Determined, page 23
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I’m sitting at my desk during afternoon office hours; two students from my class are asking questions about topics from lectures; we wander into biological determinism, free will, the whole shebang, which is what the course is ultimately about. One of the students is dubious about the extent to which we lack free will: “Sure, if there’s major damage to this part of the brain, if you have a mutation in this or that gene, free will is diminished, but it just seems so hard to accept that it applies to everyday, normal behavior.” I’ve been at this juncture in this discussion many times, and I’ve come to recognize that there is a significant likelihood that this student will now carry out a particular behavior—they will lean forward, pick up a pen on my desk, hold it up in the air and say to me, with great emphasis, “There, I just decided to pick up this pen—are you telling me that was completely out of my control?”
I don’t have the data to prove it, but I think I can predict above the chance level which of any given pair of students will be the one who picks up the pen. It’s more likely to be the student who skipped lunch and is hungry. It’s more likely to be the male, if it is a mixed-sex pair. It is especially more likely if it is a heterosexual male and the female is someone he wants to impress. It’s more likely to be the extrovert. It’s more likely to be the student who got way too little sleep last night and it’s now late afternoon. Or whose circulating androgen levels are higher than typical for them (independent of their sex). It’s more likely to be the student who, over the months of the class, has decided that I’m an irritating blowhard, just like their father.
Marching further back, it’s more likely to be the one of the pair who is from a wealthy family, rather than on a full scholarship, who is the umpteenth generation of their family to attend a prestigious university, rather than the first member of their immigrant family to finish high school. It’s more likely if they’re not a firstborn son. It’s more likely if their immigrant parents chose to come to the U.S. for economic gain as opposed to having fled their native land as refugees from persecution, more likely if their ancestry is from an individualist culture rather than a collectivist one.
It’s the first half of this book, providing an answer to their question, “There, I just decided to pick up this pen—are you telling me that was completely out of my control?” Yes, I am.
By now, easy. But I’m really cornered if instead, the student asks something different: “What if everyone started believing that there is no free will? How are we supposed to function? Why would we bother getting up in the morning if we’re just machines?” Hey, don’t ask me that; that’s too difficult to answer. The second half of this book is an attempt to provide some answers.
11
Will We Run Amok?
The notion of running amok has a certain appeal. Rampaging like a frenzied, headless chicken can let off steam. It’s often a way to meet new, interesting people, plus it can be pretty aerobic. Despite those clear pluses, I haven’t been seriously tempted to run amok very often. It seems kind of tiring and you get all sweaty. And I worry that I’ll just seem insufficiently committed to the venture and wind up looking silly.
Nevertheless, there has been no shortage of people who have been delighted to run amok—spittle-flecked, gibbering, and hell-bent on wreaking havoc. While it can break out at any time, certain circumstances predispose people to run amok, particularly ones that promise being spared punishment. Anonymity helps. During what was officially labeled as a “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, cops notoriously removed their ID badges before running amok, beating both peaceful protesters and bystanders and destroying film crews’ cameras. In a similar vein, across various traditional cultures, when warriors are anonymous (for example, because of wearing masks), the odds increase that they will mutilate the corpses of their enemies. Related to the shield of anonymity, there’s “but everyone else was running amok,” clearly a variant of amoking because you won’t get caught.[1]
The last century brought us a subtler path to feeling like you can run amok with impunity, even if you do so in the glare of the noonday sun. The excuse given was front and center during the Nuremberg trials, as well as among the World War II generation of Germans trying to explain themselves to their sickened descendants. The core of “I was just following orders” when genocidally running amok presupposes a lack of responsibility, culpability, or volition.
The direction this is going should be clear this far into the book, namely the opposite of all those French philosophers contemplating murdering strangers to proclaim their existentialist freedom to choose. If free will is a myth, and our actions are the mere amoral outcome of biological luck for which we are not responsible, why not just run amok?
The recognition that whatever dreadful thing you do is not your fault is at the core of the original running amok. Meng-âmuk, the Malaysian/Indonesian word that spawned the amok of English, refers to the occasional circumstance of some peaceful milquetoast suddenly exploding into inexplicable, indiscriminate, raging violence. The traditional interpretation is one that deftly sidesteps free will—through no fault of their own, the person is believed to be possessed by an evil spirit and is not held accountable for their actions.[2]
“Don’t blame me; I was possessed by Hantu Belian, the evil tiger spirit of the forest” is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from “Don’t blame me; we are just biological machines.”
So if people accept that there is no free will, will everyone just run amok? Some research appears to suggest exactly that.
Hard Determinists Careening through the Streets
To test this, the experimental approach is simple—prime people to decrease their belief in free will, see if they now become jerks. How to make test subjects doubt free will? One effective technique is to have them spend twenty years studying neuroscience, with some behavior genetics, evolutionary theory, and ethology thrown in for good measure. Impractical. Instead, the most common alternative in these studies is for subjects to read a cogent discussion about our lack of free will. Studies have often used a passage from Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (Scribner). Crick, of the Watson-and-Crick duo who identified the structure of DNA, grew fascinated with the brain and consciousness in his later years. A hard determinist as well as an elegant, clear writer, Crick summarizes the scientific argument for our being merely the sum of our biological components. “Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons,” he concludes.[3]
Have subjects read that passage by Crick. Control subjects read a doctored version arguing the opposite (e.g., “Who you are is much more than just a pack of neurons”) or an excerpt about something dull and unprovocative.[*] Subjects then fill out a questionnaire about free-will belief (e.g., “How much do you agree with the statement that people must take full responsibility for any bad choices that they make?”); this is to make sure the manipulation actually manipulated subjects effectively.[4]
What happens in the brain when you experimentally diminish people’s belief in free will? For one thing, there is a lessening of what is probably best described as the intentionality or effort that people put into their actions. This is shown with using electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain waves. Back to the Libet experiment. When a test subject decides to move her finger, there is a characteristic wave pattern, most probably emanating from the motor cortex, about a half second before. But the first sign of the impending behavior is detectable as a wave a few seconds earlier, termed the “early readiness potential.” This seems to arise in the presupplementary motor area, one step earlier in the circuit leading to movement and is interpreted as a signal of the intentionality that is going into the subsequent movement (and recall that as the centerpiece of chapter 2, Libet reported that the early readiness potential occurred before people became consciously aware that they intended to do something; the endless debates ensue). When people are made to feel helpless and with less agency by being stymied by an unsolvable puzzle, the size of their early readiness potentials decreases. And when people are prompted to believe less in free will, the same occurs, with less belief predicting a greater blunting of the wave (without changing the size of the subsequent wave in the motor cortex itself)—people seem to not be trying as hard, focusing as hard on the task.[5]
Another characteristic EEG wave, termed the “error-related negativity” (ERN) signal, occurs when we realize we have made a mistake. This is shown in a “go/no-go” task where a computer screen displays one of two stimuli (say, a red or a green dot), and you have to quickly push a button for one color and inhibit yourself from pushing for the other. The task goes crazy fast, and when people make a mistake, there’s an ERN signal from the prefrontal cortex—“Aii, I messed up”—and a slight delay in responding afterward, as people put more effort and attention into getting the right response—“Come on, I can do better than that.” First induce a sense of helplessness and inefficacy in subjects, and they then show less of an ERN wave and less post-error slowing (without a change in the actual error rate). Prompt people to believe less in free will and you see the same. Collectively, these EEG studies show that when people believe less in free will, they put less intentionality and effort into their actions, monitor their errors less closely, and are less invested in the outcomes of a task.[6]
Once you’re sure that you’ve induced some free-will skepticism in your subjects, whether assessed by questionnaire or EEG, time to let them loose on the unsuspecting world. Do they run amok? Seemingly.
A series of studies initiated by behavioral economist Katherine Vohs of the University of Minnesota show that free-will skeptics become more antisocial in their behaviors. In experiments, they are more likely to cheat on a test and to take more than their fair share of money from a common pot. They become less likely to help a stranger in need and more aggressive (after being rebuffed by someone, the subject gets to take revenge by determining how much hot sauce the person will have to consume—make someone a free-will skeptic and they nearly double the amount of retributive hot sauce). Less free-will belief and subjects feel less grateful to someone who has done them a favor—why feel gratitude for an act that was someone’s mere biological imperative? And just in case it seems like these skeptics are now having too much nihilistic fun by getting to take revenge with a dish served spicily, the manipulation also makes people feel less meaning in their lives and less of a sense of belonging to other humans. Moreover, lessened free-will belief leads to people feeling like they have less self-knowledge, and to feeling alienated from their “true selves” when making a moral decision. This is hardly surprising, whether because the main thing that free-will skepticism does is make you accept that the vast majority of your actions arise from subterranean biological forces that you’re completely unaware of, or because of the more global challenge of trying to imagine where the “me” is inside the machine.[*],[7]
But there’s more. Lessening people’s belief in free will lessens their sense of agency, as shown with the clever phenomenon of “intentional binding.” Subjects view a hand sweeping around a clock face (at a rate of one rotation every three seconds). Whenever they wish, they press a button, and then estimate where the hand was on the clock at the time. Alternatively, a tone is played at random, and subjects estimate where the hand was when that occurred. Then couple the two—the subject presses the button and the tone comes a fraction of a second later. And people see agency there, unconsciously perceive the tone as being caused by their button press, perceive the two events as bound by intentionality, and thus minutely underestimate the time delay between the two.[*] Lessen people’s belief in free will and you lessen this binding effect.[8]
Lessening people’s belief in free will probably even has bad implications for battling addiction. No, this is not an experiment where volunteers are turned into crackheads and we then see if it gets harder for them to kick the habit if they’ve been reading Francis Crick. Instead, one can infer this. People generally perceive addiction as involving a loss of free will; moreover, many addiction experts believe that addicts often adopt a deterministic view of addiction as a destructive attribution that allows them to make excuses for themselves. This is a fine line being negotiated. If the choice is between labeling addiction as a biological disease and labeling it as a weak soul pickling in bathtub gin, the former is a vast, humane advance in thinking. But as a step further, if the choice is between labeling addiction as a biological disease that is incompatible with free will and labeling it as one that is, most clinicians would view the latter label as one more likely to help the addict stop. Note, though, that the assumption is that viewing addiction as incompatible with free will is the same thing as its being incompatible with change. That is not remotely the case—wait for chapter 13.[9]
Thus, undermine someone’s belief in free will and they feel less of a sense of agency, meaning, or self-knowledge, less gratitude for other people’s kindness. And most important for our purposes, they become less ethical in their behavior, less helpful, and more aggressive. Burn this book before anyone else stumbles upon it and has their moral compass unmoored.
Naturally, things are more complicated. For starters, the effects on behavior in these studies are quite small; reading Crick doesn’t make subjects more likely both to cheat at some task and to steal the researcher’s laptop on the way out. The outcomes were more amok-ish than amok. Reflecting this is the important fact that you don’t typically destroy someone’s belief in free will with a dose of Crick. Instead, you just make them a bit less ardent in their belief (without changing the extent to which they value their free will).[*] This is hardly surprising—how likely is it that reading a passage from a book, being informed that “scientists now question . . . ,” or even being prompted to recall a time when you had less free will than you thought, will have much of an effect on your fundamental feelings about how much agency you have in life? A belief in free will is generally ingrained in us by the time we learn about the sins of gluttony from The Very Hungry Caterpillar.[10]
Most important, the bulk of studies have failed to replicate the basic finding that people become less ethical in their behavior when their free-will belief is weakened. Importantly, some of these studies had much larger sample sizes than the original ones that generated the “we’ll all run amok” conclusions. A 2022 meta-analysis of the entire literature (consisting of 145 experiments, with 95 unpublished) shows that Crickian manipulations do indeed mildly lessen free-will belief and increase belief in determinism . . . without any consistent effects on ethical behavior.[*],[11]
Thus, the literature shows that it is virtually impossible to use a brief experimental manipulation to make someone into a true free-will skeptic; furthermore, even if you merely lessen someone’s overall acceptance of free will, there isn’t actually the consistent effect of compromising their ethical behavior in laboratory settings.
These conclusions have to be a bit tentative because, all things considered, there hasn’t been a huge amount of research in this area. However, “Don’t blame me for stealing that child’s candy; there’s no free will” has a close cousin that has been studied in great depth indeed, and the findings are immensely interesting and teach us a ton.
An Ideal Model System
Thus, we consider the parallel of there’s-no-free-will amok-ness: Do people behave immorally when they conclude that they will not ultimately be held responsible for their actions because there is no Omnipotent Someone doling out the consequences? As per Dostoyevsky, if there is no God, then everything is permitted.
Even before considering atheists, it’s worth appreciating something about gods who judge and punish—they are far from universal or ancient. Fascinating work by psychologist Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia shows that such “moralizing gods” are relatively new cultural inventions. Hunter-gatherers, whose lifestyle has dominated 99 percent of human history, do not invent moralizing gods. Sure, their gods might demand a top-of-the-line sacrifice now and then, but they have no interest in whether humans are nice to each other. Everything about the evolution of cooperation and prosociality is facilitated by stable, transparent relationships built on familiarity and the potential for reciprocity; these are precisely the conditions that would make for moral constraint in small hunter-gatherer bands, obviating the need for some god eavesdropping. It was not until humans started living in larger communities that religions with moralizing gods started to pop up. As humans transitioned to villages, cities, and then protostates, for the first time, human sociality included frequent transient and anonymous encounters with strangers. Which generated the need to invent all-seeing eyes in the sky, the moralizing gods who dominate the world religions.[12]
Thus, if belief in a moralizing god(s) is what keeps us in line, it’s obvious where lack of belief should take you. This generates the inevitable exchange that every atheist has to endure at some point:
Theist: How can we trust you atheists to be moral if you don’t think that God holds you responsible for your actions?
Atheist: Well, what does that say about you religious people, if you only act morally because otherwise you’ll burn in hell?
Theist: At least we have morals.
Etc.
How are we supposed to function if no one believes in free will? Much can be gleaned by seeing how people function when they don’t believe in a moralizing god.
(Not: Amid the common picture, one’s attitudes about religion and about the existence of free will are not inevitably connected. We’re just looking at atheism in depth as a warm-up to returning to the challenges of rejecting the notion of free will.)
