Free Will and Wishful Thinking

To see how wishful thinking might relate to the free will problem, consider Shaun Nichols’ excellent article “The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy.”  In that article, Nichols wrote:

“Many of us incompatibilists think we know the answer to this: it’s wishful thinking!  Philosophers embrace compatibilism because they want it to be true. This view is, I think, common among incompatibilists.”

Of course, compatibilists are not the only ones who raise suspicions about wishful thinking.  When I think of wishful thinking, I think of libertarianism—which strikes me as not unlike creationism in its speculative physics and religious undertones.  But even those who would deny the existence of free will are not immune to these accusations.  I can think of at least the following five ways in which wishful thinking can infect free will theorists:

1.    we want more free will for ourselves and so adopt concepts of free will that are more extravagant—and believe the concept refers to something real (libertarianism)
2.    we want “free will”, whatever it is, to exist and so settle for a concept that refers to something actual (compatibilism)
3.    we worry that if people stop believing in free will, chaos will result, and so assert its existence (or encourage others to keep its nonexistence a secret) (illusionism)
4.    we want to be shocking, pugnacious, and smugly “above” the superstitious beliefs of free willists, and so deny its existence (free will non-realism)
5.    we believe that denying the existence of free will is morally beneficial and so deny the existence of free will (free will non-realism)

Finally, in discussing free will and wishful thinking, I think it’s important to consider a psychological theory I just discovered—reactance theory.  According to Wikipedia, reactance is “an emotional reaction in direct contradiction to rules and/or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms.”

People absolutely detest having their freedoms limited.  Kids hate going to bed on time.  In some cultures, adults hate having their parents choose their spouse.  American colonists hated the oppression of the British Empire.  The problem comes, of course, when reactance goes too far, as it surely sometimes must—when people hate feeling confined by their genetics, by their childhood environment, or by the factors before their birth that necessarily determine their lives.  People can shrug off the British Empire; they can’t shrug off their destiny—and, at least in deterministic universes, we all have a destiny.

People hate being predictable too.  Predictability, like narrowed options, makes us vulnerable.  And we loathe being vulnerable.  For example, in nature and in game theory, the most desirable strategy is often perfect randomness.  But when reactance goes too far, even deterministic randomness will not suffice (Dennett makes a similar point in critiquing Kane’s view).  Whenever I see a squirrel zigzagging back and forth, as it must whenever evading a predator, I feel reassured that all philosophical squirrels must be libertarians.

Perhaps the most important aspect of wishful thinking is sex appeal.  If cognitive biases distort our understanding of reality, one must ask “how could such distortions evolve?”  According to Robert Trivers, one way such biases might evolve is to improve our ability to lie to others.  If “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” then free will must surely be sexy—sexier than saying “I’m powerless and it’s all fate.”  A person who genuinely believes he has free will is less likely to betray the truth when trying to convince another that he has free will.  “Oh, don’t worry about me; No matter how bad my past is, my future can still be bright, because I am completely unconstrained by my history; I’m new and exciting; You never know what I’m going to do next; I evade predators; I keep things spontaneous; I’m unpredictable… I have free will.”  The illusion of control and/or wishful thinking might have evolved if they helped our ancestors get away with these sexy lies.

Gardeners: how do you think wishful thinking influences the free will problem?

Comments

[Alan]

Kip, I think this is a great post. And not just because I'm exhibiting avoidance behavior after an afternoon of reading bad analyses of Schopenhauer's prescient argument for determinism. You got me thinking. . .

Could it be that part of what you refer to as wishful thinking is the understandably logical need for consistency and coherence for the philosophical components in one's world views? (I recently expressed some thoughts on this in my contribution to the Philosophy of the X-Files book, op. cit. as they use to say.) Libertarianism connects with traditional western religious traditions in a very natural way after all(Calvinism, etc. noted as exceptions), and especially those that solve the problem of evil via FW (typically incompatibilist FW). Compatibilism (and in another way, HD-incompatibilism) has a facile connection with a purely naturalistic view of the world, especially if human nature constitutes a deterministic system. All of this may well be dubbed a form of wishful thinking, but at least it's well-motivated by yearnings for pieces of the big puzzle that fit.

[Bill Edmundson]

Kip, I would add:

6. we don't want to feel responsible for our sins, and so we deny a likely presupposition of that responsibility.

Reactance theory applies here, too. We may feel constrained by a ledger of misdeeds associated with our names, and we detest the loss of a freedom only innocence knows. (Russell asked Wittgenstein whether he was brooding over logic or his sins. He answered, "Both.")

"Wishful thinking" isn't so much an objection as a kind of default error theory--simple, easy, and ad hominem.

[Drake]

"6. we don't want to feel responsible for our sins, and so we deny a likely presupposition of that responsibility."

I took this mostly to be the meaning of Kip's no. 5. In any case, it doesn't seem to fit the data. Incompatibilists experience guilt in much the same way as libertarians and compatibilists. Moreover, I'd say incompatabilists "accept" personal moral responsibility in much the same way these other groups do, and there's a pragmatic argument that they ought to. (This being a different question than that about grounding third-person attributions of moral blame.) Finally, if you don't want to feel responsible for your sins, there are other, more conventional ways of assuaging guilt, such as rationalization or petitioning for forgiveness.

[Mark Smeltzer]

"Wishful thinking" connotes undisciplined rational processes that tend to promote pleasing premises by the active denial of powerful contrary evidence. If someone considers the mitigating evidence in a disciplined manner can rejects or otherwise repudiates that evidence, it is hardly fair to call that an instance of wishful thinking.

That said, it is clear it would be a category fallacy to insinuate that wishful thinking applies to philosophical argumentation. Wishful thinking is properly predicated of participants in a debate -- any debate -- in virtue of their personal reasons for irrational acceptance or rejection of the premise(s) of an argument.

There are only two reasons worth noting to consider a specific opposition's unwillingness to change their mind: 1) attempting to derive a more effective means and 2) knowing when to quit. (1) represents a very slippery slope for philosophers since it can quickly degenerate to mere psychology and marketing and lead to ethically dubious means. (For example, I think some of Dennett's recent work paints a great picture of a philosopher who is willing to compromise the integrity of his reasoning in favoring of adopting strategies that will win more converts.)

[Cihan Baran]

Kip,

Lately, I have been reading some psychological literature on people's implicit theories of intelligence, moral character and so on - in general, people views of how much control they have. (You can see that I am rather interested in the notion of control.)

Anyway, I am happy to say that there might be some (albeit tangential) evidence to what you are getting at.

I don't know how relevant this will be to the discussion but I am hoping you will find it engaging nonetheless.

For instance it turns out that people who want to self-validate tend to think that their character traits are uncontrollable when these traits are undesirable. According to El-Alayli and Gabriel (2007):
A self-validation motivation involves a desire to establish or prove basic self-worth (Dykman, 1998), that is, to justify the current self. This motivation should cause
people to want to view their negative traits as less controllable the more they possess them. Viewing the negative traits they possess as uncontrollable allows them to avoid taking blame for possessing those traits. Conversely, viewing the negative traits they lack as controllable allows
them to take credit for refraining to develop those traits. Thus, lazier people should be more inclined to view laziness as a trait they cannot control because they want to
feel that their laziness is not their fault; there is nothing they can do to reduce their laziness. Conversely, individuals low in laziness should want to view laziness as controllable so they can believe that their own abilities or efforts prevented them from becoming lazy.

(These are their hypotheses but they also have empirical evidence for these in the paper I am citing from.)

And in order to validate themselves, people view their positive traits as controllable:

For similar reasons, self-validation should motivate people to view their positive traits as more controllable the more they possess them. That way they could take credit for the positive traits they possess while avoiding
blame for failing to develop the positive traits they lack. Very sociable people should want to view sociability as controllable so they can take credit for being sociable.
Less sociable people should want to view sociability as uncontrollable so they do not feel responsible for their low sociability. Thus, self-validation has opposite pre-
dictions for negative and positive traits. A man who is very irritable and very smart may want to see irritability as uncontrollable and thus not his fault but intelligence as a trait that he admirably developed himself.
Support for the self-validation perspective comes from research showing that the need to justify the current self is so strong that the past self is often denigrated in its
service (Wilson & Ross, 2001).

But there is another type of motivation - self-growth- that has the opposite effect. People who want to change themselves or improve their lives for the better see their negative traits as controllable (hence likely to disappear in the future) and their positive traits as static (hence likely to stay with them in the future):
For example, a woman who is very irritable would be motivated to see irritability as controllable so she feels that she can potentially reduce her irritability. A woman
low in irritability may not feel a need to view irritability as controllable or improvable because she has a desirable level of the trait.

So where does that leave us? I think the paper echoes your main message in that there are biases operating in both ways - biases that favor the idea of control and biases that favor the opposite. So it is not correct to think wishful thinking leads only to compatibiism.

Lastly, I want to say that as philosophers we tend to look down upon "wishful thinking". (Who after all doesn't think Clifford makes a convincing case?)
However, there is psychological evidence that people who have malleable theories of intelligence, character and other attributes(does this count as 'wishful thinking'? I don't know) tend to cope with failure better. Here is a quote from Dweck:
In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many of the problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easy problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

....

Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

For the full article, see here.

[Kip Werking]

Various responses:

Alan:

Thanks! I think the danger of "worldview conformism type wishful thinking" is relevant to libertarians, because libertarians are making (extraordinary) claims about how the world and the human brain works (namely that it works in an indeterministic sort of way). I think this danger is less relevant to compatibilists and non-realists because virtually all of these make no controversial claims about how the world works. Compatibilists say we're safe either way; non-realists say we're damned either way.

Bill:

I agree that wishful thinking is less of an objection than a psychological observation (perhaps even an ad hominem one). I was not trying to disprove any given camp in the free will debate, and was instead only drawing attention to certain psychological phenomena/possibilities that I hope other Gardeners find interesting too.

Finally, everyone knows that, in general, having free will is more desirable than not having it. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, I think it is important to go over just what the psychological literature says about this desire. Most of this research involves children. Here are some interesting quotes from two pop psych books about reactance and the desire for control:

The first is from Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion:

"As opportunities become less available, we lose freedoms; and we *hate* to lose the freedoms we already have. This desire to preserve our established prerogatives is the center-piece of psychological reactance theory, developed by psychologist Jack Brehm to explain the human response to diminishing personal control. According to the theory, whenever free choice (!) is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms make us desire them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than previously. So when increasing scarcity--or anything else--interferes with our prior access to some item, we will *react against* the interference by wanting and trying to possess the item more than before.

...

One Virginia-based study nicely captured the terrible twos style among boys who average twenty-four months in age. The boys accompanied their mothers into a room containing two equally attractive toys. The toys were always arranged so that one stood next to a transparent Plexiglas barrier and the other stood behind the barrier. For some of the boys, the Plexiglas sheet was only a foot tall--forming no real barrier to the toy behind, since the boys could easily reach over the top. For the other boys, however, the Plexiglas was two feet tall, effectively blocking the boys' access to one toy unless they went around the barrier. The researchers wanted to see how quickly the toddlers would make contact with the toys under these conditions. Their findings were clear. When the barrier was too small to restrict access to the toy behind it, the boys showed no special preference for either of the toys; on the average, the toy next to the barrier was touched just as quickly as the one behind... when the barrier was big enough to be a true obstacle, the boys went directly to the obstructed toy, making contact with it three times faster than with the unobstructed toy. In all, the boys in this study demonstrated the classic terrible twos' response to a limitation of their freedom: outright defiance."

And the second (and last) excerpt is from Stumbling on Happiness:

"The surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to *exercise* control--not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective--changing things, influencing things, making things happen--is one of the fundamental needs wiith which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control. Before our hutts hit the very first diaper, we already have a throbbing desire to suck, sleep, poop, and make things happen. It takes us a while to get around to fulfilling the last of these desires only because it takes us a while to figure out that we have fingers, but when we do, look out world.

...

The fact is that human beings come into the world with a passion for control, they go out of the world the same way, and research suggests that if they lose their ability to control things at any point between their entrance and their exit, they become unhappy, helpless, hopeless, and depressed. And occasionally dead. In one study, researchers gave elderly residents of a local nursing home a houseplant. They told half the residents that they were in control of the plant's care and feeding (high-control group), and they told the remaining residents that a staff person would take responsibility for the plant's well-being (low-control group). Six months later, 30 percent of the residents in the low-control group had died, compared with only 15 percent of the residents in the high-control group.

...

Our desire to control is so powerful, and the feeling of being in control so rewarding, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable. For instance, people bet more money on games of chance when their opponents seem incompetent than competent--as though they believed they could control the random drawing of cards from a deck and thus take advantage of a weak opponent. People feel more certain that they will win a lottery if they can control the number on their ticket, and they feel more confident that they will win a dice toss if they can throw the dice themselves. People will wager more money on dice that have not yet been tossed than on dice that have already been tossed but whose outcome is not yet known, and they will bet more if they, rather than someon eelse, are allowed to decide which number will count as a win.

...

These and other findings have led some researchers to conclude that the feeling of control--whether real or illusory--is one of the well-springs of mental health. So if the question is "Why should we want to control our futures?" then the surprisingly right answer is that it feels good to do so--period. Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy. The act of steering one's boat down the river of time is a source of pleasure, regardless of one's port of call."

[Cihan Baran]

Hey Kip,

Don't you think that the control that is being mentioned in this sort of literature is just "compatibilist control" (freedom from coercion, freedom to do whatever you want, freedom to endorse whichever desire you want to endorse etc.)?

Let's take Daniel Gilbert's example:"In one study, researchers gave elderly residents of a local nursing home a houseplant. They told half the residents that they were in control of the plant's care and feeding (high-control group), and they told the remaining residents that a staff person would take responsibility for the plant's well-being (low-control group). Six months later, 30 percent of the residents in the low-control group had died, compared with only 15 percent of the residents in the high-control group."

Suppose that these elders, in the high-control group, were, let's just stipulate, really in control of the houseplant.

Now in one case, let's just stipulate that these elders exercised their control of the houseplant by agent-causing (in the most metaphysically maniac way) their decisions and actions.

Suppose in the other case, they were just determined to do what they did and they just had plain, old compatibilist control. They just reflected on their values and desires and endorsed certain outcomes in a plain, old, deterministic universe.

Also suppose that actions, decisions and outcomes in both cases are identical. The only difference is the underlying mechanism through which agency is exercised.

Now, does it really matter to the elders that they agent-caused their actions as opposed to having a more shallow compatibilist control? I just have the intuition it doesn't matter the foggiest bit.

What matters is that the agents in question have compatibilist control.

Now if you interpret results this way, these experiments can't be used to draw any incompatibilist conclusions from them, since what these experiments show is that agents want only compatibilist control. In fact, this might be the only thing worth wanting - I am not going to call it "freedom" but still, it might be the only thing worth wanting. With that in mind, it's hard to see why the absence of free will should be regrettable...

[Kip Werking]

Cihan,

Thanks for keeping the thread alive.

First of all: I hesitate to say that free will is regrettable, because free will in the Galen Strawson sense (which, I think for a variety of subtle reasons, has a better claim to what people mean by the term "free will" than other, e.g. compatibilist, definitions) is non-sense. It is like regretting that 2+2=4. I am not sure how I can regret that, why I should regret that, or what it would be for 2+2 to not equal four. I'm pretty sure it's impossible.

This is an important distinction between my own view and, say, Saul Smilansky's (who studied under G. Strawson), who has repeatedly stated or suggested that free will's non-existence is regrettable or "bad news".

The problem is not so much that it is regrettable that people lack free will (if they do, or to the extent they do), but rather that they *think* it is.

The point I was hinting at in my post and comment (however inartfully) is that the denial of something makes people *irrationally* value it, not that it makes them rationally value it.

Consider the kids who wanted the forbidden toy. Was this toy better than the other toy? Was it cooler? Shinier? Louder? More entertaining? No. They just wanted it because it was forbidden, because it was denied to them.

In the same way, at least some people will want free will, whatever it is, just because it gives them more options. People have a very strong preference for "more options are better", even if following that train of thought to its extreme results in paradoxes and impossibilities.

[Cihan Baran]

Kip,

Here is a better way to express what I was trying to say.

What the psychological literature shows is that people want compatibilist control. But from the fact that people want compatibilist control, you can't infer that people want free will.

Now I agree that there may be independent reasons for thinking that people want free will (as you say "[t]he problem is not so much that it is regrettable that people lack free will (if they do, or to the extent they do), but rather that they *think* it is" or as Leiter quotes: "As Galen Strawson has noted, the incompatibilist idea of responsibility 'has for a long time been central to the Western religious, moral and cultural traditions.'") but again this doesn't follow from anything in Stumbling on Happiness or Psychology of Persuasion.

It seems to me that it doesn't follow from cognitive biases either because, for instance, the illusion of control is the illusion of compatibilist control.

You also write that: "It is like regretting that 2+2=4. I am not sure how I can regret that, why I should regret that, or what it would be for 2+2 to not equal four. I'm pretty sure it's impossible."

Lately, I have been reading some philosophy of mind and I think a distinction David Chalmers makes in his article "The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism" can help us here. Here is what he says:"We can say that S is prima facie conceivable (for a subject) when that subject is unable to rule out the hypothesis expressed by S by a priori reasoning, on initial consideration. We can say that S is ideally conceivable when the hypothesis expressed by S cannot be ruled out a priori, even on ideal rational reflection. The main difference here is that prima facie conceivability is tied to a subject's contingent cognitive limitations, while ideal conceivability abstracts away from those limitations.

Some examples: (1) '2+2=5' is neither prima facie conceivable nor ideally conceivable; (2) Where S is a highly complex but provable mathematical truth, ~S will be prima facie conceivable for most subjects, but it is not ideally conceivable; (3) Where S is 'There is a flying pig', S is prima facie conceivable, and is almost certainly ideally conceivable."
In a similar vein, I think that free will is prima facie conceivable but not ideally conceivable. Someone who studies philosophy can rule out on a priori grounds the hypothesis expressed by free will but not the lay person.

While it can not be regrettable that (P) 2+2=4 since P is not prima facie conceivable, it may be regrettable that e^(pi*i) = -1, since e^(pi*i) != -1 is prima facie conceivable but not ideally conceivable.(Say one may regret it if one got the identity wrong in a question during an exam.) (Also I heard that there are some feminists/postmodernists who resent e=mc^2 because it privileges the speed of light over all other speeds. There are also some feminists who resent Newtonian mechanics because it's about rigid, solid objects and not fluid material like air or water but I'm digressing. See Richard Dawkins' commentary on the Sokal Affair.)

[Kip Werking]

Cihan,

I agree that the literature shows that people want compatibilist control. I hesitate to agree that it shows that people *only* want compatibilist control.

People want more control, period. Compatibilist control, incompatibilist control, blue control, red control, super control, tiny little bit of control, something that went to high school with control and once got its signature... if it seems to enhance control in even the slightest, even parodoxical way... people will want it (what's the harm in seeking it? Will Galen Strawson's kind of free will stab you in the back if you acquire it? Better to be on the safe side of more control than without.)

I also (hate to) disagree with your other point, your strong distinction between 2+2=4 and e^(pi*i) = -1. The difference is one of degree and not kind. People can get the identity "e^(pi*i) = -1" wrong on a test, but they can also get 2+2=4 wrong on a test too. Each involve a certain amount of calculation, one just much more so than the other.

However, I wholeheartedly agree with your point that free will's non-existence is like e^(pi*i) = -1---necessarily true, but not obviously so. The proof of this theorum is libertarianism, which dares to suggest that human beings actually have what Galen Strawson was after---or at least something like it.

e^(pi*i) = -1 is a good rejoinder to those, like Robert Kane, who say "well, *of course* people cannot mean that is the definition of free will, because that kind of free will is *impossible*. Nobody believes that free will is impossible! Therefore free will must mean something else." This overestimates the intelligence and knowledge of most of the people who use the term "free will"---and therefore govern its definition.

[wilmot sweeney]

From one point of view, whether free will exists or does not depends upon one's definition of free will. Basically it boils down to "my criteria trump yours".
Free will is such a troublesome notion.
Not sure exactly what it means to say
"I have free will". Is it the same as "I am free to do what I want"? Am I able to leap tall buildings at a single bound? If I am, then if I want to do it, I can, and that is
free will. So, I have free will despite the fact that I am not able to leap tall buildings at a single bound--though I want to do so--and would if I could. So free will is some kind of license to do something one might or might not have the ability to do?
Or is the ability itself free-will? After all I can will it without being able to accomplish or perform it. What is the use of willing--free willing or not---if nothing happens?
If I am not free to get up and get a glass of water---is that a lack of free will? Or is the will free still-- because, if I had the ability, I would be free to do it?

Is free will more than wanting, desiring to do something---and involves an actual
action (whatever that is)?
Or is free will just about desires? Is desire produced by some entity --"me"-- instead of by the evil demon of Descartes,or the deterministic demon of science, really what free will is? ----that it comes from a
"me" ----(whatever that entity is).
But if I am part and parcel of the universe--is it not the universe which wills?
Or am I like the clock that God winds up and
lets run--without interference? Who or what wills? Is it just the sense or thought " I did it"?
Supposing I can will as I will will, but the act resulting from the will is just imagination--because I am a brain in a vat or some such--then am I really willing?
Is willing without action--still willing?

How do you know whether what was willed doesn't come about because you failed to will effectively or rather because you don't have the ability, talent, capacity etc., to do what was willed?
Do You just assume you have the ability? What if a previous ability no longer manifests---did you mistake the context and the ability is still extant in the appropriate context--or is the ability simply intermittent?

If I will world peace, or jail for a particular politician or university chancellor, or some such----but no way will it happen--is it will free or not?

Suppose I can leap tall buildings but only have the opportunity to do so once in my lifetime. Do I have free will to do so?
Surely I am free to want to do so---but is wanting free will?

What if I decide I don't want to have free will --but feel I am stuck with it--I am
loath to take responsibility or some such.

How can I have free will if --given two choices, I only want one? If I was really free---I should be neutral about them,
right? Rather than compelled---How could compulsion be free? Does free will also mean being free of the desires that arise?

Free will is a large can of worms.