The Ghost in the System: Where Free Will Lurks in Human Minds

written by Jay Michaels & Robin Vallacher
edited by Hans IJzerman

This latter scenario comes very close to capturing the true essence of free will. (Interestingly, a system that is not constrained by an attractor is said to have many “degrees of freedom.”) But this is not the type of free will that people find desirable (cf. Dennett, 1985). To navigate the demands and choices of social life, people need a frame of reference that provides a coherent and stable platform for decision-making and action. Having a surplus of choices can undermine a person’s sense of control, promoting a corresponding decrement in his or her feeling of free will. Harvey and Jellison (1974), for example, found that people had a greater sense of personal freedom and control when they could choose from six as opposed to twelve alternatives. Too much freedom of choice—or conversely, too little constraint—can be aversive, reducing a person’s freedom to a sense of uncertainty and indecision. Faced with this prospect, people look for and embrace cues to higher-order meaning that provide a coherent framework for thought and action—even if this means adopting the perspective of influence agents and authority figures (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987). In effect, the lack of constraints on moment-to-moment dynamics promotes what existentialist philosophers call an “escape from freedom” (e.g., Fromm, 1941).

Constraint and Freedom in the Free Will Debate

There is a certain irony to the dynamical perspective on free will. The dynamics of personal experience—people’s moment-to-moment thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—are constrained by attractors, yet these constraints are also responsible for people’s sense of personal freedom. Attractors provide a coherent and stable framework for disambiguating reality and deciding how one should act. In so doing, Attractors set the stage for a host of (deterministic) mechanisms that generate a rich and dynamic trajectory of mental experience. To the extent that an individual lives “in the moment,” however, the attractor may be invisible, enabling him or her to feel in direct charge of decisions, thoughts, and actions despite the tacit constraints that direct the flow of behavior and the non-conscious mechanisms that service these constraints. Observers, too, are typically mindful of what a person does on a moment-to-moment basis, ascribing freedom (and responsibility) to him or her for what transpires. In effect, “behavior engulfs the field” (Heider, 1944), with inferences about a person’s character based on observers’ sense that the person could have done otherwise at each point in time. Without this sense of free will, prosecution of transgressors—like those involved in the Enron scandal—would make little logical sense as there would be no clear way to distinguish deliberate from unintentional wrong doing.

In sum, the tendency for moment-to-moment thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to coalesce into stable patterns that constrain mind and action co-exists with people’s sense of personal freedom. Free will is thus ultimately in the “I” of the beholder—whether people see freedom as real or as simply an illusion is up to them. We can be fairly certain, though, that the primary players in the free will debate will maintain and vigorously defend their stance on the free will issue, while demonstrating all manner of original and “free” thought.