Determinism

Determinism is the view that human behaviour and thought is caused by external or internal factors and beyond the person’s control. There are two main types of determinism, e.g. external (environmental) and internal (biological and psychic).

Scientific, especially experimental, research, aims to uncover cause and effect relationships; therefore science is fundamentally a determinist approach.

The behaviourist approach proposes that all behaviour is learned and can be explained solely in terms of external (environmental) factors. This is environmental determinism. Skinner argued forcefully that freedom is an illusion, maintained only because people are unaware of the environmental causes of behaviour. Humans are seen as ‘blank slates’ when they come into the world and being totally determined by their experiences. Bandura suggested ‘reciprocal determinism’, a position where the environment influences the individual who on the other hand influences the environment.

Psychic determinism refers to the psychoanalytic approach, which suggests that adult behaviour or personality is predetermined by events in early childhood. Freud believed that the actual causes of our behaviour are unconscious and therefore hidden (i.e. internal). Psychoanalysis is based on principle that people can change so therefore there must be a certain amount of free will. Freud warned against “over determination” warning that behaviour has multiple causes some of which are conscious and therefore can be subject to free will. The two instincts Eros (life) and Thanatos (death) also determine a person’s behaviour.

The biological approach also sees a certain predictability regarding thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. This is because it thinks our biology (physiology and genetics) determines, or makes us what we are, and what we will become. This is a naive view of what it means to be human. Biological determinism ignores the great influence positive and negative experiences the environment can have on behaviour.

The cognitive approach is to a large extent seen as mechanistic, and any mechanistic explanation is said to be determinist because it suggests that a particular action will result in a predictable result. Cognitive psychology is divided in several areas but in its essence it focuses on different cognitive processes, many of which are automatic. The view of the mind is that it can be compared to a machine (computer analogy) and that thinking takes place in sequential patterns, one step causing the next. So where is free will? The common-sense idea of free will is that our actions follow from a conscious intention to act.

However, the philosophical argument to this would be that there are limitations on our freedom to act, e.g. because we’re not conscious about many of the acts we commit (e.g. that you take the train to get to work) and that most of cognitive processing is automatic and not really the result of intentional behaviour. Human agency can be seen as a feature of autonomous creatures that all the same life in a deterministic universe.

There is a strong divide between an inside world and an outside world, and thoughts must get out in order to cause action, i.e. bodily actions must be caused by non-physical symbolic thoughts. It seems that e.g. skills (related to procedural memory) that are so well learned that they are incorporated into a flow of behaviour take place without much consciousness, i.e. each sequence of the behaviour is not the result of deliberation.

In spite of this, it can be argued that all behaviour is to some extent caused, but it is often argued that cognitive psychology is related to soft determinism in that free will is not freedom from causation but freedom of coercion and constraint (James 1890), i.e. if actions are voluntary and in line with our conscious desired goals they are free.