K.D., & Schooler, J.W. (2008). The value of believing in free will: Encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.Psychological Science, 19, 49-54.
