Overstepping the boundaries of free choice: Folk beliefs on free will and determinism in real world contexts

Highlights

• There is strong convergence of folk beliefs on the unconscious in natural examples.

• Marketing is the most frequent example of the use of research on the unconscious.

• Folk beliefs of constructs associated with the unconscious are context dependent.

Abstract

We know little about the commonality of folk beliefs around applications of psychological research on the unconscious control of behaviours. To address this, in Experiment 1 (N = 399) participants volunteered examples of where research on the unconscious has been applied to influence their behaviours. A subset of these were presented in Experiment 2 (N = 198) and Experiment 3 (N = 100). Participants rated the extent to which the behaviour being influenced in these contexts was: (1) via the unconscious, (2) free, (3) the result of prior conscious intentions, (4) under conscious control. Relative to judgements about the extent to which behaviour was influenced via the unconscious, the remaining judgements regarding conscious control of behaviours were either higher (e.g., political contexts) or lower (e.g., therapy). This study is the first to show, using ecologically valid examples, the folk beliefs people share on psychological constructs concerning free will and determinism.

Introduction

There are numerous ways in which psychologists and neuroscientists have characterised the properties of consciousness (e.g., Gangopadhyay et al., 2010, Kihlstrom, 2009, Melnikoff and Bargh, 2018, Newell and Shanks, 2014, Pennartz, 2018, Shea and Frith, 2016). However, in the broadest of terms, consciousness can be conceived of relating to matters regarding awareness (e.g., of ourselves, of our social and physical environment), as well as control (e.g., of perceptual-motor activities, of our social and physical environment) (Osman, 2014). The focus of the present study is to investigate folk beliefs on applications of psychological research on the unconscious control of behaviours.

Do people share similar beliefs regarding the ways in which psychological research on the unconscious has been utilised beyond the academic world (e.g., advertising, government, clinical practice)?. Which are the most commonly held beliefs? Moreover, if unconscious control of behaviours is perceived to be used to influence behaviours in the real world, what type of folk beliefs are there regarding the extent to which conscious choice, conscious intentions, and free-will are maintained? To date, there has been no empirical work designed to answer these questions. Therefore, the aim of this study, which includes three experiments, is to empirically answer these questions.

Folk beliefs on the unconscious and free will. As mentioned, while there is little work investigating the general views people hold regarding the application of psychological research on the unconscious in daily life, there is work examining people’s beliefs on the unconscious, and more often their views on the relationship that this has to free will. For instance, Monroe and Malle (2010) presented people with the question “Please explain in a few lines what you think it means to have free will?”, the responses of their student population were coded into three categories: (a) decision or choice; (b) following one’s desires; and (c) overcoming (internal or external) constraints. The majority of participants volunteered responses falling under the category of ‘decision or choice’ (65%), with another 33% of responses classified under the option ‘following one’s desires’, and 29% providing responses under the category of overcoming external or internal constraints’. The findings suggest some overall agreement in the belief that making a deliberate choice is a demonstration of having free will.

To further explore this, and to consider the role of determinism which was not a concept explicitly referred to by participants in their first study, Monroe and Malle (2010) followed up their study by presenting participants with the following statement “Neuroscientists claim that free will is a false impression; that all of our behaviour is caused by our neural impulses; and that any feelings of controlling our actions are an illusion.” Participants were then asked, “Does this sound believable to you?” and if they disagreed, they were asked to give an argument against the claim. 49% of respondents rejected the claim posed to them, and when it came to rejoinders to the claim, 55% gave responses that referred to having personal choice regardless of the fact that neural impulses may be the underlying basis of behaviour. These, and other findings examining folk beliefs on the unconscious and its association with free will show that the preservation of choice is a strong indicator of conscious behaviour, and a critical indicator of the presence of free will (e.g., Forstmann and Burgmer, 2018, Malle, 2004, Malle and Knobe, 1997, Stillman et al., 2011). This also supports theoretical and empirical work suggesting the strong association that people make between conscious choice, and their sense of personal agency and control (Osman, 2010, Osman, 2014). Moreover, the findings examining folk beliefs regarding free will and consciousness also tend to suggest that people maintain a more complex view of the relationship between the causal efficacy of their conscious choices, which in turn is used as a proxy for free will (Osman, 2014).

In other work exploring the association between folk beliefs on the unconscious and free choice, Shepherd (2012) study finds general support for the view that people judge an agent to have acted freely when presented with descriptions in which consciousness plays a central causal role in an agent’s behaviour. In addition, when consciousness does not play a central causal role in an agent’s behaviour, people tend to judge that the agent did not act freely. Here the evidence suggests that people generally have nuanced beliefs about the central causal relation between consciousness and free choice (Shepard, 2012; Stillman et al., 2011). In Stillman et al. (2011) study, half of their participants were asked to volunteer examples that refer to experiences in their life in which they took an action they considered to be of their own free will. These were coded along several dimensions that included, positive outcomes, goal-attainment, level of consciousness, moral behaviour, acting against external forces, long-term self-interest and short-term self-interest. The study was able to show that general folk beliefs around acting freely relate to experiences of conscious reflection that occurs prior to an action taking place. It is worth noting that the study had independent researchers classify and rate the examples according to different psychological constructs. However, it did not report details about what the actual contexts were, or asked other participants to assess the volunteered contexts according to their judgments and beliefs, instead; this would provide some insights into general folk beliefs regarding experiences where volition is judged to be commonly present and where it is absent.

Further work by Deutschländer, Pauen, and Haynes (2017) examined the way in which folk beliefs impact the interpretation of daily events in relation to consciousness (in the presence of a free action rather than determined by automatic or habitual processes), intention (the presence or absence of conscious intention prior to the action being performed), and whether or not the action is biologically driven (e.g. drinking because one is thirsty) or self-directed (e.g., picking up a book to read). Participants were presented with 12 different scenarios of simple descriptions of daily actions taken (drinking water, reading a book) in which 3 different dimensions were varied (i.e. consciousness, intentions, biological determined actions), and were asked to rate each scenario on the basis of ‘‘How free was the presented action?” (on a scale from 1 = not free to 5 = free) and their confidence in their rating. Deutschländer et al. (2017) found that, a combination of prior intention to act, along with being free to act explained the majority of ratings regarding the extent to which the scenarios demonstrated a free action.

The reviewed work on folk beliefs reveals a close relationship between consciousness and deliberation taking place prior to acting, particularly when early intentions are formed prior to what is judged by people to be a free choice. Furthermore, this work suggests that making conscious decisions is directly related to beliefs about free choice, and that by extension in the absence of making deliberate choices, people believe that they are less free (Vonasch, Baumeister, & Mele, 2018). However, much of the work in the domain of examining folk beliefs tends to involve participants responding to constructed realistic scenarios (Deutschländer et al., 2017, Feltz, 2015, Forstmann and Burgmer, 2018, Malle and Knobe, 1997, Shepherd, 2012), but few are actually drawn from the participants’ own experiences (Monroe and Malle, 2010, Stillman et al., 2011. Therefore, the present study is motivated to further explore people’s lay beliefs on free will and determinism, by using ecologically valid examples volunteered from the participants themselves.

Thus, to establish the generalisability of the pattern findings and to examine the range of actual examples participants volunteer, which has also attracted little empirical attention, the present study aims to address both. In particular, the present study examines the degree of convergence of folk psychological beliefs of the unconscious and related constructs across people, when they are presented with natural examples (by which is meant the examples that are freely volunteered based on personal beliefs and experiences). In addition, it is worth noting that, while Stillman et al. (2011) asked people to volunteer examples of instances in which they had no free choice, they and others have yet to investigated the extent to which the relationship between free will, conscious intentions, conscious control and the unconscious are associated when people don’t have free choice. This matters to the extent that it is possible to show that the direction of the relationship between these four constructs is sensitive to the context in which people are perceived to be acting freely or not, based on natural examples.

For instance, there is a large body of psychological research that examines the role of the unconscious on behaviour (e.g., priming studies), which has had many applications in the real world (e.g., advertising) (e.g., Bargh, 2002, Dijksterhuis et al., 2005, Martin and Morich, 2011, Yoo et al., 2015). Similarly, there is an amassing literature on the use of behavioural interventions, such as nudges – decision-support techniques, designed to direct people to make better lifestyle choices for themselves around their health, finances and wellbeing (e.g., Thaler and Sunstein, 2008, Sunstein, 2017). These methods often, though not exclusively, rely on purported indirect methods of persuasion that apparently redirect unconscious processes, such as presenting artwork on stairwells to unconsciously cue people to use the stairs instead of elevators (e.g. (Åvitsland et al., 2017, Kerr et al., 2001, Marshall et al., 2002), or the use default options, such as opt-in investment and pension funds that also apparently implicly redirect attention towards "better" choices (e.g., Benartzi et al., 2017). There has been considerable discussion on whether these methods are ethical assuming that they do change people’s behaviour without them being aware of the basis for that change (for review see - Lin et al., 2017, Osman et al., 2017). Furthemore, there are debates regarding the extent to which methods of this kind can actually influence people's behaviour unconsciously (Lin et al., 2017). Nevertheless, examples of this kind are often used to suggest that, if information critical to making choices in the real world is presented in a way that people are not conscious of, then they are likely to be making choices that are not under their conscious control, and therefore, not construed as free. However, thus far, there is no empirical work that examines peoples’ folk beliefs regarding the applications of psychological research on the unconscious control of behaviours in typical experiences in daily life, and so the aim of this study is to explore this.

Present study: Experiment 1 was an exploratory study that presented participants with a single open ended question in which participants were asked to describe a typical context in which they thought that psychological research on the unconscious had been used to manipulate people's choices. The most common categories generated from Experiment 1 were used to form a set of naturalist examples in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2 participants rated the examples according to psychological properties that have been previously studied in the context of folk beliefs on conscious choice and free will (Deutschländer et al., 2017, Malle, 2004, Malle and Knobe, 1997, Stillman et al., 2011), and Experiment 3 served as a replication of Experiment 2.