TrueLife - Dr. Roy Baumeister - The Science of Free Will

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Prepare for an unparalleled conversation with Dr. Roy Baumeister, a giant in the field of psychology whose influence spans continents and disciplines. With over 700 published works, including more than 40 books, Dr. Baumeister’s exploration of human behavior, free will, and self-control has shifted paradigms in how we understand ourselves and society. His groundbreaking book Willpower became a New York Times bestseller and transformed how we view personal discipline and resilience.Currently affiliated with Harvard, Constructor University, and several global institutions, he’s received the prestigious William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a testament to his profound lifetime contributions. Dr. Baumeister is also the president-elect of the International Positive Psychology Association, continuing his mission to unravel the complexities of human motivation and well-being.In his latest work, The Science of Free Will, he ventures beyond academia, examining how we make choices, navigate social structures, and create meaningful lives by weaving together the past, present, and future. Today, we’ll delve into his deep insights into the human psyche, the essence of decision-making, and the hidden forces that shape our potential.https://roybaumeister.com/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope that everybody is having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. the wind is at your back. I got a show for you today that I think everyone is going to enjoy. It's

going to be mind-blowing. So prepare for an unparalleled conversation with Dr. Roy Baumeister, a giant in the field of psychology whose influence spans continents and disciplines. With over 700, 100, 100, published works, including more than 40, 40, 40 books, Dr. Baumeister's exploration of human behavior, free will and self-control has shifted paradigms in how we understand ourselves and society. His groundbreaking book Willpower became a New York Times bestseller and transformed how we view personal disciplines and resilience. Currently affiliated with Harvard, Constructor University, and several global institutions, he's received the prestigious William James Fellow Award from the Association of Psychological Science, a testament to his profound

lifetime contributions. Dr. Baumaster is also the president-elect of the International Positive Psychology Association, his mission to unravel the complexities of human motivation and well-being. In his latest work, the sciences of free will, he ventures beyond academia, examining how we make choices, navigate social structures, and create meaningful lives by weaving together the past, the present, and future. Today we'll dive into his deep insight of the human psyche, the essence of decision-making, and the hidden forces that shape our potential.

Dr. Roy, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? I'm pretty well. I'm great. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, the pleasure is all mine. I've got a bunch of really cool questions from the audience, and I figured we'd just dive right in here to both feet since I got you for a short amount of time, and the conversation may be complex and engaging. So the first question that we have down that comes from Kevin Holt is, you have noted that viewing life as an interconnected narrative helps people find meaning. Do you think this drive to build a cohesive story,

of life's moments is a form of self-made destiny. Oh, well, that's a nice way of putting it. I suppose so. Destiny sort of implies that it's there for you whether you choose it or not. And I think the point of free will is you're much up for choosing your own course. So you can reject your destiny.

But still, I think the story is good. And again, I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, but everything starts with evolution. And we forget most other animals just live in the immediate here and now. So they don't have a story sense of their own identity. I mean, they know their families and so on. Dogs know their owners and all that. But the idea of life is an ongoing story, the way we think of it,

that, you know, what you're doing today is linked to where you were in the past and where you're going in the future and you're making choices to get to the future. you desire and honor the promises you made in the past. All that, that's really an important part of the human experience that's pretty much limited to our species. Is that particular narrative, like a free choice? To what extent is the narrative a free choice versus a psychological need? Well, you need some kind of narrative.

It's very hard to live without any sort of meaning. but you can change and you can choose to some degree. Now, when you go back into childhood, it gets more complicated. My friend, the wise, Dan McAdams has researched this extensively. He says, you know, people's stories that they start out as children, just learning to play a role. You're like an actor. And you figure out the script in children's games like playing house and so on.

What am I supposed to do? How do I be the mommy? or whatever. And then a bit later, you're still following the script, but you have choices to make. So you're more of an agent. As they say, you can steer the story in one direction or other. So you're not just doing what you're supposed to do in following a script.

You're helping to, by reacting to steer it in different ways. And then sometimes in the teen years, there's another step, when you start to be an author. And that's when you can change the script. And my parents brought me up to be this, but I'm not going to follow that route. I'm going to go somewhere else and do something else. And some people change in their midlife or even later, start a new chapter and a new direction. So certainly your ability of an adult, you can change the story, not just make refinements along the way.

And you can even sometimes shift to a very new and different story. It's interesting. I was sitting down to lunch with a family friend the other day, my wife and I, and we were talking about like culture and on some level. Isn't it weird? Like the first four letters of culture are cult. And it seems like so much of the societal norms are there to tell us what to do on some level. You know, where does free choice and I know it's kind of a large question, but where do you, when you think about like the cult and culture and free choice, like how much is how much society's norms and the cult of culture? are really telling us what to do. Well, I'd frame it a little bit different way. Every species has to figure out how to survive and reproduce, otherwise it goes extinct, right? Yes.

So it needs a strategy to continue life. Biology's never been able to make life. It goes on forever. So has to create new life and sustain what it has. So our species, our strategy for it is culture. We organize our social life based on shared understandings, division of labor. Right. um, marketplaces, uh, things like that. It's working really well for us.

Yeah. Um, I mean, in about two or three hundred thousand years, we've gone from one first human to eight billion. Um, meanwhile, our closest relatives of the chimpanzees are down to 300,000 in the wild. So, uh, so our strategy works, uh, culture, but culture means most of the people have to follow most of the rules most of the time. It's a, it's a system. Uh, morality is really, to derive from the requirements of a functioning system. So things like the Ten Commandments, we associate with the Judeo-Christian tradition, but you won't find any culture where they say, oh, our morals are exactly the opposite. We believe it's your duty to lie and cheat and murder and have sex with your neighbor's wife and all those things.

No, systems work better when people respect others' lives and tell the truth. and respect property and so forth. So morality derives from the requirements of the system. And so culture tells us what to do. And certainly it gets carried away or overreaches. And so it will tell us all sorts of weird things like neck ties, which seem to be going out of fashion. Californians gave up on them some time ago.

But even here at Harvard, the professors don't wear ties to lecture anymore. But so, yes, certain weird things happen. But the basic and the more important part of culture is rules so that people can work together and live together without killing each other and can ultimately produce more resources than they could if they were living alone and working alone so that we can live longer, happier and more lives with more offspring. You've written so many different books in a wide range of perspectives and ideas you've contributed to the world out here. Was there something different about this book? Was there something that made you go like, I'm going to, I need to research this. Was there something that grabbed your attention and really wanted you to focus in on what this book talks about? Well, it's not different.

It's part of the big picture. I sort of set my goal. I want to give in the advantages of my career. a social science generalist that can learn a lot of basic things about people. And so set my goal, I want to try to get as close to the truth as I can of what the human condition is all about, why we're here and what we're doing and how the mind works and so on. And so, well, the mechanism by which we choose our actions, that's an important part of it. I mean, psychology is the science of behavior are used to claim that. So how does behavior come about? And,

And so issues of free will are then very central to this. So this was an issue that had to be done. You kindly mentioned my earlier book on willpower. That was about self-control, which is also a key trait that many researchers has found is one of the most important things for predicting success in life. People with good self-control live longer, happier, have stronger marriages, make more money. and so on. So well, self-control is one piece of free will, one aspect of it. So in a sense, that this is a step further from that earlier book, although the problem of free will stands on

its own. You don't have to have read the earlier one. But that's part of the logic of how does the human mind work. We got another question coming in. It talks about As one of psychology's most prolific thinkers, you've explored themes like resilience and willpower. How does the concept of free will influence our capacity for resilience, particularly when we face circumstances beyond our control? All right, Till. Resilance is not something I've specifically written about, although it's an important topic, and I probably should get to it before I'm done. but resilience is a way of responding when you have a setback or

misfortune. Something goes wrong. We can say that that's a choice point. When you're defeated by life, how do you react to it? Do you get up and try again and look to do better the next time? Or do you give up and fold and go hide away? probably almost everybody will eventually give up if the failures are too relentless.

But being resilient and being able to bounce back from a defeat, that's important because nobody goes through life without the occasional defeat either. So resilience would be one sign, a way of marshalling your free will powers to deal. with the situation and often me you see the essence of free will the way i think of it is the ability to act differently in the situation it's a kind of flexibility in behavior which in biological terms it's very adaptive and very useful even it's the basis of uh of learning so if you're defeated by something uh well you could go and just do it again uh hope it works but but use your free will think something about my strategy didn't work out this time

If it was pure luck, maybe I'd do the same thing and I'll get a different result. But if my strategy is flawed, maybe I should pick a different strategy. Think about the situation. Think about the opportunities. Think about how I could try again and maybe get a better result. So that would be a very key use of free will, basically addressing the same situation and looking for a different strategy after your first one failed. I love that.

That's a great way to put it. Thank you. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, there's a, there's a, I think it was Victor Frankl's book, the space, there's a space between stimulus and response. Is that where free will resides? Do you think, like, you have that moment, that moment of clarity between stimulus and response. And the longer you become familiar with it, like the bigger that space gets.

Is that, would that be a good space for free will to dwell? Yes. Yes, exactly. The early psychologists who are often studying rats, you know, they didn't want to talk about the mind or anything. So they looked at behavior as there's a stimulus, something coming in from the environment, and then the response to behavior. But pretty soon they said, this is not adequate. You don't just have the responses programmed.

You have the stimulus, and then you process it in some way. And different individuals, even different rats, might process the same stimulus in different ways. And, of course, in the complexity of human situations, there's a much greater variety. And so the scope for individual processing is considerably greater. So yes, that's where free will can come. If it's a simple stimulus response, like a reflex or something, there's not much free will involved in that. But if, you know, say you're trying to quit smoking and your friend wants to go outside for a smoke,

it invites you along. Well, you want to be with your friend, but you don't want to smoke, that's the point at which you make a decision. And that's the kind of thing free will is for. You recognize there are two options. Maybe you understand the consequences. I know a woman who had quit smoking, celebrated.

She said, something really good happened. And so I thought I'd have one cigarette. And she said, there was five years before I quit again. So you've got to be aware of the contingencies. But yes, she made a free decision. Unfortunately, didn't accurately. foresee the consequences. I love that word aware.

Like it seems to be something that I'm becoming more aware of. You know, it's interesting to think about that when you become aware of something, it's very difficult to not see it in your life. And it's not like you didn't know about it. It's just it was always in your periphery on some level like that. What role does awareness have in free will? That's a great question.

Awareness, also known as consciousness. It is utterly fundamental and central. I mean, there are essentially no theories by anybody of unconscious free will. If we have free will, it's based on conscious thinking and choosing. So, yes. Now, there are people who argue about consciousness and doesn't really do anything and so on. I think the evidence is overwhelming that it does. that are very solid experiments that will manipulate different thoughts or feelings and show that

behavior changes as a result so that so consciousness definitely has causal power it's true we do lots of things unconsciously and without thinking about them and we do others that we may be vaguely aware of but aren't uh aren't really consciously intervening so i mean just deciding to walk to the grocery store uh you decide to go To do that, your feet have to make a lot of individual steps. Your brain has to issue commands to the muscles in your legs and feet to move you all along that way. But you're not conscious of any of that. You're conscious maybe to decide that if I need some bananas or whatever.

So I'm going to walk to the store. You make that decision consciously. And then the conscious mind sort of hands it off to the unconscious, which carries out the actions. And the only time you might, consciousness might come back into play if you're walking there and your usual path is blocked because I don't know, there's construction on the street. You think, oh, I have to take a different route. And so again, then your conscious mind is engaged and you work out a different plan. And then it again hands it off to the unconscious and you're back to thinking about whatever is going on in your mind, your love life or your worker or who knows, my fantasies, while your unconscious mind tells. the feet to take one step and another step and another step and that's so on. Yeah, it's it's an incredible

process that start taking time to think about and I think you can open up a lot of doors and awareness to how you live your life. The question that comes to mind for me is this idea of like a non-local consciousness. Do you subscribe to that camp like there's something informing us on a different level? Yeah, you don't know if the psychoanalyst had that sort of, uh, thinking, at least the collective unconscious. I love those ideas, but as I've spent most of my career in hardcore rigorous science, I don't really find much convincing evidence of those things. I would like to be persuaded, but consciousness is something the individual brain produces. It's not to say we don't share ideas like we're doing now.

Yeah. Everyone consciousness can certainly influence another. And indeed, that's one of the key. things that it's for, that I think consciousness is crucial for talking. There's a line of research that people want to show that things we thought you needed consciousness for. Well, you can sort of do them, maybe a watered down version unconsciously. All that's good. And it's very impressive work, but nobody's been able to show that you can carry on a

conversation unconsciously. I mean, I ask you to try to, you know, try listening to music. like, well, try to just focus on thinking about something else while you're talking to them. You really can't do it. Cognitive psychologists have noticed this for a long time, but maybe that's the point of consciousness. Thinking is for talking, conscious thinking, because it's one of the basic things our species does, and it does way better than any other species. I mean, some animals communicate.

but none of them has what linguists would call a language. And yet every human society has one. In fact, most people spend most of the day talking. So, including listening. So that is really crucial. And yes, so consciousness is crucial for that, among other things. It's interesting, too. I love language and I love learning.

and I can't help but think about like the linguistic patterns we use. Like sometimes the words we use and the relations we have are a mirror of the inner dialogue we have, which is sort of a mirror of the consciousness that we have or the mirror of the patterns in our life that we have. Maybe can you touch on that a little bit? Like I'm just fascinated by it. I love to hear your opinion. Well, I think this is a little bit getting off the topic. but when you learn a foreign language, you're often impressed about how they say things a little bit differently.

And I'm passable to German and I learned to read French once, but I don't dare try to pronounce it. But in French, the adjective goes after the noun. And in German and English, it goes before. So we say a big man, but they would say a man big. And so that sort of thing is fascinating. Now we're getting into the more interesting and complex stuff about the talking we do to ourselves all day and that being part of the story. Really a life, I think, is sort of a cluster of stories, often not very good stories. It's true. Yeah, it is true.

But we think about these as we go along. And I guess the example of going to the grocery store, I say, well, you know, my girlfriend is coming over for dinner tonight and she likes, I don't know, asparagus. So maybe I better get some of that that'll make her happy. So that sort of thing goes on a lot in our minds. language again so so fundamental to to the human condition it's it's one of the big departures in evolution that pushed us forward to the biological success of our species as I said every culture that we know has language and no animal society has as what amounts to a language we got here we go from our

friend Clint in Arkansas. He says, how might free will play a role in our pursuit of happiness, particularly when happiness often feels like a fleeting state? Yes. Well, that's full of interesting things in that question. So if we start, if we go back to evolution, nature doesn't really care if we're happy. It cares that, you know, that we survive and reproduce. And that's sort of what it measures. It's a bit of fanciful to say that nature cares at all. Nature wouldn't care if we all went extinct. But nature rewards us for not going extinct. Happiness, therefore, in the nature, in the natural scheme, is a means, not an end. We think of it as an end. We pursue happiness and all that. One thing parents say about their children is, I just want them to be happy.

So that is seen as a supreme ultimate goal. But the way it's built into the mind, it's more of a means. You feel happy when things occur that will promote your chances to survive and reproduce. One of my big papers, for example, was on the need to belong is a basic human motivation. Freud said the basic motivations are sex and aggression. And I said, well, he's missing something there. We're strongly motivated to connect with others, to form relationships, and not to break those relationships.

And sure enough, if you look at the emotions, the positive emotions very routinely come from increasing social bonds, you know, getting married or joining a group or being accepted into some kind of elite thing. And by the same token, damage to a relationship produces a lot of, negative relationship negative emotions so it's sadness and grief and anger and jealousy and so on so there's a pretty strong line up there that uh that the the emotions are there to help us feel even signal like anxiety is often a signal that some relationship is in trouble So happiness is there to guide us to do things as far as nature cares,

as far as nature built us to do things that basically will improve life, to prolong life and help us reproduce. As point about happiness being fleeting, well, that's a complicated one. Certainly positive feelings come and go. One way to measure happiness is sort of the balance. If we ping you at 20 times over the course of a week and ask you, are you feeling good or bad right now? If most of them are good, then you're a happy person. If most of them are bad, then you're counted as an unhappy person.

So that's one way to do it. The other is the bird's eye view. How satisfied are you with your life as a whole right now? The thing is, these are remarkably durable. I remember some time ago reading the early research on that, And they attract people. First of all, they surveyed how happy, who is happy and who is unhappy and why. You know, you're happy as you have a good marriage.

You're unhappy because you're a bad job and your boss is a jerk. You're unhappy because you have money problems. You're happy because you're all these things are very specific. They follow the people up 10 years later. And so most of those things have changed. You have a new job. You have a new car. All of the are mostly gone.

But the happy people are still happy. The unhappy people are still unhappy. It's remarkably stable over 10 years. The best predictor, you know, they just found new things to be happy or unhappy about. So you tend to think, yeah, I'm happy because of this. But there's something about yourself that does it. This is not a nice romantic view, but probably there's some genetic aspect. Yeah.

Tell my students, you know, if you meet some. sometimes you can tell, I'll bet he was a happy baby. That's the kind of person you want to marry. Because they're going to be happy and they'll be pumping positive emotion until they're all the time. Other people are just sort of chronically miserable. And you get connected with one of those. Well, that's going to make your life get worse.

Unfortunately, nature is figured out. that we can spot this. And so when you're in love, a lot of the negative emotions disappear. So it has kind of a bait and switch idea that a real unhappy, depressed sort of person will fall in love and be happy. But that only lasts maybe a year.

And if you've gotten married, then you've got the rest of your life to be with some miserable, unhappy person. I know some of those people. Yes, I'm sorry. It's amazing to think about it. In some ways, it almost feels like a magnet. You know, like sometimes those, I know I'm kind of birdwalking here,

but it seems like some of the happy people that I know have found some of the miserable people, and vice versa. It's almost like life is attracting these two. You guys are two polar opposites. You should be in the middle somewhere. Is there any sort of evidence for like that sort of attraction that happens between two opposites, you think? Well, this has been much debate. it actually so do similar people attract birds of a feather or does it

opposites attract I'd say 90 95% of the time it's the similar ones that win there are some opposite cases particularly like a dominating one and a submitting one I mean my parents marriage my my mother grew up scared of her father and mother and older mothers. They all told her what to do. So she wanted to marry somebody who would tell her what to do and what to think. And my father was happy to play that role. And so, I mean, they were married for 70 years.

It worked very well. But they were clearly opposite on that trait. But for the most part, they were similar in lots of ways. I did look at self-control when I was doing that research. as we talked about that as part of free will. And on that, it seems like there's a sexual attraction of opposites. We had one big project where we looked at dating couples,

married couples, and then same-sex friends, and looked at are they similar or different on self-control? Well, first of all, in terms of what made them happy, it was the total amount of self-control. It wasn't the difference. So it wasn't either similarity. or difference that produced happiness. It's the more self-control either person has,

the happy or the other one is. But there was, in the dating couples, there was some sign of opposites attracting. It goes to the idea that people really different from you. The great Daryl Bem called it, the exotic becomes erotic. What's different from you becomes sexually exciting. So the highly organized buttoned down everything in its place person is attracted to the wild and crazy one.

And vice versa. So that was strong in the dating couples. It was significant but weak in marriage. And then there was no sign of it in the same sex friends. So it clearly goes with a sexual attraction because that's sort of the prominent in dating. Sex is there in marriage, but there are lots of other things. I read somebody say once that managing a marriage is like running a small business. And so you want to have a partner who, you know, will pay the bills or take care of things.

And so on. So the opposite subtraction isn't there. And that's where, as I said, over the long term, the higher both people are on self-control, the better the relationship does. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. Here we go. We got Gabrielle coming in. She says, how can insights from the science of free will inform the way we approach ethical decision-making in a world increasingly characterized by complex moral dilemmas?

That's exactly what it's for. The moral agent is one of the big aspects of free will. I think free will operating in society is two things. responsibility and autonomy. Autonomy is self-government to make your choices. And responsible means understanding the consequences of your actions and accepting them. And so morality is very, very important with that. And so the human free will is partly there to enable us to make good moral choices to think the situation through. Now, this is not to deny people often make. moral decisions based on a gut feeling that this is right or wrong but the gut feeling can be

informed and changed by influence from others by talking about it by uh i studied guilt for a while and often guilt comes up people didn't mean to do anything wrong but they found out afterwards they hurt somebody's feelings or whatever and then they they feel guilty about that and so they think about how did this come about how can i avoid doing this again um And in that way, people learn and they become a better person. That's what's sometimes also called counterfactual thinking, whereas you replay the past, only you acted differently. You know, especially after something went badly. You think, okay, what could I have done differently that would have produced a better result?

And so you can really learn a lot from a single event, much more again than other animals, because it's not clear the other animals can do this, can replay the past. say if only I had climbed the tree faster or whatever. But human beings do this, do this a lot and we replay it. And so you can have even a life-changing experience from one event that you reflect on and learn from. That's a lot of what free will is, is consciously thinking about things, understanding the sequences of events, the narratives, that this action leads to this result, that actually leads to a different result. I did this. I'm not happy with the result. I should have done that next time I'll do the other one. So all that conscious thinking, exploring multiple

alternatives, possibilities, and using ideas to guide behavior because moral principles are often are that. That's why people can talk about morality and debate what's wrong. The last part of Gabriel's are a question that modern life raises more and more complicated ethical dilemmas. Well, that's unfortunately true. It's nice to have a simple life and simple answers, but you're going to live in a complex modern world. There are all sorts of layers of argument. I heard people debating about vegetarianism and saying, well, it's nicer to the animals if we don't eat them. And others were saying, well, if we stopped eating meat and eggs, chickens would probably go extinct. There are like 34 billion chickens in the world, mostly there because they make food for us.

And if we stop doing that, would they go extinct? So the moral dilemmas are complicated, yes, in the modern life, and especially as you adopt an increasingly global perspective. But that's what we have the advanced power of the big brain for and the ability to talk to others about them is really important again. It's interesting. I can't help but think of, there was a book I read a while back called The Fourth Turning and it talks about just different generations. And I'm curious to get your ideas on, you know, we spoke a little bit about evolution, but how about the evolution of ideas? Do you think as every generation moves on, like, our ideas change, like the same way language kind of changes in a way? Like, I know that's kind of a broad, broad, broad question.

But what is your take on generations changing ideas? All right. So human societies may be listed, existed for 150,000 years. 140,000 or 100 gatherers. Probably there wasn't a lot of change during that phase. But in the modern world, everyone's been saying, I think quite plausibly that the pace of change has greatly increased. So some things change faster than others, to be sure. But partly with the wider network, we can share more information, hear more different ideas and different approaches.

It's easier to question how we do things because we encounter other people who do things differently, which, again, was probably not much the case for the first 100,000, 150,000 years. So tradition that we worked out a way to do things, and that's the way we do it. And so we keep doing it that way. The older ones, teach the young ones, how we do things. Humans are especially adept at learning that not just how to do things, but how we do things. I don't know if you know those studies on over imitation. So you can, I say there's a box with food in it.

And you go over to the box and twirl around in a circle and pat your head on three times. And then you lift up one side of the box and the thing opens up and there's food inside. So a gorilla or a chimpanzee watching you will just, we'll see that there's food inside. We'll go over the box, open the food and get it. And it's not going to turn around in a circle or pat itself on the head. But the human child will do all those things. We'll copy the full procedure. It's sort of learning the cultural script as well as learning the pragmatic point that,

no, there's food in the box. So we adapt that way. And we learn the norms of our group and the language of our group. And so that's part of the human system. To change, again, we're more able to change as well and to question systems and to think of alternatives, which again is a big part of free will. Like the example of wolves, for example, wolves are extremely social animals. but a pack of wolves living out in the forest will live pretty much the same way that they did 10,000 years ago.

They have not invented democracy or created technology or market economy. They have not reinvented the roles of women, female wolves, anything like that. The basic social structure remains the same, whereas human societies are constantly changing. It's one of the interesting things we talked about culture. And it's common to talk about the culture as a thing as if it's stable. And you have to realize there are differences that are enduring. But yet all cultures are always continuing to change some faster than others. But new information comes in and new opportunities and new society can be reformed with different kinds of systems.

Democracy is really spreading over much of the way. world, but there were long periods where there was hardly any democracy. You can say there were some in the hunter gatherers, but that was perhaps different, and it wasn't a representative democracy either. Yeah, it's just, it's mind-blowing to some time. Sometimes I just, I do that. I zone out and I think of the big picture and how the world's changing and it blows my mind. We got Lonnie coming in over here from New Jersey. Hello, Lonnie. Given your experience

bridging academic and popular spheres, how would you encourage people to approach the idea of free will in their everyday lives? Well, in their everyday lives. Well, certainly you can use it to get better results.

If we think of, obviously the question, through me a little bit. Sorry. No worries. Take your time. So there's several key points. One is the limited energy aspect and this this was in my willpower book that all this extra thinking and stuff takes extra energy and so your your mind gets depleted. So free will is not something we're using all the time. It just we use it on crucial things. Like I said, example where you're walking to the store and your your path is blocked. Well then you have to figure out an

new path. But the rest of the time, you're just doing it automatically, which takes much less energy. So one thing is to realize the limited amount of energy that you have when you've made a lot of decisions. You'll start to make them more casually. There's a cool study, Levav, and some colleagues did with Audi dealers. When you buy a car, you have a lot of. You have a lot of of decisions to make, perhaps especially with an Audi. So they changed the order in which people, they scrambled the order for different people in which they'd make the decisions. And they found that regardless of what the order was, as people went along, they're more and more likely to take whatever was standard. So the first ones you think hard or you're exactly what do I want,

what do I need in my car. And after a while, your decision-making mechanism gets tired. It's used up some of its energy, ego depleted, as we say. And so you start to just go on automatic, and we just follow whatever is standard or what everybody else does. So that's something to be aware of, that the powers of free will are limited. They're very useful and adaptive. You can think about the four main kinds of things that are affected there to go down from the grand concept of free will into more specific behavior.

So self-control is one. That's overriding one response to substitute a different response. You know, basically interrupting what you're doing, resisting temptation, maximizing your work performance, controlling your negative emotions, things like that. Rational choice is another. Thinking through logically what's the best thing to do. Yeah, it's good to stop and do. this periodically as you know we're in the habit of reacting automatically you say well stop and think

you know what are all the options and what is the most sensible one that will lead to the result I want third is planning people do a lot of planning it's it's not clear that other animals are even capable of planning certainly beyond very minimal kinds of steps but we can make elaborate plans or I'm going to do this and then we'll do this and then it'll lead to that and that. And planning really does help you get to your goals. People who do more planning are more successful in life. So planning is forth. And then finally active instead of passive responding to take control to speak up,

to stand up, to take initiative rather than just being passive and letting things happen to you and going along with the flow. even perhaps criticizing a group and saying, I think what we're all doing here doesn't really make sense. It's not going to get us to the right answer. And some people will do that. And a lot of people don't. They'll just go along with the group and follow along into disaster.

So those would be things in everyday life where you can apply the free will, understand how it works, and really get the most out of it. That's a fantastic answer. Thanks for that. It's a... Ben, we got Ben, Doc Askins coming in from Kentucky. And he says, looking back over your career, how have you, how have your own beliefs about free will evolved? Well, let me see. I think there was a period when I didn't believe in it.

As a young man, I was smitten with the elegance of determinism that everything is caused and everything is inevitable. and the laws of physics must explain everything and they have no room for free will. And gradually some wise older people helped me see that that's really kind of a dead end sort of view. And I look back on that phase as intellectual masturbation. It's an elegant idea. It gives you a sense of superiority and so on, but it really doesn't apply to how we live our lives. We don't live in a deterministic world.

Maybe some of the physical things are. I could turn the light switch on and the lights come on. But for our human relationships, there are built on multiple possibilities. and options and indeed in psychology are now become kind of an anti-determinist all the findings from scientific psychology are probabilistic not deterministic in other words a psychologist will do an experiment and they change the odds of responding in a certain way but they don't guarantee it and deterministic is that

cause always produces the same effect you know unless another cause, which always overrides it, happens to do so. It's sort of the clockwork universe. Everything is a, universe is a giant machine, and the future is completely inevitable. As I said, it's a seductive view. Christianity had its version of it and predestination. The scientists have had it for a while,

although modern science isn't really compatible with determinism either, as I understand it, talking about quantum physics and even relativity theory poses some challenges. So, yes, my ideas have indeed changed. The long program of research of lab studies I did with many talented colleagues on self-control and decision-making. and so on that really informed and changed my views as well. The limited energy idea I didn't have in the early part of my career. And that just at first emerged from trying to learn about self-control and just reading all the research I can find on it.

And then we started doing experiments and they worked very well. So, yeah, the idea that it takes extra energy to use free will to the full. list and after you do, your energy is somewhat depleted. So if you have another demand for self-control or rational thinking, decision fatigue is another term for this. Then you won't do it as effectively until you have time to replenish with, say, rest or sleep or something else. Thank you for that. It's a wonderful answer. And I'm thankful that you got to, that you shared it with us. I got a, I got my friend Hank Foley coming in that says, do you have any thoughts on psychedelics and altered states of consciousness?

Well, I don't know what they have to do with free will, but I do. I do. And I mean, these things fascinate me as a psychologist just as a way of exploring the hidden corners of the mind. Psychedelic means revealing the mind. And so that's what every psychologist wants. Yes, how can we? How can we learn about the mind?

With some of those, I wrote some papers on LSD years ago. My takeaway part of it was that it removes your defenses. So your mind is built a certain way, much of it as a result of learning to focus on certain things and ignore other things. And suddenly those defenses are gone. that's what's great about it because you can find all these things that are in your mind that you didn't know where there. That's also what's occasionally awful about them because, well, you have your defenses for a reason. It's true. You take somebody who has a lot of defensiveness and so on and give them LSD and then what happens,

the saving grace with LSD is that your attention is Spanish. short and your mind keeps leaping from one thing to another. So you might have realized, oh my God, this is a terrible thing, but let it go. And then five minutes later, your mind will be on to something else. But the bad trips were people would seize on that and try to fight that, but they can't fight it. And so it would get this sort of self-perpetuating panic reaction that you can't let go. and then people go to the hospital, which is probably one of the last places you want to go on an LSD trip.

It's so true. Yeah. So anyway, I think they're a fascinating tool for exploring the mind. There are also therapeutic applications, which are reasonably well supported and a number of them, and there's still being work on that.

I heard some recent papers on iOS. Huska and ecstasy, MDMA, in terms of helping people accept things or change things about their lives. So the upside potential is good. They do not seem to be very addictive, so the downside is bad, but people will do crazy things on them. And so there is a certain danger. it's when there are benefits for a lot and danger for a few I mean that's that's the societal dilemma and uh to we deprive the many of the benefits of it to prevent the few from self-harm I forget addiction researchers have talked about that about the long tail to all these substances even

starting with alcohol I mean lots and lots of people drink alcohol no I've been known to have the class of champagne myself. And it doesn't cause any problems or damages, but a few people really mess themselves up. They drive cars or they become addicted and so on. And there's no perfect solution there. And we see worldwide all sorts of solutions from anyone can have alcohol any time to restrict it to adults past a certain age and under uncertain circumstances like not driving a car to some countries that there's none whatsoever.

They visited Saudi Arabia a few years ago and even on the airplane flying there. They said, okay, we have to stop bringing your drinks. This is your last chance to have alcohol until you're on the plane going home. And well, they all work reasonably well. I mean, the people in Saudi Arabia seem quite happy and are getting along. You're too fine without alcohol. Other people enjoy drinking. Other people get into trouble.

I drink too much and get into fights or sleep with the wrong person. I mean bad decisions. So that's getting off the psychedelic aspect. The psychedelics seem less dangerous unless you're driving a car or something. But my interest is partly the potential for exploring the mind and seeing what sorts of things might happen. And you can even realize how much of your understanding of the world is basically just a construct. Yeah. It's interesting to see some of the work on there where it shuts down the default mode network.

And if you think of the default mode network as the way in which you go throughout your day and just make these choices. On some level, it does have an interesting relationship, maybe with free will on a psychedelic type of nature. You know, it brings up another question I have. You've toured around extensively. You've worked with so many great people, and you've got to see a lot of the world.

Is there a difference in different cultures towards free will? That's a good question. And I'm sorry to say that I don't have a lot of evidence about that. people everywhere seem to have the same basic intuitions about it. So I know some studies that ask, you know, if you put a ball on the hill, does it have to roll down? Well, yes, the ball does not have a choice. But if you have a person on the hill, can the person choose not to walk down? Yes.

So they understand there is a difference that people are able to make choices and control their behavior. and in some sense, some fundamental sense are freer than others. That seems to be fairly universal. In Western civilization, the notion of free will got tied up with the Christian doctrines, as that was the dominant religion for a long time and still it is. It's not as dominant as it was because there are fewer religious people, But so free will was so much shaped by that sort of view. And some of the versions of it that free will means that the soul is causing behavior,

reaching into the brain to do some stuff. That's a peculiar view that may be specific to Western views. but I don't know enough about how other cultures, Islamic cultures, India, Hindu cultures, how do they think about these things to really make a strong statement there? It's fascinating to me. I would say this. I would say that the importance of acting responsibly, autonomy and agency.

Those are pretty much requirements of human societies everywhere. So our specific theories about what free will is and how it works may vary depending on what religion and dominated or what philosophical school in different societies. But the basic everyday points of self-control and planning and decision making, those probably are pretty similar everywhere. I guess. Yeah, it makes sense. It's, you know, it's interesting.

The more, the more we get involved in something, the deeper you go, the bigger it gets. You know what I mean? Like you go in there, you're like, what about this one? That's the beauty of life and the complexity and the wonderful connections that we have and that we see in life. Dr. Roy, this is a fascinating, I can't believe an hour has gone by. Like, I feel like it was five minutes,

And I still probably have like another 15 questions in here to come up. But before I continue, maybe you can just fill us in a little bit more about what is it that you want people to take away from this newest book that you've put in out there? All right. The first point is you can make a scientific theory of free will that many of the past arguments and debates about it are really arguments over term. terminology. Even the scientists I know are skeptical of free will. They agree that the human mental system that controls action is radically different from anything else in nature. Here at Harvard University, there's nothing like Harvard University among any other species. They don't even have schools. Some of them do teach, but, you know, It's not even clear they have intentional teaching that the babies are wired to imitate the elders.

But the elders don't think, oh, today I've got to teach the babies how to, you know, catch a worm or whatever. So evolution gave us something radically new and marvelous. And it's not unscientific. It's a brain system for functioning in culture. And that's the scientific problem. That's what we need to understand. So rather than arguing about does it deserve to be called free will or not, the unscientific definitions I'm not making use of, again, like souls causing behavior or another one is causality doesn't apply from causality.

No, scientific theories are causal theories. But the important features of free will, like the time perspective, unlike other animals, we can project into the future. We can imagine several different possible futures that would result from the present, depending on what I do, on which direction I go. So that's the kind of stuff we need to explore and understand. And that will furnish us with an understanding of free will or more broadly with the understanding of what's special about the psyche. It's beautiful. I would encourage everybody within the sound of our voice to go down to the show notes and check the links. And if you have any questions, go down to Dr. Roy's links down there and reach out to him.

Definitely check out the book, check out the other works. And where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? Well, in terms of people, I find me, my website, Roy Baumweister.com, which is maintained for me by other people. So it's a little behind, but it has my email address and so on. And we updated pretty well. Those are very nice people. So that keeps up with my latest works reasonably well.

In terms of where I'm going, in my age, I've stepped back from teaching and administrative work and all that, which I, the teaching was fun. Administrative work I never liked. So I'm mostly devoting the next decade to peer scholarly work to thinking and reading and writing. I'm not running a big lab anymore. I did that for many years and that was fun. But I work with people who collect data. But still, there's so much scientific work being published and each one sort of addresses a small question.

But somebody needs to read through a lot of these to address the big questions to put them together. And so that's kind of what I want to do. Right now I'm reading about what are the effects of socializing, of interacting with others when you're physically alone. which is I guess what you and I are both doing now. Yeah. Interacting.

But email, of course, many of us spend a couple hours a day on email and you're sitting alone in a room interacting with other people. And yet I think it doesn't really engage the whole person to some extent. And we maybe be losing things, losing some of the response. I taught a seminar here at Harvard last fall. And it turned out it was exactly 50 years since I'd been a senior like they were. It was mostly upper level undergraduates. So it was reflecting on the differences.

Back then, we didn't have all this electronic stuff. My junior, I didn't even have a phone at all. And so it was much more intense competition than it was before grade inflation. So we had to study for three or four hours. But then we would get together with our friends. And some would go to the pub and have a beer. Those were the pot smoking days or whatever. We'd hang out and we'd talk in person and we would laugh out loud and so on.

Now I think a lot of them go alone back to their room. They send out text messages. They type LOL. Right. They laugh out loud. But everybody have asked. I said, do you really laugh out loud every time you type? And they say, no.

And laughing is good for the body and good for the mind. And that's just one of many physical things. So anyway, I'm sort of exploring this. I say all my ideas are subject to revision. So I'll read as much as I can find and then try to figure out what's the big picture with that. So that's one thing I'm working on now and got other projects in the work too. It sounds fascinating. And I hope we continue to see lots and lots of papers published by it.

I would love to learn more about these new things you're learning about and reading about. And I know my audience would as well. And so, well, hang on briefly afterwards, Dr. Roy, just for a few. few moments, but to everybody within the sound of my voice, I hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Please go down and check out the book. Do yourself a huge favor and learn about how free will can play apart in freeing you from some of the burdens in life. If you have the energy to do it, that's all we got. Ladies and gentlemen, have a beautiful day. Aloha.