ISSUES AND DEBATES - Determinism and free will
- Created by: EmilyEther
- Created on: 11-03-19 14:32
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- Determinism and free will
- Free will
- the idea that if circumstances were exactly the same, we could have behaved in a diff way
- without free will:
- no real choice (despite our experience of choice)
- prediction, manipulation, control
- no responsibility
- LIBET: 'decisions' appear to have been taken by the brain up to 7 seconds before PP records being aware of the decision
- casts doubt on free will. Libet - still have 'free won't' - can reject an action
- eval: not been replicated for more complex decisions / thought processes
- libertarian FW - belief that humans freely choose their actions
- Evaluation (A03)
- can't prove a negative (eg you can think something doesn't exist but you can't prove it - God)
- FW difficult to investigate - can't recreate conditions to test if we would've acted diff
- causation
- agent causation: an agent can start up a chain of causality that wasn't caused by anything else
- event causation: an event can occur without having being caused by another physical event
- many libertarians concede that the physical world itself is deterministic (eg. ball flying through air bc it was hit with a bat)
- Determinism
- HARD DETER: the belief that all behaviour has a cause (butterfly effect)
- idea that we can trace back causation and see that options are limited at each stage
- some psychologists favour deterministic view bc it suggests that everything has a reason
- some people concerned about deterministic views - sense of self gone
- SOFT DETER (or compatibilism) : we have free will but within certain constraints
- types of determinism: biological (inc. genetic), environmental, psychic
- biological: genetics, brain physiology, biochemistry. Role of evolution and genetics of influencing behaviour
- environmental: behav determined by environmental influences
- psychic: role of the unconscious on the conscious & how it affects behaviour
- scientism - use of methods from natural sciences to find causal mechanisms for behaviour and thought
- argues for deterministic viewpoint but denies personal and moral responsibility
- what causes an action? - belief, desire, temperament
- VOHS & SCHOOLER - PPs exposed to deterministic statements were more likely to cheat on subsequent test than those exposed to neutral statements
- Eval (A03)
- most scientists now believe that science is properly deterministic
- ROSKIES - neuroscientific imagery is probabilistic - we can't predict firing of exact neuron
- BERGH - sentence unscrambling. IV = words associated with age. DV - time taken to walk out of lab. People with 'old' words, made people walk slower
- PRIMING?
- HARD DETER: the belief that all behaviour has a cause (butterfly effect)
- Free will
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