Free Will and Self-Actualisation

3 Key excerpts on "Free Will and Self-Actualisation"

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  Issues, Debates and Approaches in Psychology

  • Ian Fairholm(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 Determinism and Free Will

  Do you have free will? Ask most people and they will probably say they do, or at least that they feel they do. In this chapter we will be addressing one of the trickiest and most long-lasting debates of all: whether humans are free to choose how they think and behave, or whether their thoughts and behaviours are determined by things beyond their control.

  This is a tricky debate, partly because it threatens something that nearly all of us experientially believe to be true – that our personal will determines the choices we make and the actions we perform. Many psychologists have questioned this notion and in this chapter we’ll address the basis for their arguments. But first we need to define some terminology.

    Definition of the problem – are we really free?

  We’ll start off by attempting to define free will, which is perhaps not as easy as it sounds. Free will is essentially the notion that humans respond freely, voluntarily and actively to events around them, that when they encounter or are presented with stimuli, choices or options they have the freedom to choose which to select, or in fact may choose not to select any of them at all. Ultimately it assumes that we’re free to select our own course of action, behave in unconstrained ways, make our own decisions and determine our own lives.

  One of the potential problems with this notion of pure free will is related to science. Science fundamentally looks for causes and as psychology attempts to promote itself as a science it needs to be able to identify causes for thoughts and behaviours. So what causes a person’s thoughts and behaviours? You might want to answer, ‘obviously the person causes them’, but that doesn’t help much because psychology acknowledges that people are complicated, so what aspect of the person actually does the choosing and what causes them to make a particular choice? Different psychologists tend to highlight different factors, as you might expect, and we’ll identify where the five main approaches covered in this book stand on this issue throughout the rest of the chapter.

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  Self and the Phenomenon of Life

  A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity

  • Ramon Lim(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • WSPC

    (Publisher)

  1 This morning I deliberately chose tea over coffee, and I believe this simple decision was not preconditioned by what my cave-dwelling forebears did twenty thousand years earlier, nor was it a remote consequence of quantum fluctuations in the beginning of time. To be sure, whereas the entire physical world appears to be locked in a deterministic chain, we humans seem to be able to disobey this ironclad predestination. Is this self-deception? In the objective sense, free will is the unpredictable element in a person’s behavior as it appears to an observer. For example, a person can choose to act contrary to common sense, like giving away good food while going on starving. Looking at lower animals, a turkey can veer to the left or right unpredictably as you chase it for the Thanksgiving meal.

  Humans enjoy many freedoms they take for granted until they are taken away. No one is happy to be told what to eat, what to wear, what to like and dislike, what to think, and how to act. Under the banner of freedom and liberty, countless people willingly face the firing squad or walk up to the gallows. What makes freedom so precious that some people value it above their own lives? Does freedom make biological sense?

  I shall start from the simple premise that all animals take actions, directly and indirectly, for the benefit of self — their survival and reproductive success. Free will makes these actions possible, and therefore is favored by evolution. In this context I define free will as the ability to initiate an action, in the absence of coercion, which entails a choice to act or not to act, and to elect which of the alternative courses of actions to take. In the subsequent sections I shall examine free will from multiple perspectives. One topic I try to omit is the connection between free will and moral (or social) obligation and legal responsibilities, as I hold such discussions futile and irrelevant. Instead, in the next chapter I shall expound the evolutionary advantage of morality in the context of society as an expanded self.

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  Social Cognitive Theory

  An Agentic Perspective on Human Nature

  • Albert Bandura, Daniel Cervone(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  For example, people have the freedom to vote, but whether they persuade themselves to vote and the level and form of their political engagement depends, in large part, on the self‐influence they bring to bear. Through the social influence of collective action, they change political and other social systems. In addition to regulating their actions, people also live in an intrapsychic environment largely of their own making. In this environment, the self‐management of their inner lives frees them from disturbing trains of thought (Bandura, 1997). Because personal influence is an interacting part of determining conditions, people are partial authors of the past conditions that developed them as well as the future course their lives take. The development of agentic capabilities adds concrete substance to abstract discourses about freedom and determinism. People who develop their competencies, self‐regulatory skills, and enabling self‐beliefs can create and pursue a wide array of options that expand their freedom of action (Bandura, 1986). They are also more successful in realizing desired futures than those with less‐developed agentic capabilities. The development of strategies for exercising control over perturbing and self‐debilitating thinking is also intrapsychically liberating. There is no absolute freedom. Paradoxically, to gain freedom, individuals have to negotiate collectively rules of behavior for certain activities that require them to relinquish some autonomy. Without traffic laws, for example, driving would be chaotic, perilous, unpredictable, and uncontrollable for everyone. Sensible traffic rules provide predictability and increased control over getting safely to one's destination and knowing how long it will take. The exercise of freedom involves not only options and the means to pursue them, but also rights. At the societal level, people institute, by civic action, sanctions against unauthorized forms of societal control

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