Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Free Will in Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Part 2

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

This is the second episode in our Free will series. In this episode, we will describe some definitions of free will, explore determinism (the opposite of free will), cover some quotes by famous authors on the topic, and break down some statistics, and studies about it.  By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.75 Psychiatry CME Credits. Link to blog. Link to YouTube video.

Hello and welcome to the Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. I'm here to talk about getting rid of burnout, increasing job satisfaction, and feeling like an expert in what you do. One thing that created a lot of burnout and angst for me was trying to get continued medical education right at the last minute. So why not join the CME membership and do CMEE while listening to this podcast? Go to Psychiatrypodcast.com, sign up, sign in, take the test, and the certification is email to you in seconds. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm joined with Matthew Higley. we are going to do part two of the free will versus determinism. In the last episode, we talked about some of the historical context.

We talked about some of the sort of different people who are speaking about this. We talked about the studies that have been done on free will. We talked about the famous clock study in which they had this EEG and later brain electrodes from some seizure patients. hooked up to the motor cortex and the motor cortex started to light up before the person became consciously aware of the desire to make a choice, a basic choice, right, to raise their hand or something like that. And so the experiment has been touted by some determinists as like, look, this is proof. Everything occurs in the brain before we become consciously aware of it. And our arguments against that were, first of all, this is a very simplistic action of, you know, raising your hand or whatnot.

And a lot of free will decisions are likely much more complex, right? Moral decisions, decisions that are using a multiplicity of brain areas. And sort of there may be this other aspect of sort of integrating those brain areas in consciousness. which has choice. The second sort of critique of that came from this one article. Shuggler 2012, he said, the urge to act in this experiment occurs when normal random fluctuations and motor activity happen to cross a threshold,

but that the earlier buildup neither reflects an unconscious intention nor a commitment to act. and we found that even when the patient who had the brain electrodes in, the seizure patient was competing against someone who could see their actions. They wouldn't always win, right? 100% of the time, the person who could see what the brain was lighting up would not win the games 100% of the time. So this author, Shuggler, talks about how there may be this sort of buildup,

which is not unconscious and it's not a commitment. to act, it is ongoing in the brain and it precedes a decision to act. Any other sort of big things that you would like to add about this one experiment and sort of the experiments that came afterwards? Just to agree, I think that the idea is really key that these are very simple decisions. They do not have any weight or value to them. The decision maker is not benefiting or being harmed by the decision. They're not even choosing really between two alternatives. They're simply choosing at what point they will act. They're not choosing to act or not act in a larger sense. And so I think that's incredibly significant. And then also just that there are a number of other

models. There have been studies that question the methodology of the original model, but there have also been studies such as this one by Blakemore that even questioned the underlying concept of what these readiness potentials are used for. And Blakemore believes that the readiness potentials or signals seen before the action are actually just forward models that sort of represent the brain trying to figure out what would happen

if the individual did act. And so they are trying to predict what will happen in the future and don't necessarily represent a choice. And I think this is important because the proponents of a very strict determinism, like, you know, your brain is making all your choice and your brain is informed by your environment and genetics and epigenetics.

And there's nothing in you other than your brain, you know, neurotransmitters and stuff. People who are a proponent of that will say things like science has shown that determinism is true, you know? Or like science has shown, and this experiment illustrated this, right? And I don't hear them, like I've watched a lot of you, too, debates on free will to prepare for this. I don't hear them going into the science of, you know, what we're talking about right now, like the neuroscience. Like there are neuroscientists who have done these studies. There's other neuroscientists who critique the studies and have other opinions.

And so it's not so clear cut as like science says, this is how it works, right? And it's also science, so you can say science showed this one experiment where these electrodes were attached to this person's brain because they had seizures, chronic seizures, and they needed electrodes in their brain to stop the seizures, but we're going to use these electrodes to do these studies now. And science has shown that 90% of the time, their movements could be predicted, and because they could be predicted to this person

would win this game against them, right? So that's what science says. And then what you have is you have philosophers who then take that and then maybe, like, jump to further conclusions, right? And so I'm saying, like, that's not how, that's science, is the experiment and the results, and it's like kind of sobering and maybe a little bit dry, right?

But science, you can't say science, therefore, says, like, the decision to hit your wife was not your choice. That was something that was your genetics and your upbringing, and you didn't really have a choice in that, you know? So science can't say that. Okay.

Let's talk about someone else who, made some arguments for determinism. I think this next author, a researcher, James Miles, makes some really interesting claims, not necessarily about the existence of free will itself, but about what believing in free will means for society. He has a very pessimistic outlook on that. He claims that all studies of free will are methodologically flawed,

and then a sense that they cannot disprove free will since the scientific method isn't designed for that purpose. He goes on to say that almost all work on free will published to date by social psychologists appeared methodologically flawed, misrepresents the state of academic knowledge, and risks linking social psychology with the irrational. Was he like, do you think he was saying that the studies that we were just talking about are flawed?

Is that what he's talking about? Or is he talking about more of the studies where they are looking at the positive benefits of free will? I think more the latter. Okay. It's a very bold statement, right, to say that all of the free will studies to date are methodologically flawed.

You know, show me in our, once again, like my thought with a statement like that is like, okay, okay, give me one article, show me how it's methodologically flawed. And let's talk through one article at a time, right? Let's pick like a really strong article maybe, rather than just making a statement like that. Okay, let's keep going. He continues. Furthermore, the psychological literature appears almost wholly unaware that the possible existence of free will has already been disproved by logical philosophers.

And it has long been recognized by certain scientists, legal theorists, and philosophers that far from having pro-social benefits, belief in free will acts to discriminate against. against the poor and racial minorities may make justice impossible and even encourages contempt for and violence towards the weak. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot here, right? There's a lot of leaps of logic. So psychological literature, you know, what do the logical philosophers actually say? Right? We talked about how there's a lot of arguments on this. Like there's intelligent, well-intentioned people on both sides who are philosophers who believe one way. way or the other, right? And they come to their conclusions based on, you know, sort of sequential thought processes, which can be, you know, looked at. And if you have a premise, you can, you can look at the premise and you can start to consider if the premise is true or not. So I don't know if that means much to say that all logical philosophers, like, believe this one kind of idea, right? And then, you know, he goes on to say that there's these

sort of discriminatory results and that he cites that there's scientists legal theories and philosophers that believe that. My question with that sort of process is, you know, where are those scientists? Where are the legal things? Like, you know, are you citing those? Are you showing your progression of thought? And also, like, is this actually something that we can see in the literature? Right.

Can we run an actual study? So, you know, the importance of evidence moves away from a personality and an opinion. So that's actually a pretty low grade of evidence. Like, here you have an expert who believes this. Like, that to me doesn't really, that's a lower level of evidence than like a study where you look at the data and you look at the analysis. Okay. He has a few more statements to that same effect. maybe we'll just read one more of them.

Free will may just be the primary excuse many used to legitimize a contempt for the poor that would exist independent of their professed belief in free will. But free will assertion, nonetheless, provides the ethical fig leaf for such contempt that would be far harder to rationalize and therefore tolerate without the myth of free will. Therefore, the myth of free will does not just excuse indifference to poverty. it creates and maintains much of that poverty in the first place. Right. Yeah.

So, I mean, to make a statement like that, I think you would have to back it up with like an actual study where like people who believe in free will maybe have indifferent attitudes towards poverty. So one thing you could do is you could, you know, run a study maybe where you get people who are high and free will, you know, and low and free will and you look at the difference and how. how they approach people who have, you know, who are in poverty. And that's exactly what we're going to do.

Later on, there is an article that actually was a response to James Miles. And so we have some interesting studies that provide some data on that point. Cool. Let's keep going. So now that we've sort of talked about Harris and Miles, they're not the only voice in the free will discussion as we've been talking about. So we wanted to sort of show some of those other voices and talk about their other definitions potentially for free will and how those might be more reasonable and fit more with reality based on some of the data. There's the definition that we used previously from Baumeister,

claiming that free will is a blanket term composed of self-control, rational choice, planning behavior, and active choice, also synonymous with self-regulatory behavior. But there are more definitions. One article made an interesting proposition that free will, will can be conceptualized as a form of self-organization. This was by Baumeister and Vonatch in 2011. Quote, more to the point, however, each person can be understood as a self-organizing system of molecules and biological substances. In our view, free will builds on the notion that individual living things are highly

self-organized, so that their actions emerge from inner processes that are to a relatively high degree independent of specific causes and inputs from the immediate environment. I like that. I like that. It's like this highly self-organized capacity, right, that the sum is greater than the parts. Yes, and they go on to say that exactly. They say that whatever free will is, it is not localized to a single kind of process or brain function. Free will as self-organization is what makes the whole more than the sum of its parts. Hence, it is vulnerable to disruption by impairment of any of its various parts. Yeah, and I could go into a lot of details about what that means that you could have

like one part of the brain damaged and it will influence or affect free will the ability to choose. but the ability to choose doesn't go away completely, usually. Like, there's still, like, a little, like, a bit in there. Okay, keep going. They then go on to directly address some of the arguments we've talked about, about reductionism or neuroessentialism by saying they propose that human behavior is caused by brain processes. The brain consists of nerve cells that fire in mechanistic fashion

based on chemical and electrical processes. There's no room for indeterminacy or free will. in the firing of a particular nerve cell. Therefore, human beings cannot be free. The fallacy in that argument is that it overlooks the strong likelihood that new causal processes and principles emerge at higher levels of organization. Nice. It's that idea of new causal processes and principles emerge at higher levels of organization.

And that's why, like, if you look at, like, a bee, The bees have certain programmed steps. Like, okay, go find something bright colored. Okay, I found something bright colored. Okay, it's my pool mat. Okay, I'm gonna go down and touch it. Okay, there's nothing there. Okay, I'm gonna fly out to the next thing.

There's like different sort of like processes that are programmed to accomplish the mission or ants. Like ants have like rules of engagement on how they look for food and how they create paths and everything like that. But as we get more and more complex, What I've found is that there's more and more sort of agency and choice and like learning behavior. And there's there's there's this whole like sort of ability to adapt and morph into a totally different environment.

Okay, talk about that more later. Let's keep going. And then just one more quote I think that's important from them sort of references back to some of the things we talked about in part one. about the purpose of free will not to be initiating thoughts, but maybe to be manipulating them. These researchers claim, quote, impulses to act may indeed originate outside of consciousness. And indeed they should, because initiating behavior is not the function

of the consciousness. Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense because there's these natural things that are underneath the surface drives for sex, drives for self-preservation, drives for the hurt instinct, And it's not like these initiating behaviors should function in consciousness. Actually, they're probably most adaptive to not function in consciousness most of the time.

And then finally, they reiterate what they stated earlier, claiming that no one part can make the system work nor destroy or stop it. So it's a collective work together that creates free will and autonomy. Yeah. And I think this is, you know, where like someone who believes in determinism would say, well, look, look, like this guy had this mass in his brain and then he killed this person. True story. Right. And so therefore, he lost his free will.

It's really the mass. Okay. Well, that's not a complete forensic evaluation of that person and the act, right? It's not a psychological forensic evaluation. If you have to like look at their developmental history, you have to look at their choices, you have to look at their proclivities, you know. did they have a history of violence before the mass? Did they have any substances in their brain when they actually did the act? So there's all these potential influences, sure.

But do you destroy the ability to prevent yourself from doing something because you have all these things going on? And one example that I have is often me people. who do violent acts against their like significant other. And it's like they'll maybe throw things or, you know, hit them. And ask them, why didn't you kill them? Because they'll tell me like, oh, I just lost control. I blocked out.

I didn't have any, like, control over myself. I'm like, oh, why didn't you kill them? It's kind of a dark, dark thing to say to them. But I learned it from this one, anger expert. at a conference and and and they look at me like well and they'll be like well i didn't i don't want to go to jail i'm like oh okay good so you do have some control it's sobering to think that you have control i know that it would be easier to believe that you didn't have control but you have to know that you have control to stop hitting your spouse because if you just give up your thought that you have

control, then you will go on hitting them. And it does help. It does help them stop doing violent acts against each other. So if there's one part of the system that is damaged, like this person might be drinking alcohol or something like that, that may influence things. That may make them not completely themselves, but do they still have choice? You know, okay, let's keep going. So after looking at some of these neuroscience arguments, and specifically the last one talking about a whole series of pieces needed for free will, we could take a brief look at some philosophical approaches. There's a number of different definitions of free will.

One of the most common philosophical definitions is that when a decision is made, a decision is up to that individual in the sense that they were able to choose otherwise, or at a minimum, they were able to not choose to act as they did, and also up to them in the sense that they are the source of their own action. Another interesting definition I think fits well with our previous neuroscience discussion is that some philosophers believe both freedom and the linked responsibility coming from that freedom are gradients which develop based on past decisions. current external influences may simply be the results of previously made and independent decisions.

Yeah, so that kind of goes into the Plato's sort of thought that you could train in a certain way to be able to accomplish your intended goal. For example, when I was rowing, the coach would every day before practice, you know, 200 days out of the year or how many days we trained. And he would say today is the day you choose to win the national championship. Today, you know, today. And every stroke, stroke by stroke, pay attention, focus, concentrate. Every stroke, you're getting better. You know, and it is this idea that, like, if you showed up in a certain way, today, when you're training, you will show up and be able to make that decision much easier when you actually compete.

And it's like during all. competition, you have already gone through that scenario of learning how to suffer and learning how to push through the pain and learning how to put everything on the line. And we have so much more human capacity than we think we do. Like we have so much more capability to go harder than we think we do. And it's like through training of extending yourself over and over again, you get to a point where you're making that good decision. Another example of this, I think, think is, it's like, should we allow people to strengthen areas of their brain that are malevolent, you know, like rape, porn, or something like that? So it's like after watching that over and over again,

does that change the way that the brain is going to fire? And I think it does. So you pair two things, which weren't meant to be paired together, and you strengthen those connections over a long period to time and then, you know, not only are you giving out mirror neuron sort of signals to people on what your intentions are, which make you provoke disgust in women that you meet, but also you gain pleasure now through something that is not the way that you're going to actually interact in the world in a meaningful way to find long-term happiness. So it's kind of like, you know, Making a series of choices over time and creating habits, I think does change how you will interact in future events and change the way that you will be able to make choices. Like if you practice and have disciplined choices and like do some voluntary hardship like exercise and then later it becomes easier to to sort of make that choice as well.

Is that kind of what you were thinking about this quote or am I taking it to a whole other level? I mean, in a good way, I think. Okay. Yes. Yeah. So then sort of concluding this portion, it's important to state then again that free will is difficult to define. We've been through a number of different definitions. And it's also important to note that some of these academic or philosophical definitions may not match common conceptions of free will.

And so may be different in that key way. So then we're going to sort of shift and move into some models of free will. If it exists in some form, does it have any evolutionary value? Does it have broad acceptance in common definitions or even a physiologic basis? The first article we have here claims that free will has an evolutionary value in forming societies and then also has potentially a physiologic basis. The evolutionary value is stated as such, free will is not needed for doing whatever you like. indeed enlightened self-interest often means precisely resisting immediate impulses and temptations

so as to obtain a greater good in the long run yeah it's like the there's a value in in being able to plan and there's something about planning and sort of delayed gratification that is so important for the human race to survive right there's winters how do you survive the winter you you prepare you may prepare all spring for a winter. And so it's like that choice, that planning behavior, that active choice kind of, which is part of free will. Then they also mentioned multiple components of free will that we've talked about before, such as self-control, rational choice, planning behaviors you mentioned, active choice. And the authors claim that all of these components help individuals live better in society.

Self-control or self-regulatory behavior is linked to self-control resources, which can be depleted like a tank of gas. Deliberation and acting on choices also causes depletion of self-control resources. Rational or intelligent choice also depends on willpower, since Schmeichael et al showed that performance on tests of fluid intelligence was significantly and substantially impaired among people who had previously engaged in self-control. They then go on to say that free will does not depend on the assumption of random action or of violations of causality. Rather, it involves an evolved capacity to free oneself from natural and habitual patterns of response so as to be able to pursue enlightened self-interest in the complex context of human social life and culture. Yeah, when I read this, I was thinking there's a time where you need to change your environment. You have to choose to change your environment. I used to go into the juvenile

hall and I used to tell the guys there, hey, when you get out, the one choice you may have is who your friends are going to be. I can almost guarantee you if you go back to the same group of friends that led you being in here, you'll probably come back here again, you know, or something worse. It's like there's a small choice that we have to make and sometimes it's changing our environment. And so we have these habitual patterns of response. And it's like how do we change out of that? We have to choose to change our environment, which is uniquely something we can.

Choose to find different resources, different mentors, maybe a therapist, maybe introducing a diet coach if you're stuck. There's all sorts of different ways that we can change our environment. Definitely. Then the authors then continue with a new concept related to what they talked about earlier about your gas tank of self-regulatory behavior by claiming there could be a physiologic basis for self-control. Quote, self-control appears to depend on glucose. People who have low glucose and others who may have high glucose but whose bodies appear unable to utilize it efficiently

have various deficits in self-control. They go on to support this by citing some studies which manipulated blood glucose by having research subjects drink a glass of lemonade, which by random assignment has been sweetened either with sugar, having plenty of glucose, or with diet sweeteners, which have no glucose. The sugar drinks effectively counteracted the behavioral effects of ego depletion, whereas the diet drinks did not. I wonder how they measured ego depletion, but basically it's that like ability to choose, where I self-control.

That's what they're talking about. That's like, it's what we consider like an ego function. I think of this, you know, we've talked about Sensorium. I've done a four-part series on Sensorium. It's like total brain function

and it fluctuates, you know, you're maybe a little bit sharper early morning, maybe midday. It's kind of like there's this like slump. If you take some Benadryl, you're going to be out of it. And so there's lots of things

that influence our Sensorium. And in the same way, if we negatively influence our Sensory, we may have less ego function, which is like ability to control yourself, to control your urges. So it's a fluctuating thing. I don't think our ability to choose is purely static. Moving then a little bit from free will to belief in free will, it's still possible to see a similar societal importance. These authors, publishing a paper in 2017, claim that belief in free will is important for individual and collective well-being.

Society benefits through regulation of inappropriate impulses, and individuals benefit through increased meaningfulness via feelings of belongingness. Therefore, belief in free will may have developed further as an adaptation to meet the escalating demands of opportunistic, intrinsic to, and facilitate a new form of human social living. These beliefs and related psychological capacities would have helped people to override their automatic selfish impulses that demand greater mental energy and self-regulatory resources. Yeah, I thought about when I was looking at this, I was thinking about how, like, the nature of tribe influenced early humans.

Like, it was so important to be a part of a tribe. In Africa, imagine, dropped off in the middle of Africa, you're the biggest prey. But if you drop off 50, you know, adults in Africa, you're now the biggest predator, right? Because 50 people throwing rocks can chase away a tiger, can chase away a lion, can chase away, you know, can do a lot of damage. So there's a lot of focus, you know, when we think natural selection, evolution, it's like on the individual, right? But I often think, actually, for tens of thousands of years, humans were selected based on their ability to act together as a tribe.

You know, not to mention like the history of megalithic architecture in which you have tens of thousands of people working together to move very large pieces of stone, long distances to create huge structures. And this went on throughout every continent. and you have people working together, making choices to do that based on meaning, purpose, you know, like the pyramids aligned with true north and south. You know, so they're looking at astrology and they're making decisions based on the stars and stuff like that. It's pretty cool to think about you have incredible amounts of people working together based on meaning, not based on pure self-interest. I think the pure self-interest is potentially a distant relic of our past,

more than the tens of thousands of years that preceded humans being where they are today, because tribe was so important for survival. Okay, let's keep going. So now we're going to move into a focus primarily on a belief in free will. It's difficult to manipulate and actually measure free will itself, but it's much easier to work with a belief in free will. And as we've recently discussed, belief in free will does have a societal importance. In fact, according to Miles, who we also previously discussed, there is a significant potential for harm in the belief in free will. His views have been challenged by later authors, but this argument introduces a consequential importance for,

belief in free will. If, as Miles says, there is a potential for it to significantly harm society, then belief in free will matters because it either has a potential for significant harm or it doesn't. We found an interesting response to some of his arguments from a paper published in 2013. This paper actually addressed him directly. Quote, he, Miles, asserts that to be freely choosing, an individual would have to be free from deterministic effects and indeterministic effects. To say that one's behavior must be completely free from all past influences in order to be free creates a straw man argument that essentially defines the phenomenon out of existence. They continue. Then again, he may actually mean that moral responsibility is impossible.

To be, quote, to be responsible for how they act, they would have to be responsible for how they are, and to be responsible for how they are, they would have had to create themselves. End quote. We do not believe that moral responsibility requires self-creation, nor do we think that moral responsibility is an evil idea. In fact, belief in moral responsibility is probably a prerequisite for being upset over injustice, and Miles seems to be upset over injustice. And we all are, right?

I think we all get upset over injustice. I'm thinking about the recent racial injustices that, are just so evident, you know, nine minutes on someone's, some black Americans neck is completely unjust and rightfully infuriates people. It infuriated me. I think it infuriated most cops that I've seen on social media talking about it. Like, it infuriated America. And I think we really get, we, we find it morally reprehensible. when we see acts of racism that are just so clear-cut. Just horrible.

Okay. Now that we've sort of established the idea that belief in free will matters for society, we can start looking at some of the methodologies of the papers that we're going to delve into in a little bit. The first methodology we need to look at is how belief in free will is measured. And most commonly, for the papers we found, it was measured using the free will and determinism scale. that was then later expanded to the free will and determinism scale plus, and it was originally developed in 1994 with the addition in 2011. The scale has broad acceptance and reliability,

and it can be used to measure both state, i.e. manipulated belief in free will, and static belief in free will, which is still variable but not actively manipulated. The studies that we'll talk about will be divided into both the static and the manipulated categories. And I think this is really important because we often gloss over in the methods section, like, oh, this was a survey that was used. Having gone through the laborious task of developing a survey, the connection index, I know how important it is to actually look at the questions.

So we actually have the questions in our handout if you want to take a look at them. I think it might be worth reading some of the free will ones versus the determinism ones. Because you really get the definition and you get an idea of what the scores mean, number one, and what people who believe on the fringes and where the average is. And it helps bring a lot of nuance, I think, to the discussions of the actual paper. To look at how the scale was made. What are the questions? What is the internal validity of the scale?

So we have some of that documented. I don't know how much we want to go into this. in this episode but let's talk about like the highlights of this all right we have both included in the handout we have the original free will and determinism scale as well as the free will and determinism plus scale both abbreviated with fad or fadd plus and the basis is that they use a one to five uh lycourt scale from one being totally disagree and five being totally agree and then they move through close to 30 different questions that are categorized into determinism and non-determinism with each having their own subsets.

Determinism as far as fate is concerned. Determinism in the sense of scientific causation. And then non-determinism in the sense of randomness or in the sense of free will. So some of the papers then only use the free will subscale, other ones use the entire form. Okay. So let's look at some of these like biological determinism questions. So number two, people's biological makeup influences their talents and personality.

So on one side of that is like talent is overrated, which goes through meticulously how talent can be created through tens of thousands of very purposeful hours, doing a task. Another question for biological determinism is bad behavior is caused by bad life circumstances. That could also be looked at, right? So you could look at the level of abuse growing up, level of trauma that a person's been through, and then you could look at their, you know, antisocial behavior. And we could say, okay, what is the correlation between homicide and, you having childhood abuse, right? Not incredibly strong. So that's a scientific question. I think we could ask ourselves. Here's another biological question. 26 is, as with other animals, human behavior

always follows the laws of nature. You know, so do we, are we completely predictable based on the laws of nature? Are we unpredictable? One of my favorite authors, Dolsayevsky, kind of tried to address this and notes to the underground. and tried to kind of argue that people did things against their best interests sometimes just to exert their free will or free choice. But we'll keep going. Maybe we should read some of these free will items. Because interestingly, when I read these, I didn't agree with all of them either.

Well, there are a number of definitions. Okay, so free will number four, people have complete control over their decisions they make. interesting question right do people have complete control over the decisions they make sometimes i think people may not have control over some decisions they make you know so i don't know if i would go completely agree on that i can think of some scenarios where they don't completely have control here's another one uh people must take full responsibility for any bad choices they make you know do they should people take full responsibility jocco will would say you should take full responsibility right and uh to what degree does taking responsibility

allow you to grow and move move past bad choices into good choices okay here's another one people can overcome any obstacle if they truly want to um people can overcome any obstacle if they truly want to well there may be a benefit of believing that even if it's not completely true all the time right So if you don't believe that you can't overcome an obstacle, then you definitely will not overcome some obstacles. Right. So it's like, okay, I guess, I guess, you know, we're all implicitly racist, and I guess there's nothing we can do.

You know, so let's not do anything about it, right? No, I think we can actually make some progress in that. Research has shown we can. So let's study that some more and let's make some steps towards that, right? Definitely. One thing that we could potentially do is decrease the amount of black people represented in news that are perpetrators of violence. That's been shown to be quite a bit higher than the actual number in reality or the white victims is actually higher than the amount of white victims that are actually in reality. So, you know, if we watch a lot of news and we watch a lot of movies and it's not in alignment,

with reality, then we start to create patterns in our brain for how things are represented. And then that potentially influences us in ways that we might not even know. So not to go on too much of a tangent, but it also influences the world. I mean, the way you portrayed in movies and TV shows, I mean, those have a far broader reach outside of America. And there's plenty of, you know, than misrepresentation of America. Yes, and people that want to come into America have totally different concepts of what life is actually like. Yep, yep, I've thought about that as well.

Some Islamic religious figures are very critical of America, you know, media and movies. And I'm like, yeah, okay, I kind of get that. You know, there's some movies that really are dehumanizing. Okay, criminals are totally responsible for the bad things they do. That's another free will question. you know, once again, where would I, where would I be? I'd probably be somewhere in the middle. Totally responsible is, you know, what does that mean? For the bad things they do. Well, I'd probably, I'd probably be somewhere not totally agree, but probably next to it.

Like I agree to a large degree. Where would you put yourself on that one? That's an interesting question because my first response is to say, totally, whoa, that's a strong word there, especially going through a lot of training in the sciences. There's no all or never. But I do think that based on how you define responsibility, that I probably would be on the more agree side than the disagree side. Yeah.

So you'd probably put yourself a four or five. Yeah, I think I could think of scenarios that would make me not completely agree. But like, you know, like let's say the person was, well, once again, how do you define a criminal then, right? It's criminal. Because you could see how someone might do something completely out of their nature if they had made previous choices, maybe to use drugs. And so, I don't know, that's why I wouldn't go totally agree. I think I would, I'm not unsure. I think I do agree that people should be responsible for the bad things they do. But I think there's a little bit of a gap between like, okay, you have, you know, this person who has had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, you know, who is on PCP and amphetamines, who creates, who does a murder, you know, it's like, okay, they probably wouldn't have done the murder if they weren't on those drugs.

What if they were slipped those drugs in a drink? you know so maybe that decreases some of their responsibility but maybe they're they still should be they should go through the judicial system and be given a trial and lawyers should argue both sides and you know they should decide what what the best outcome is okay um people do not choose to be in the situation they end up in it just happens and now this one has an r next to it indicating reverse scoring. Reverse scoring, yeah. So people do not choose to be in the situation

they just end up in it. It just happens. So, you know, if you totally disagree, then you'd be on the free will side. It just happens. So, yeah, I could see why someone who doesn't believe in free will just kind of believes that they're just there. It's just happening that we're having this debate, you know,

blah, blah, blah. Okay. we should avoid punishing people because many of them can't help doing what they do well i think that's that's a reverse coded one as well um so if you if you agree with that then you'd be more on the deterministic side less free will i mean it also could depend upon your concept of justice as well because i think you can have a strong belief in free will and say that the goal of justice is not to punish, but to rehabilitate. And so we believe that we're trying to mold them

into making better decisions in the future. So I think there are multiple complexities to this as well. Yeah, what does punish mean, right? It's punishing, placing a person in a jail with a good program where they can be rehabilitated. You know, it's punishing putting them in solitary confinement. Those are very different things. So always, always nuance in the questions, you know?

So they would keep me from going all in either way. Okay. Last question for free will. Strength of mind can always overcome the body's desires. That one too. Like always, you know, like strength of mind. Okay, what do you mean by strength of mind? Like how strong is the mind, you know?

Like some people might not have the strength of mind to, you know, over. their desire for that late-night cereal. My mind isn't always able to overcome that. So I almost see some like distortions and going too strongly. But interestingly, when you look at the average mean score for free will, like in a group of people, it's like 3.84, which if you look at the Lycard scale, 3.123.84 is around unsure to like the middle agree. So it's on a five point scale.

So they're averaging somewhere around four basically. So they don't, most people in general in this group that they did of 102 undergraduates with European heritage only. That's an interesting way of saying it. It's basically white undergraduate students. they found that on average, they scored a little bit on the positive side of free will. Sounds like we're pretty average then, right around a four? Right around four. Yeah, I'm somewhere on average.

And then the standard deviation is 0.5. So most people would fall into, you know, 95% of people are going to fall into two standard deviations, which would be one point. So basically, somewhere from 4.5 to, 3.5. So right around unsure or no, sorry, one point would be unsure to totally agree. So very few people would go beyond into the twos where they would go, I disagree with those free will statements. That's interesting to think about. You're talking about like a couple percentile of people on average. Okay. Yeah, anything else? Let's keep moving. on this way of looking at it.

Well, the little aside did sort of transition us into our next section. I mentioned that they only did this study with white undergraduate students. Now we want to sort of look at the idea of how universalizable is a belief in free will. Is it specific to a certain culture? Can we really make these claims broader and more applicable? Most studies referenced in this presentation rely on sample populations of North American groups sharing a relatively homogenized culture. However, some studies specifically address the potential for cultural differences affecting beliefs in free will.

These studies showed no statistically significant difference between the cultures tested. Additional studies also demonstrated belief in free will as a cultural norm, since manipulations to increase belief in free will showed statistically similar outcomes to control groups with no manipulation of belief in free will. efforts to decrease belief in free will within these studies produce statistically significant differences between both decreased belief in free will and control groups and the increased belief and free will groups okay say that another way all right um another way is that if you don't do anything and then you also manipulate people to increase their belief in free will both of them

will score very similarly on the scale we just talked talked about finding that belief in free will seems to be a norm however when you manipulate someone to doubt free will their scores do differ and they differ not only from those who were encouraged to believe in free will but they also differ from those who are not manipulated at all okay well it's interesting that it's across cultures cross cultures kind of believes the same thing yeah which makes you you think like there's some sort of whenever I hear that I think like okay at some point like we were in generally it was generally adaptive to believe in some sense of self-efficacy right yeah

although self-evacacy and free will is probably different but it's it's probably a better long-term survival advantage and we'll go through the details on that for like all the benefits of believing in a sense of free will and some of the details here just sort of supporting the claims we just made was a study from 2012 found that participants from the u.s. Hong Kong India and Colombia believed in an indeterministic universe and as a reminder that's a universe in which both human agency and free will exist the authors say quote the reason results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that, A, our universe is indeterministic, and B, moral responsibility,

is not compatible with determinism. The majority believed in an indeterministic universe, and quote, there is no significant difference between the responses from participants in these different cultural groups, and the majority also believed in a deterministic universe was incompatible with more responsibility and there's no significant difference between the responses from participants in these different cultural groups. Good. Okay. So now we know a little bit about this measure and how the measure kind of is represented in

different groups of people and how there's some commonalities. Yeah. So then moving on to generally the manipulation of belief and free will. which we haven't talked about yet, and will be sort of important in setting up our discussion of these papers, largely, as we have mentioned, I guess, in the previous section, it's based on either reading pro or anti-free will passages, and then comparing the scores on the free will determinism scale, both before and after reading those passages,

to confirm that the manipulation has been achieved. And the vast majority of our papers referenced a 2008 paper by Voss and, schooler, I believe, which is where this manipulation first existed. And there have been some modifications such as in some situations papers will have, researchers will have participants read statements and then rewrite them in their own words or reflect on them to further increase the manipulation. But in general, the difference is, okay, you get a passage that promotes free will, you get a passage that doubts free will. Yeah. And this also shows that people are suggestible to ideas.

You know, people can change their opinions based on what they read. And it's important to look at the logic and not just maybe consume things haphazardly, right? To look at both sides to really weigh what we believe. So in jumping in here to some of these studies that we discussed previously in a little bit more detail, this study about the belief in free will found that increasing it does not decrease sympathy for poverty. Participants were recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The method was to use the free will and determinism scale we've talked about, but they added questions about income inequality, causes of poverty,

as well as a belief in a just world scale and agreeableness. Now, looking at the results, they, for this part, they placed a quote saying, most of the people described as poor today have only themselves to blame for not having a higher income. Then they asked people to respond to this quote. And they found that people espousing a high belief in personal free will were marginally less likely to agree with the above statement. that's interesting if you think about it because that's not what we would maybe that's not maybe what you would think if you were just reading those free will questions like you may think like oh people who believe in free will believe that those people have a choice and that they're poor because they have a choice but actually what we find is that people who scored higher

and free will actually you know they did not agree with this statement yeah it sort of flies in the face of some of the claims made by Miles earlier on. And just a few more results from this study, believers in personal free will tended to disagree with the assertion that people were fated to live in poverty. The authors found no relationship between free will beliefs and sympathy towards a person who works part-time by choice and therefore lives in poverty, but found that people with high beliefs and free will actually felt more sympathy than others towards a person who works part-time and lives in poverty but is constantly searching for a better job.

That aspect makes sense to me too. It's like there's an appreciation for the person that's believing that they can move forward, right? There's positive appreciation for that. And then to in a seeming, you know, check against Miles, the researchers also found that people with high belief and free will were no less likely than others to feel sympathy towards a person who chose to be poor. Hmm. Okay. And they end by stating, quote, we found, we only found a relationship between belief in a just world and the general free will subscale, which measures beliefs about. people's free will in general rather than one's own free will. So basically saying that they did find a link, just world then would be, you know, the poor are poor because of their own choices,

the world is just. And they found a link between that and a general concept of free will, but they didn't find a link between a just world and people's own concepts of their free will. Yeah, and the correlation there is like 0.22, so it's not a very strong correlation. One being the highest, zero being not correlated, not linked at all. Yeah, and then there's just an interesting article on belief in free will and how it decreases racial prejudice. Tell me a little bit about that one. Yeah, we discussed this a little bit earlier as well. they got some 34 college students who self-identified as Han Chinese, and they used the version of the free will determinism scale we've been talking about, but they removed one item which didn't translate correctly.

And then they also included a feeling thermometer based on the work of other researchers, which was used to assess explicit feelings towards Uyghur Chinese as rated on a scale from 1 to 100. they then also used the same priming and manipulation method we've talked about previously. And they found that participants in the condition of belief in free will, so they were manipulated to believe in free will, reported significantly warmer temperatures toward Uyghur Chinese compared to the participants in the disbelief in free will condition. So that in particular goes against this idea that if you had this belief in full, free will, you would be more prejudiced towards the minority. Is it correct to say, am I reading this properly, that there is an effect size of 0.86?

0.86, yeah. 0.86 is the number of standard deviation movements. 0.86 standard deviation change. Yeah. They continued this study in the U.S. And they used 63 individuals who were randomly selected on a flight by one of the researchers and they all self-reported as white. And they used the pro-black attitudes questionnaire

with Lyker scales from 1 to 5 as well as the manipulation or priming methods we've talked about and the free will and determinism scale. And they found in the results that in the condition of belief in free will, the participants expressed greater pro-black attitudes than did those in the condition of disbelief and free will.

And it was like, an effect size of 0.82, so 0.82 standard deviations difference in more positive black attitudes. You know, when I look at this, it's a survey, right? So my critique would be, let's use like the gold standard for bias. and let's put like, let's do some micro-expression analysis of people's faces when they're looking at, you know, black or white people doing different things or white people doing different things. There's some EMG studies of that, which I think are EMG where they put the electrodes on the people's face and they can tell when someone's frowning or smiling. I think that's the gold standard for more of an implicit racist or implicit bias sort of model. And so I would be curious about running a study like this with that kind of looking at belief structures as well.

That would be an interesting follow-up. Moving on to another study, authors found that an increase in a belief in free will leads to an increase in setting goals, which are also more meaningful, personally relevant, and on a longer time frame. So they offered the participants course credit, used manipulation that we previously discussed, as well as a brief-mood introspection scale, which was used to control for emotional influence to sort of look at the state of the participants at the time. And then they also asked the participants to create a list of three things that they would like to do. And the lists were anonymized and coded for indicators of meaningful goals as well.

as goal-directed content and the authors found a high agreement between the judges they used with a caper ranging from 0.81 to 0.86. The results quote participants in the free will condition described more goal-directed content than participants in the disbelief in free will condition. Participants in free will condition also expressed more goal-directed content than control participants. Yeah, that's That doesn't surprise me because I think that's why, like, it's important to, your beliefs will determine, you know, what you do, right? So if you don't believe that you can make a change, that you can follow and pursue a goal and achieve the outcome you desire, you're not, you may not try. And so I think about, like, the in-cell culture and taking the black pill, like, I'm never going to be able to get married.

I'm never going to meet someone. I had a patient like that, actually. And as we sort of progressed in therapy, he became more open and less rigid in his thinking. He started going on dating apps and he started dating. And he had some good dates. He was, you know, it's interesting. So it's like he's progressing in that path towards his goal of being married and having kids. He really, that's what he really wants.

And interestingly, the reason why I think he suffered for so long with this sort of belief structure that was like, I'm never going to be able to find anyone, was because he had a really bad dating sort of saga with one person, with some traumatic sort of memories linked to it. And once he was able to work through those and they didn't bother him so much, it kind of like freed him up to trust that he would be able to potentially find someone. who was who really loved him, you know, type of thing. So, yeah, I like that. Okay, let's keep going. Another study found that decreasing a belief in free will leads to a perception that life is less meaningful. So this is the inverse.

They manipulated people to doubt free will. These were students, again, who participated for course credit, used the same manipulation methods we've talked about, except for they were asked to rewrite the either pro or anti-freewill sentences in their own words to sort of confirm that they understood them. They used the same free will determinism scale, but then they also added a Kunzendorf no meaning scale, where higher scores mean life is more meaningless. And the results, they found that participants in the determinism

condition perceived life to be significantly less meaningful than did the participants in the free will condition. And they also found that the effect size was large at 0.82. Yeah. So basically decreased their meaning by almost one standard deviation, which is significant, right? That's a big effect size. And it's pretty amazing that actually how they created that effect size was just getting people to read some convincing arguments, deterministic arguments, and getting them to rewrite it in their own. own words. Like that decreased their meaning almost a standard deviation. That's pretty impressive. It says a power to the words and the implications of this discussion. It's the power of beliefs,

right? And I think the war of ideas. It's like ideas, good ideas change how you view the world. And so if you walk around believing that you're stupid and ugly and an idiot and worthless, Like that really is going to make you interact in the world differently and you're going to be depressed and you're going to have harder time making friends. But let's put those thoughts on trial. Let's create a worldview for yourself that's more accurate to reality. Let's not just concede to the narratives that we believe about ourselves that are just horrible narratives. Definitely. Definitely.

And also moving outward then from our in moving from focus on our. ourselves to others, a decrease in belief in free will reduced willingness to help. These were also undergraduate students using the same priming methods. And then they also included the brief mood introspection scale to sort of do an emotion check and then same free will and determinism scale to check for manipulation. And the results found that pro-social tendencies, as indicated by willingness to help, were reduced among participants who were induced to believe in determinism and disbelieve in free will. They were less willing to help across an assortment of situations and opportunities

as compared to participants who were induced to believe in free will and as compared to a neutral control group. Specifically, participants in the determinism condition were less willing to help them participants in the free will condition, which found a determinism condition the mean was 5.33, and, then in the free will condition, the mean moved up to 6.27. Wow. It's interesting that being pro-social is linked to believing that you can have an influence on the world. That's interesting to me. That's profound.

Yeah. And that if you decrease a belief in free will, it makes you think of others less. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Decreasing belief in free will also leads to impulsive selfishness. These were participants recruited online through Amazon Mechanical Turk and given 50 cents for their time. They completed a different emotion or mood check, which was the positive and negative affect schedule.

And then they also did the same manipulation process that we talked about. But they didn't use the free will and determinism scale. They just had the participants rate their belief in free will. on a scale of 1 to 100. Now, the exact methods of this game were interesting. They had participants work in a public goods game, where they were given a set amount of money, and they could anonymously contribute to a public pot,

which would then be doubled and split evenly among the participants. And so there's a potential for them to receive a bonus, if all work together, but if they kept their money, they are guaranteed a certain amount. The process then was manipulated by adjusting the amount of time deliberate participants had to think before they made a decision to contribute to the pot. So either had a short amount of time or they had a longer amount of time. And the results were very interesting.

Quote, the current study uses an economic contribution game under varying time constraints to elucidate whether reducing belief in free will allows one to justify negative behavior, or if the effects occur at a more intuitive level of processing. Here we show that although people are intuitively cooperative, challenging their belief in free will corrupts this behavior, leading to impulsive selfishness. If given time to think, however, people are able to override the initial inclination towards self-interest

induced by discouraging a belief in free will. And they found the exact numbers of that is that when given time to think, participants did not differ in their contributions as a function of whether they were exposed to anti-free will message. Both groups donated about 34 cents. When confronted with decisions they must make on impulse, however, participants contributed 30% less to the public pot after having their belief in free will challenged. And so they only contributed about 28 cents. Wow. Yeah, it's just kind of, it's amazing that all these studies are,

pointing in the same direction, right? When you decrease belief in free will, there's a little bit more of that sort of self-preservation, which is that sort of innate biological drive that's underneath the surface, that unconscious, you know, part of them kind of lurks out and is not checked by something else, right? And it fits well with what we're talking about, the evolutionary value of belief and free will. Yep. Because they're able to work together as a team, gain benefits that. that none would be able to have individually.

Yep. That's why I think there's this, with our brain becoming more, like advanced from prior animals and orders of magnitude larger in certain areas, especially the verbal areas and frontal lobe, you have this sort of development of this ability

to work together in unique ways as a team and also to overcome environment. factors which are complex and changing. Yeah, I think it's like the tribal sort of nature that has been going on for tens of thousands of years that has allowed for this capacity. And when you start decreasing the belief in the ability to have free will, then you go back to being more sort of individualistic, selfish.

Yes, that leads directly into, the next study, which finds that decreasing belief in free will leads to increased cheating. Participants were undergraduate students, and they had the same manipulation that we've previously discussed with reading the statements. They also included a neutral branch where they just read a chapter on consciousness. They did a manipulation check with the free will and determinism scale, as well as the same emotion check that we discussed previously, the P-A-N-A-S. Participants were then told to solve mental math problems and record their answers on a computer. However, the computer had a fake glitch that would show the correct answer after each question.

So the researchers instructed participants to press the space bar after they put in their answer to avoid seeing the real answer. The results found that, quote, analysis of the main dependent measure, degree of cheating, revealed that, as predicted, participants cheated more frequently after reading the anti-free will essay than after reading the control essay. Wow. That's significant. That's significant. And it's quite a bit of a difference, too, which is interesting. Yeah, mean moving from 14 to 9.6? Impressive.

Wow. They did a second part to this study, and they used undergraduate students again, but it made cheating more active than simply not pressing a space bar. So it involved the similar priming and manipulation methods, but it was about a practice questions from the GRE, and these were done without supervision. They also did the same mood check as we described previously. There were five total conditions with the possibility to cheat in three of those conditions. Each cheating condition was manipulated to promote free will, determinism, or neutral beliefs. Participants were divided into individual carols and told to complete their tests in 15 minutes, with no supervision, before grading their own tests and paying themselves $1 for every correct answer for a pile of coins.

The results, quote, planned contrasts revealed that participants who had read the determinism statements and who were allowed to pay themselves for correct answers, walked away with more money than the others. None of the other groups differed from each other. So the people who read the deterministic statements paid themselves more money. And how much more? It was significant.

It was significant. I pull that up and include it. the resources. I didn't realize that figure was not included. Yeah, let's, we'll put that in the resources if you're curious. Okay, let's keep going. Decreasing a belief in free will leads to social conformance. This was also with undergraduate students, if you don't sense a theme, in a psychology course. They did the same manipulation that we've been discussing, and they also had them rewrite the statements, including a neutral prompt. And then conformity was measured by having participants rate the quality of abstract art while having access to random ratings

of, quote, previous participants, which were fictitious, and determining how close their ratings aligned with these random and fictitious ratings. Manipulation was confirmed with the free will and determinism scale. A quote, participants in the anti-free will condition conformed significantly more than participants in the pro-free will condition. participants in the anti-free will condition also conformed significantly more than participants in the control condition but there was no significant difference in conformity between the control condition and the pro-free will condition wow yeah and it's about the the jump is about four points and the standard deviation is four so that's about an effect size of one

as well in this study so you know these are statistically significant strong big effect size not weak effect size and belief in free will when you when it gets decreased increases social conformity so you're not thinking for yourself you're not analyzing how you want to sort of interact in the world as an as an individual so it's interesting it both makes you cheat less which is good for the tribe right but it also makes you independently think which is good for the tribe in the end, right? The best teams are the ones with the most open lines of communication and conformity can actually cause more errors, more issues, especially in medical teams. I've looked at studies on that. Decreasing a belief in free will also leads to impulsive antisocial

tendencies. So they got a selection of participants that were younger between 20 and 31 years old. They used the same manipulation methods we've talked about. And with Bencef passages, they used 15 different sentences which were displayed for a set amount of time. They used the same emotional check we've been talking about as well as the same free will and determinism

scale. And this was actually a rather complicated study that I'll do my best to explain. But each arm of the study completed three marble trials. One trial

was a control with a red marble rolling down a ramp where participants noted when the marble turned yellow. The additional trials included green and white marbles. The green marble trials were conducted first and rewarded rapid response to stop the marble from rolling off the ramp and triggering a negative noise once it rolled off. This trial was followed by the white marble which rolled more slowly and had no negative noise. The participants were told to provide an even number of trials where they stopped the white marble or just allowed it to roll off the table.

So this is the marble that doesn't have any negative noise associated with it. In this white trial, participants were asked to note the time when they decided to either stop the marble or not. The accuracy of their reported timing was measured through their accuracy in the initial red marble timing task. So the red marble task, just a reminder,

was a marble that was rolling down the ramp and then turned yellow at one point. And the participants were supposed to note, okay, when did it turn yellow? And they found how accurate they were. The results, quote, there was no difference in average reaction times and proportions of successful go trials

between the two groups, suggesting that they performed equally well in the primary task, i.e. the green marble condition, which was stopping it before it gets off the ramp and makes the loud noise. Crucially, however, the no-free will group was less likely to intentionally inhibit

the response in the decision trials. So this was the white marble trials as compared to the control group. Since the task was designed to encourage fast responses, intentional inhibition required self-control. Our interpretation is that the reduced intentional inhibition in the no free will group reflects degraded self-control. Yeah, I don't know if I would jump to say impulsive antisocial tendency. from this, but there is this decrease in degraded self-control, right? Degraded ability to control to do this task based on what they had read, what they had read, right?

Yes, based on the manipulations that we've been talking about. Yeah, wow. It's a very interesting task. Yeah, rather complicated. It took a couple of readings for me to totally understand what they had going on there. Yeah, it was an interesting article. All right. Moving on to the next article,

unless there's anything else you want to say about that one? No, no. All right. Let's keep going. Decreasing a belief in free will decreases behavior adjustment after error. So they had a number of university students that were paid for their participation.

Use the same manipulation we've been talking about. And then same manipulation checks and emotional checks. But they also added a assignment. task, which is prompting either a right or left-handed keystroke with specific colors, then pressed on the, then presented on the opposite side of the screen to create conflict, which was used to assess sequential effects of errors. Typically, reaction times are slower following errors. Yeah, this is a really good one. That's a good study. The results found, importantly, we found a significant session, previous trial, and group interaction.

with reduced post-error slowing after the belief manipulation in the no free will group, but not in the control group. So that's important because there's this aspect of slowing down to reevaluate after you make a mistake that occurred in the people who were the free will group, believing in free will more. And this is something that is also seen in patients with schizophrenia and children with ADHD. It's this sort of frontal lobe function of being able to stop and reanalyze your errors. Very important, right?

And of course, medications can be given to help people with these psychiatric issues. But the post-air slowing was reduced in the no-free will group. and the free will group had that slow down, which is so important to reevaluate after you make a mistake. Decreasing a belief in free will increases aggressive behavior. These were undergraduate students looking to fulfill course requirements. They used the same manipulation method with different sentences on different pages of a book, either pro or anti-free will.

And then participants were told that they would be forming groups based on the desires of other participants. In other words, you had to be chosen in order to be part of the group, but the process was anonymous. Half of the participants were accepted, and the other half were randomly rejected. Participants then completed belief and free will manipulations before beginning the aggression measure.

And the aggression measure was that participants were asked to prepare food for a partner who had rejected them and who did not like spicy food. The amount of hot salsa they put on the plate was a measure of aggression. and they found that participants who had read the deterministic sentences gave their partners more of the unwelcome hot sauce, about 17.8 milligrams, compared to participants who read the sentences supporting free will,

which only gave about 9.4 milligrams. Thus, induced disbelief in free will led to more aggression as compared to inducing belief in free will. Yeah, piss off another person, right? If you don't believe you have a choice, you're just doing it. I'm just pissing you off. I'm putting more hot sauce. Just natural, just how it works.

Yeah, can't control that. Sorry, I'm determined to do it to be annoying. Now we can move into some studies that talk about static or trait belief in free will. So these are studies that still used the free will and determinism scale to assess belief in tree will, but they did not use the manipulation methods we've talked about with reading pro or anti-free will messages. They just looked at what people in general believed. And if they believe these things, what are their sort of commonalities? Correct.

Yes. They were able to find more of an association instead of a causation per se. A static belief in free will is associated with better job performance. So they got 65 adults from a day labor agency. They measured their belief in free will using the scale. we've talked about, and then they had job performance be evaluated objectively and independently by a supervisor of those workers. Quote, the relationship between belief and free will and overall job performance was significant.

In addition, belief and free will was positively correlated with four of the five measures of workplace performance, work effort, consistency, positive social impact, and general assessment. No other independent variable predicted any job performance measure, though this could partially be because of the smaller sample size. Yep. And this is a 0.33 correlation, free will and work effort, consistency, 0.27, social impact, 0.35, overall 0.3. So, you know, it's a, it's not a huge correlation, but it's positive and it's consistent throughout the different measures. Yeah. Static belief in free will was associated with less prejudice.

Returning to that previous study we talked about, they did a slightly different version of it. They still used college students who self-identified as Han Chinese. They measured their belief in free will. And in order to measure prejudice, they measured the social level. distance between Han Chinese and Tibetan Chinese, and social distance was measured with a version of the Bogartis social distance scale. The results, I found that the mean score for belief in free will was 4.77, and the mean social distance score was 2.90.

These results revealed a significant negative correlation between belief in free will and prejudice against the Tibetan Chinese. Yeah, the correlation was like. 0.316. So made some impact not huge, but it was in the direction that's consistent with the other studies. Static belief in free will is also associated with lower social conformance. They recruited participants online through Amazon Mechanical Turk, measured their belief in free will, and then also used a conformity scale, which was an 11-item-septial tool measuring tendent. to conform to those around them.

Quote, there was a significant negative correlation between belief in free will and conformity. Participants who expressed a stronger belief in free will reported conforming less than participants with a weaker belief in free will. Yeah. It's in the same direction we would expect based on other studies. Not a huge link, but it's a significant link. Static belief in free will is associated with positively with life satisfaction. So they got about 1660 10th grade students from high schools in China and had them complete a translated version of the free will and determinism of the free will subscale from the free will and determinism scale as well as a satisfaction with life scale. and they also did the mood check, the positive and negative affect schedule,

and then also used a self-report measure of the Big Five personality traits. The results, critically, the belief in free will was positively correlated with life satisfaction and positive affect, but negatively correlated with negative affect. Belief in free will has a 0.22 correlation with positive affect and a negative 0.13 correlation with a negative. affect. Yeah. So these are smaller correlations, but they're still in the direction we would expect, you know, that there's some positive affect, positive emotions that come with the belief in free will. They did a follow-up study then with fewer students, 639 10th grade students from China, and they had them complete the same set of tests, but they also added a philosophical question,

which described both a deterministic and an indeterministic universe. Participants were asked then which universe was more like ours and classified as either believers in determinism or in free will. So they compared the scores on the free will subscale of the FAD Plus between free will believers and determinism believers, and they found that compared with determinism believers, free will believers scored significantly higher. So basically they were using another method of a free will check to sort of confirm the free will and determinism scale.

And so therefore that confirmed again that the belief in free will measured by the free will and determinism scale was positively correlated with life satisfaction and positive affect. But in this study they found it was negatively correlated with negative affect, which I guess is similar to the previous. study as well. Yeah. The effect size is not large. It's 0.28, but honestly, that's the same effect size we would see in a lot of antidepressant trials. So maybe we need to give a little bit vitamin free will to people. Yeah, just start printing out some pamphlets. Yeah, maybe that would, maybe that would be an option. Well, it's, of course, a whole lot more nuanced, let me say, because there's no placebo arm, which, you know, medications are always compared to a placebo arm, which placebos work as well.

So medications move away. If you say it affects size at 0.3, it moves away from the placebo. That's different than just an effect size here, because here we're just comparing it to, like, where the bell curve lies and the standard deviation, stuff like that. Got it. All right. This study included a number of factors now. A belief in free will was associated with more gratitude, greater life satisfaction,

lower levels of perceived stress, and a higher commitment in relationships. So recruitment was done online partially and also on a campus with undergraduate students, and they were given some course credit for this. They used either the free will and determinism scale, its modified plus version, for or it's modified plus version for this study, the added additional measures of general self-efficacy, perceived stress scale, mindfulness, subjective happiness scale, relationship satisfaction, commitment, which was a subscale of a Stanley and Markman's scale, and a commitment measure, meaning in life questionnaire, and gratitude questionnaire six,

as well as a satisfaction with life scale. So they gave them a ton of batteries. The results found that a belief in free will has a 0.56 correlation with subjective happiness, 0.31 correlation with meaning, 0.32 correlation with gratitude, 0.59 correlation with life satisfaction, 0.35 correlation with self-efficacy,

0.27 correlation with forgiveness, and 0.21 correlation with relationship satisfaction. Some of those are pretty good. Like subjective happiness, that's a pretty strong correlation. 0.56. Yeah, life satisfaction too. Meaning. Point three.

Relationship satisfaction. That's interesting. 0.21. I mean, that is correlated at all, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So, and, you know, we read those belief and free will questions earlier. Mm-hmm.

So it's kind of like you kind of know what those are. as you're looking at this and you're like, huh, okay, that's interesting. It is an interesting comparison. They continued on with a second part to their study, solely recruiting people online. They used the same free will check, but they also included an internal control index. And then they also completed the satisfaction with life scale, a general self-efficacy scale, and gratitude questionnaire. The results found, quote, there was a small to moderate. positive correlation between belief in free will and locus of control, such that participants

who believed more strongly in free will also tended to have a more internal locus of control. Apart from correlations between each criterion variable and the free will belief subscale, the only significant correlation that emerged was a negative correlation between fatalism and gratitude. I guess if you believe fatalistically, you're not very grateful. Guess not. But the correlation is not huge.

So let's not get out of ourselves. Like, you can't be grateful if you're fatalistic. It's like negative.26. And even though these correlations were smaller, authors found that, quote, belief in free will had stronger correlations with life satisfaction, gratitude, self-efficacy, and meaningfulness of life

than did implicit theories and locus of comfort. control just in a comparison there. Right. So this is kind of like that this is where I'm getting to this idea that this is important. You know, like, okay, we pay a lot of attention to locus of control in psychotherapy. Let's pay attention to how people view the world. Do they believe that they have some free will? Like they can make their decisions going back to those questions, you know, like this is

important. I mean, just from a practical standpoint, you know, practical standpoint as in like, this is going to make someone's life a little bit better to believe this set of beliefs. You know, your beliefs matter. What you believe changes the way that you interact in the world. And, you know, as we do psychotherapy, we want to move people into a set of beliefs that are more in alignment with what is going to lead to thriving. right so you know i'm concerned that some people have a very sort of mechanistic purely biological

perspective and how does that influence the patients and does that cause harm you know so i think we we have to be careful if we do have a more deterministic viewpoint on the world how do we communicate that in a way that doesn't squelch someone's belief that they can set goals and have meaningful change and we'll talk about that there's actually a study about that about neuro essentialism and mental health and what affect the beliefs of the mental health professional could have on patients yeah so in part three in part three when we get to that that's kind of what we're building up towards you know we're building up towards why this is important as professionals if you've gotten this far and you go into the resource library,

let me know that you got this far. I will give you a special congratulations for getting through part two of the free will episode. I think it's important. I think it's important to understand this concept. I think it's not something I got in training. I'm curious about it.

I got Matthew curious about it, enough to help me out, fill this episode. And I'm looking forward to part three. And part three, we will be going through some more studies here. Anything else you want to mention on part three we're going to hit? There's going to be a number of interesting things that we're going to really get to how free will and mental health interact. We're going to talk about some of the practical differences maybe between free will and decision-making capacity,

which is something that's often placed in the realm of psychiatry. Psychiatrists are called to assess that. We're also going to talk a little bit more about. some different concepts of free will and how free will could relate to things like psychosis, how does that relationship work about ideas of true self-knowledge, even some studies on, as we talked about the importance of neuro-essentialism and how much of an effect it has on both patients and on mental health professionals. Yep.

well i really appreciate matthew all the hard work that you've done helping me produce this once again matthew is going to be applying into psychiatry so if you're a program director or resident you should encourage him to apply to your residency because he'll be a great addition to um to the intellectual conversations and to the hard work that is done in residency so thank you sir and we will leave it here for today. Once again, this is going to be in the resource library. We're going to pretty much leave it as is as we've gone through it to produce this episode. So you can go get it and re-listen to the episode while you're going through the notes. You can check out the articles. If you feel like we miss something or if you feel like we made any errors, please

shoot me an email. I rarely get one. But when I do, I make changes. And I go back and take out little parts of episodes. And I've rarely done that. And if you're on my mail list and if it's a significant change, I'll let you guys all know, because I want to keep you guys updated with the most up-to-date, wonderful information that will allow you to be awesome. All right, we'll leave it there.