Running head: VALUE OF DETERMINISM 1

The Value of Believing in Determinism: A Critique of Vohs and Schooler (2008)

Ishtiaq Mawla
Connecticut College
VALUE OF DETERMINISM 2

The Value of Believing in Determinism: A Critique of Vohs and Schooler (2008)
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.
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis
In a rather famous study conducted by Vohs and Schooler (2008), participants
read the above excerpt before engaging in a task where they were given the opportunity
to unfairly cheat with money. Participants who read this passage, which emphasized the
truth of determinism, cheated more often than participants who read different excerpts
emphasizing free will or neutrality. The implications of this study lie at the crux of the
tension between free will and moral responsibility. It supports the view that people
should not believe in determinism, otherwise people will become demotivated and lead
lazy lives; it will disrupt societys moral framework and crime rates will go up.
However, there is plenty of scientific evidence which indicates that causal free
will is just an illusion created by the mind (Wegner, 2002). Human behavior cannot fall
outside the causal chain of events produced by the universe, otherwise basic laws of
physics would be defied. It couldnt be clearer that we live in a deterministic world
without real causal action. The question of free will, however, remains to be a delicate
issue with no definite answer.
In this paper, I have attempted to make a case that the results of Vohs and
Schooler (2008) do not have any long-term effects on moral character, and therefore,
these results cannot be concretely used against a belief in determinism. People cannot
simply become immoral as a result of priming by determinism because a belief in
determinism can never be fully internalized. I have incorporated evidence from
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established psychological theories and findings to support my arguments. Moreover, I
have argued that in some respects, a belief in determinism is necessary for society to
function. And finally, without endorsing a traditionally compatibilist viewpoint, I have
argued that people are allowed to enjoy their sense of freedom while maintaining a
strong belief in determinism.
Layperson views of free will
Scientists and philosophers can talk, experiment, and write about free will all day
long, but such scholarly discussion constitutes only a minority of the human population.
In order to discuss how people are generally affected in their day to day lives by
thoughts about free will, it is useful to gauge into what the general thinking about free
will is like. Nichols and Knobe (2007) gave participants brief descriptions of two
universes; Universe A was deterministic where the beginnings of the universe caused a
domino effect of events which led up to the present, and in this universe, John buys
french fries for lunch. On the other hand, Universe B was similar to Universe A, except
for human decision-making processes, which remains outside of the causal chain; Mary,
in this universe, did not necessarily have to choose french fries for lunch. In the
questionnaires that followed, over 90% of participants stated that Universe B was more
like the current world humans live in.
Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005) explored the same issue to
argue against natural incompatibilism - an armchair philosophy idea which proposes
that humans are naturally able to recognize the discrepancy between determinism and
free will and make moral judgments accordingly. One of their studies involved
participants reading a description of a world where a supercomputer is able to predict
future outcomes with perfect accuracy. The supercomputer predicts that Jeremy Hall
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will rob a bank on a particular day, and when that time approaches, he ends up robbing
the bank. The participants were asked if this action was caused out of freely choosing to
do so, and about 76% said yes. Furthermore, Sarkissian, Chatterjee, Brigard, Knobe,
Nichols, and Sirker (2010) asked people across several cultures about their views on free
will, and found that people in the United States, India, Hong Kong, and Colombia, all
believe the freedom of human action.
The studies described in this section show that, 1. it is not typical for ordinary
people to conceive of a deterministic world, 2. ordinary people justify moral
responsibility in a deterministic world, and 3. this phenomenon is cross-cultural. It is
also evident that peoples responses do not follow logic or laws of Physics. The default
mode of peoples thoughts about freedom and morality is indeterministic, therefore it is
questionable as to what extent Vohs and Schooler (2008) changed the beliefs of their
participants by simple priming. An extremely high proportion of people naturally
believe in free will and the strength with which the excerpt by Crick makes people
immoral can be doubted. Can the findings of Vohs and Schooler (2008) be a real case
against belief in determinism? Why do people believe in free will by default? The
following sections will attempt to unpack this issue further.
The Inevitability of Illusions
The picture on the next page is one of the many widely-known examples of
optical/visual illusions. The table on the left obviously seems longer in length than the
one on the left. But perception is mistaken and doesnt match reality in that if someone
brings a measuring tape and measures the individual lengths, the two tables turn out to
have exactly the same length. But once the measuring tape is removed from the scene,
the newly gained knowledge that the tables are of the same length does not apply
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anymore. One cannot help but see the table on the left to be longer than the table on the
right, regardless of the truth that they are of equal length. It is as if visual illusions are
unaffected by the belief that it is just an illusion.

The experience of conscious will follows the same principle as visual illusions. As
I mentioned in the previous section, freedom is the default mode of thinking, because
voluntarily willing an action is so spellbindingly real. We regularly claim agency and
claim to cause our own actions, with full freedom. Just like visual illusions, under
normal circumstances, the experience of free will cannot be simply ignored or lost. Even
if free will is just an illusion, the illusion is real most of the time. So even if people learn
the truth of determinism, that there are no real choices or no direct causality, people will
still continue to experience free will, because it is a strong and compelling illusion. Just
as I can place a measuring tape on the tables above to show that they are of equal length,
I can show scientific evidence from genetics or neuroscience which strongly speaks
about the fact that there can be no alternative to deterministic explanations of our
behavior and this will not, under normal circumstances, influence my conscious self to
lose the sense of freedom I enjoy. Vohs and Schooler (2008) may have demonstrated
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that participants behaved less morally when being reminded about determinism, but
these people did not lose their day-to-day sense of freedom or morality. The participants
may have gone to bed that evening and woken up again feeling free and acting morally.
Therefore, if determinism doesnt affect whether the self feels free or not in the long run,
there should not be a case against learning the truth about determinism.
Freedom as a positive emotion
Rodin and Langer (1976) conducted a study at a nursing home for the elderly in
Connecticut where two groups of people were given different messages at a group
meeting. One condition was the responsibility-induced group, where the emphasis of
the speech was on the residents responsibility for their own actions and freedom of
choice, including being able to choose their own plant and being given the choice of
what movie they are able to watch. People in the control condition were instead told that
it was the staffs responsibility to help the residents. Results showed that the
experimental group was more active and felt happier and were more involved in the
activities at the nursing home compared to the control group, indicating that feeling free
is valuable, especially in the context of a nursing home. Such positive effects of feeling
free has been shown in several contexts and situations.
Wegner (2002) proposed that the experience of free will serves as a positive
emotion, one that acts as a guidance, a compass, and provides authorship to human
actions. According to him, it serves as a marker for actions; for instance, if I lift a box
and put it in a different location, the act of will throughout the process of transfer acted
as a marker that I engaged in the effortful task of lifting and relocating a box. In most
normal instances, the experience of will aligns with actual outcomes of causality, giving
an indication to the agent that an event has occurred. It helps action to be served into
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memory by organizing and tracking when and what I am doing and by planning future
events. It aids our consciousness by helping us navigate through events in our lives.
Having a feeling of perceived control also enhances feelings of competence,
confidence, and achievement (Wegner, 2002). Winning a lottery or graduating with a
4.0 GPA would not seem fruitful if the sense of control was not present, and such
activities would not be important to us. Perceived control is a basic need, and as Wegner
(2002) said it, The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is - but that is as it
should be. All is well because the illusion makes us human.
If the feeling of freedom is an innate human quality, one that is a positive
emotion and cannot be simply ignored because of its powerful illusory characteristic, a
belief in determinism will not be very threatening to this experience of free will. This
may sound contradictory, since determinism, by nature, claims that actual agency and
causality does not exist. But the experience of free will is a default mode of positive
emotion, so any deterministic belief will not be very influential. People will not feel
deterministic as a result, they will continue to exercise their freedom, because it is a
desirable emotion. The positive feeling of freedom cannot be easily broken down with
deterministic beliefs. Therefore, there is absolutely no problem in holding deterministic
beliefs while feeling free, every day, at every moment. One can easily criticize this
argument by asking for evidence where deterministic beliefs do not undermine feelings
of freedom. Although there is no direct research on this topic, the following sections will
aim to enhance this argument, using theories of loss aversion and the psychological
immune system.
Loss Aversion and the Endowment effect
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Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman revolutionized Economics with Prospect
Theory. According to this theory, people use heuristics, also known as basic mental
shortcuts, in their decision-making process by setting neutral reference points. Anything
above this reference point is a gain and anything below this is a loss. But the aspect of
this theory that we care most about in the current discussion is loss aversion, which
suggests that people are asymmetrically affected by losses and gain. A unit of loss may
be numerically equivalent to a unit of gain, but psychologically, a unit of loss hurts
significantly more than a unit of gain feels good. People therefore avoid choices where
losses are involved. For instance, when people are given the following gamble
(Kahneman, 2011): 50% chance to lose $100 and 50% chance to win $200, they will
reject it. Although a calculation of how much people can expect to win/lose based on
probability shows that people may actually end up gaining $100, people will reject it
because the prospect of gaining $100 is not the same as losing $100.
Loss aversion has been demonstrated through the endowment effect - ownership
of an object makes people demand a higher value for the object in order to give it up. In
a classic study (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler, 1990), participants on a university
campus were given coffee mugs, which were usually sold at the campus bookstore for a
price of $6 each. Half of the participants were assigned as buyers and the other half were
sellers in a trading situation (A trading situation is a standard method in experimental
economics where a market is created with tokens and after multiple rounds of trading,
participants can redeem their tokens for cash at the end of the experiment). Sellers kept
their mugs in front of them and buyers were asked to look at them and both parties
indicated trading prices. The results were dramatic and showed that sellers asked for
prices double the amount that buyers placed.
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Such results from loss aversion show that people are very inclined to remain at
the status quo (Kahneman, 2011) of general default options, and are resistant to change,
as they think that the disadvantages are greater than the possible advantages.
Experiencing the freedom of will and agency is the default positive mode of human
thought. People will therefore be generally resistant to change their experience of free
will. It has been established earlier that not feeling free is a negative emotion and
according to prospect theory, people will be generally averse to this kind of negative
emotion. So the concern about reduced moral responsibility of the self that Vohs and
Schooler (2008) has brought up is not a very serious one. It is very unlikely that
participants committed crimes, petty or heinous, after having left Vohs and Schoolers
study. The passage from The Astonishing Hypothesis was averse to participants and
they probably did not consciously think or act on the outcome of the study. If
determinism doesnt significantly affect peoples moral character, there cannott be a
strong reason against believing in determinism.
Psychological Immune System
It is obvious that people are averse to negative outcomes and events, but the
human mind has a strong defense mechanism, which attenuates the processing of
negative information. Of course, the illusion of control is one of the many mechanisms
through which the mind is protected and guided to gain the feeling of agency. The
presence of such a system is crucial for mental well-being, making recuperation from an
aversive state of mind quick and easy. The evolutionary benefit of such a system is
immense, helping to cope with bad or negative emotions quickly.
In a very well known study conducted by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman
(1978), accident victims, specifically those suffering from paraplegia and quadraplegia,
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major lottery winners (ranging from $50,000 to $1 million), and control participants
were interviewed regarding their general happiness and everyday pleasures. These
interviews did not happen immediately after Although accident victims reported
significantly lower happiness ratings compared to control and lottery-winners, when
asked to what extent they enjoy everyday activities, such as eating breakfast, talking
with a friend, and buying clothes, lottery-winners and accident victims did not
significantly differ from each other. Additionally, on the general happiness question,
which was on a scale of 0 (not at all happy) to 5 (very much happy), accident victims
reported their happiness at 2.96, which was significantly higher than the midpoint of the
scale, 2.5, supporting the case that the psychological immune system helped them get
better.
If the human mind is so good at protecting itself from negative affect, the
conclusions made by Vohs and Schooler (2008) against believing in determinism fall
apart. The mind should be able to quickly recover from any negative feelings as a result
of priming. A person therefore cannot truly internalize the negative effects of
determinism and long-term immoral acts cannot result from something that is innately
aversive. People who have immoral tendencies as a result of some deterministic belief
will always be nudged towards feeling moral through the perception of freedom and
agency.
There are several other issues with Vohs and Schooler (2008) which I will just
point out, but not go into any greater depth. For instance, the margin by which people in
the determinism condition cheated was just around $1 to $2 compared to the free will
and neutral conditions, which turns out to be a low effect size. No baseline measures
were taken on the free will measure, so it is unclear whether priming people with
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determinism actually changed their beliefs or if it just made a previously available belief
more salient. Cricks statement from The Astonishing Hypothesis may have actually
threatened participants core beliefs about freedom, resulting in them going into an
evolutionary survival mode, turning on peoples basic System 1 processes, and making
them only worry about maximizing money and not caring about other antisocial
consequences.
So far, I have shown that Vohs and Schoolers (2008) evidence that people
become immoral as a result of determinism has limited practical consequences. In other
words, people will not significantly change in moral character. One may pose the
question at this point whether a belief in the truth of determinism can coexist with
experiencing conscious will. In other words, without an endorsement of traditionally
compatibilist views of moral responsibility, is it possible for one to believe in
determinism and feel free.
Parallels between free will and death
However hard one tries, the feeling of freedom cannot be simply avoided or
removed under normal circumstances. However, free will seriously conflicts with
scientific thinking. Laws of nature, basic laws of Physics, Genetics, Neuroscience, and
many other sciences dictate that actual causality and freedom of will does not exist. A
person cannot cause behavior solely by her/himself - it is a result of the environment,
mental states, and brain chemistry.
There are two truths that people have to deal with here. One is the truth of the
feeling of will, a positive feeling, which exists regardless of the fact that humans are not
actually causing anything. The other is the truth of determinism, that humans dont
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have actual causal agency, and this a negative feeling, which people are averse to and
dont want to generally think about.
We think about death in the very same way. Death is an inevitable truth which we
all acknowledge but thinking about this fact is upsetting and undesirable. Everyone
agrees on the truth of death, the end of all ends, but generally, people do not want to
ponder about this issue. At the same time, the life that we are constantly experiencing
gives us a positive feeling that cannot be ignored. Unlike free will, life is not an illusion,
but it eludes us from the inescapable truth of death. Most of us want to live longer than
it is possible and we overestimate when actual death will occur to keep us away from
thinking about death, but, no one can ever deny that death is a fact and will happen to
all of us.
Peoples beliefs about determinism and free will should operate in the same way.
One can believe in the truth that human actions are not external to the forces of the
universe and that everything falls in the causal chain, even though it is an undesirable
thought, much like death. At the same time, it is possible to relish the feelings of
freedom, just as one is allowed to enjoy life. It is therefore possible for people to hold a
belief of determinism and not be affected by it simultaneously.
It seems unnecessary to believe in determinism. Is there any benefit at all to
believing in determinism? The next section will address this issue by demonstrating
some newly developed empirical evidence supporting a belief in determinism.
The Benefits of Believing in Determinism
Out of popular public demand, researchers in psychology have been mostly
involved in showing detriments of believing in determinism and few have focused on the
possible benefits of such a belief (Brewer, 2011). One recent study, conducted by Sharriff
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et al. (under review) showed that people ease up on their attributions of moral
responsibility when primed by determinism. Participants read the same excerpt from
The Astonishing Hypothesis as the one at the beginning of this paper, followed by
reading a fictional scenario of a person who committed a crime by beating up a man to
death. Participants were then asked to provide the offender a punishment sentence and
results showed that on average, participants in the neutral condition (those who were
not primed by determinism) gave a sentence of approximately 10 years, while those
primed by determinism gave a sentence of approximately 5 years. They replicated this
finding in further studies, one in which participants were primed by lesser opinionated,
pop Neuroscience articles from everyday magazines, and another study, in which
students in a Neuroscience class gave punishments to the same crime at the beginning
and at the end of the semester. Both of these studies demonstrated that with a more
mechanistic understanding of human behavior, people become more compassionate in
judging moral behavior.
In similar unpublished work, Brewer (2011) examined peoples willingness to
forgive others based on manipulations of free will and determinism. Just as some of the
other works we have encountered, participants read an excerpt from The Astonishing
Hypothesis, which was either deterministic or indeterministic, followed by filling a
modified version of the forgiveness likelihood scale with 10 vignettes. These situations
were different from Sharriff et al. (under review) in that, participants were asked to
imagine being wronged by another person. In addition, instead of having length of years
of punishment as an indirect dependent measure, Brewer (2011) asked direct questions
of How responsible is this person for? and What is the likelihood that you would
choose to forgive your friend? The situations given were more representative of
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everyday moral transgressions: family member humiliating you in front of others, your
significant other having a one night stand, stranger breaking into your house, your
friend spreading incorrect nasty rumors about you, etc. As hypothesized, participants
primed by determinism were more forgiving that participants primed by free will.
These results show that determinism makes us more understanding and
compassionate. Psychology has extensively shown the mental benefits of compassion.
Being compassionate to others does not just reward people on a personal level, but also
makes us prosocial. These results are also important in regards to the legal system and
punishment of individuals. The current justice system, in special cases, such as the
insanity defense, takes into account deterministic underpinnings of crime. Of course, it
does not make sense to harshly punish a battered woman who murdered her husband
because she did it out of self-defense; or even to sentence a teenager to life in prison who
does not have a fully developed brain system for reasoning. A notion that these
individuals freely and consciously committed their actions breaks down under this
circumstance, giving us a refined sense of moral responsibility which is able to include
determinism. Ordinary people tend to agree with such a system of justice, which takes
into account any determinist explanations, to be fair and reasonable. In a study
conducted by Pizarro, Uhlmann, and Salovey (2003), participants in one condition read
the following vignette:
Because of his overwhelming and uncontrollable anger, Jack impulsively smashed the
window of the car parked in front of him because it was parked too close to his.

Participants in the another condition read the following vignette:

Jack calmly and deliberately smashed the window of the car parked in front him,
because it was parked too close to his.

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Participants were then asked to rate the morality of the action and the level of praise or
blame the person should receive. Specifically, participants judged the agents by rating
how moral or immoral the behavior was, how much praise or blame the agent should
receive for his action, and how positively or negatively the agent should be judged.
Results showed that participants blamed Jack lesser when he impulsively did the act
compared to when he consciously thought about doing the act. This is consistent with a
deterministic account, which shows that people are able to take deterministic causes
into their evaluations of criminal behavior.
We generally prefer to be free in making our decisions and this is a part of our
current political, economic, and individualist societal framework. However, research in
choice and consumer behavior indicates circumstances where such openness of freedom
of choice does not lead to happiness. Sometimes, people are happier when their choice is
taken away, indicating that deterministically affecting someones decision-making can
sometimes be beneficial to the self. Gilbert and Ebert (2002) conducted a study
examining choice, advertised as one aimed to teach people about darkroom
photography. Participants were extensively taught darkroom procedures and were asked
to take 12 photographs around Harvard campus and come back a couple of days later for
a darkroom session, where they could print two negatives of their choice. Participants
first reported a baseline preference measure to examine the extent to which they
preferred one photograph over the other. Next, they were randomly assigned to either
the changeable condition, where they had the ability to change their mind on which
print they chose to take home and which one they wanted to relinquish, after they left
the experiment; or the unchangeable condition, where participants did not have any
choice to be able to change their mind later. Results showed that participants who are
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given the choice to be able to change their outcome were less happy with their choice
compared to those who had their outcome fixed. Adding extra choice diminishes the
actual utility and enjoyment received from the product whereas a fixed outcome makes
people enjoy their outcome further.
Similar research done by Schwartz, Ward, Monterosso, Lyubomirsky, White, and
Lehman (2002) showed that people are better off when they satisfice with regards to
their own choice, i.e. they are happy with whatever they have, versus when they
maximize, i.e. when they try to make their decision based on a lot of choices to achieve
the best possible outcome. Although it makes sense to have expanded opportunities of
choice to evaluate the best possible outcome, it usually leads to negative undesirable
effects on well-being. It is clear that in many domains of life, having a deterministic
belief (in moral responsibility) or having constrained freedom (in decision-making and
choice) can be advantageous, to both the self and the society.
Conclusions
My arguments in this paper have aimed to criticize the hasty generalizations
made by Vohs and Schooler (2008) by showing that the feeling of will is a robust
positive illusion and that it is hard for negative emotions about determinism to cause
immoral behavior, because thoughts about determinism are intrinsically aversive. That
being said, people can still maintain their beliefs in determinism while continuing to
experience free will, just in the way people think about death. And finally, I showed that
people should believe in some form of determinism because of its potential benefits in
how we think about ourselves and others.
This paper is not claiming to solve the problem of free will. Neither is it claiming
that believing in free will is completely bad. It should be obvious by now that the free
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will argument has asymmetric consequences for humans such that in certain domains
the effects in believing in determinism is different from believing in free will in other
domains.
I want to conclude by throwing out some thoughts about improving peoples
understanding of determinism. As we have seen earlier in this paper, ordinary people
have a demotivating and fatalist view of determinism, whereby they think that if actions
and behavior is predetermined, they dont have to do anything, everything will happen
by itself. It is futile to make any effort in treating a disease or studying for an exam,
because the events are bound to unfold by itself. But this is an incorrect view of
determinism. People often forget the aspect of determinism which says that every effect
has a cause, so if I dont study for an exam or write this paper, it will not write itself.
Determinism does not exclude contingency.
Another concern is that people generally see determinism as an excuse to relieve
them completely from moral responsibility by claiming things like, My genes/brain
made me do it. In the words of Pinker (2008), it is the confusion of explanation with
exculpation. Just because we are able to understand the deterministic origins of
behavior should not mean that we are excused to commit immoral actions (Pinker,
2008). A scientific understanding of determinism should not destroy responsibility of
actions. We deter immoral behavior so that it acts as an example to society, in order to
prevent future crimes. Determinism aids this process - for instance, people who clearly
commit crimes out of mental illness are not punished as harshly. Deterrence is not a
complete solution to the problem of punishment (Pinker, 2008), but a scientific
understanding of determinism is helpful for a sound system of moral responsibility.

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