Initial
studies by Vohs and Schooler, and by Baumeister himself, have found increases
in cheating and aggression in experimental participants, after they were told
by the experimenters that science had proven that free will was
an illusion. In my prior post I noted that it is quite premature to
draw strong conclusions from these few initial studies, as Baumeister and
Schooler have, about any such negative social consequences, for
several reasons: First, these initial studies only
examined antisocial forms of behavior, and so only negative and no
positive consequences could have been observed. Secondly, I
noted that we already have the historical precedent of evolutionary
science andreligion, in which
substantial amounts of evidence in favor of the principle of evolution over the
past 150 years has not shaken people's belief insupernatural causes
such as the act of Creation -- so we probably don't need to be so afraid of
informing the public about studies indicating their lack of free will.
Now,
Baumeister has been careful in his recent posts to
distinguish determinism from causality, and he and I seem to be
converging, via this battle of the blogs, on the notion of relative
freedom. I see the body of social psychological research on unconscious or
automatic causation of social judgment (e.g., stereotyping, forming
impressions of others), social behavior, and social goal pursuits (such ascooperation, competition,
achievement, and affiliation) as showing that the glass of free will is mostly
empty, and Roy sees it as mostly full -- or at least fuller than I
do. But I cannot and do not conclude on the basis of that evidence alone
that free will does not exist, just as Roy cannot and does not conclude from
that evidence that the will is entirely free.
SHOULD
WE TELL THE PUBLIC THAT THEIR BEHAVIOR IS BEING CONTROLLED?
Given
this, I'm not sure what Baumeister, Schooler, and Vohs' position is concerning
informing the public about experimental evidence about limitations in the scope
of free will, or of situations and domains in which people believe they are
exerting free will when in actuality they are not. This is not the same
as telling the public that determinism is an established scientific fact, or
that free will is an illusion (in an absolute sense). Rather, it consists
of reporting to the public evidence of external and internal causes of their
choices and behavior of which they are not aware and did not consciously
intend. In that spirit I want to alert you to anew study, just
published this month in the journal Health
Psychology,that illustrates perhaps the most important reason
why it is irresponsible for us as scientists not to tell the
general public about evidence of limits to the free scope of their will.
As
Baumeister emphasized in his Tampa SPSP debate presentation, the belief in free
will (as distinguished from free will per
se) serves important motivational and subjective functions for the
individual. But it also can cause problems when it leads us to ignore or
dismiss the possibility that there may be powerful influences on our
behavior that we don't know about -- even for important behaviors such as
who and what we vote for, or the kinds and amount of food we eat. If
we believe that we are the absolute captain of our soul, then we don't
worry too much about these potential influences -- and thereby leave
ourselves wide open and vulnerable to them.
Now,
we all know that children are not as able as adults to defend themselves
against ads for toys, cereals, clothes, DVDs, etc., so perhaps this finding is
not that surprising. It certainly suggests that there is a direct and
automatic effect of food ads on consumption behavior in children right then and
there while they are watching television, not only on their preferences for
certain brands or products for their parents to buy
them. And the sheer size of the effect strongly suggests that this
automatic effect on consumption is indeed a contributor to the public health
problem of obesity in children. However, nearly all of the social
psychological research on automatic and unconscious causes of
human judgment and behavior over the years has been conducted on college-age or
older adults, suggesting that adult television viewers might be just as
vulnerable to the deleterious effects of food advertising as are
children.
In
our Study 2, we showed a group of adults a short television
documentary that incidentally included either snack-food ads,
nutritious-food ads, or no food ads. After the program, they took part in
what they thought was a separate study in which they taste-tested a range of
healthy (e.g., fruits) and unhealthy snack foods. We found that the
adults who had been exposed to the snack food ads ate more of all types of food
during the taste test compared to the other conditions. Thus the
automatic effect of snack food ads to increase the amount eaten while
watching television holds for adult as well as child viewers, suggesting that
TV snack and fast-food ads are a contributor to adult obesity as
well. In neither study was the amount eaten related to the participants'
reported levels of hunger, and in careful
questioning after the experiment was over, no one showed any awareness or
appreciation that the amount of food they ate while watching the show was
influenced by the ads they saw. (In studies such as these, participants
typically strongly resist such suggestions.) These are
unconscious effects, and so by definition one is not aware of them while
they are happening. Because people do not experience these influences on their
behavior, they have no chance at correcting or controlling them. The only way then for
the general public to know that there are interested agents out there (e.g.,
advertisers,government) exerting
control over their behavior in these ways is for us as scientists to do these
kind of studies and to report the findings publicly and as widely as possible.
Bottom
line: we should be telling the public the truth about limits to
theirfree will as revealed
in experimental studies, and not decide for them what is good or bad for them
to know. We may think we are doing them a favor by permitting them a
positive illusion, but there are also negative consequences to such naivete --
namely, leaving oneself wide open to being controlled by others who are not so naive.
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