Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will

by Robert M. Sapolsky

What happens in the brain when you experimentally diminish people’s belief in free will? For one thing, there is a lessening of what is probably best described as the intentionality or effort that people put into their actions. This is shown with using electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brain waves.

When people are made to feel helpless and with less agency by being stymied by an unsolvable puzzle, the size of their early readiness potentials decreases during a subsequent task.

Collectively, these EEG studies show that when people believe less in free will, they put less intentionality and effort into their actions, monitor their errors less closely, and are less invested in the outcomes of a task.[6]

A series of studies initiated by behavioral economist Katherine Vohs of the University of Minnesota show that free-will skeptics become more antisocial in their behaviors. In experiments, they are more likely to cheat on a test and to take more than their fair share of money from a common pot.

the manipulation also makes people feel less meaning in their lives and less of a sense of belonging to other humans.

Thus, undermine someone’s belief in free will and they feel less of a sense of agency, meaning, or self-knowledge, less gratitude for other people’s kindness. And most important for our purposes, they become less ethical in their behavior, less helpful, and more aggressive. Burn this book before anyone else stumbles upon it and has their moral compass unmoored. Naturally, things are more complicated. For starters, the effects on behavior in these studies are quite small;

Most important, the bulk of studies have failed to replicate the basic finding that people become less ethical in their behavior when their free-will belief is weakened. Importantly, some of these studies had much larger sample sizes than the original ones that generated the “we’ll all run amok” conclusions. A 2022 meta-analysis of the entire literature (consisting of 145 experiments, with 95 unpublished) shows that Crickian manipulations do indeed mildly lessen free-will belief and increase belief in determinism…without any consistent effects on ethical behavior.[*5]

Do people behave immorally when they conclude that they will not ultimately be held responsible for their actions because there is no Omnipotent Someone doling out the consequences?

Fascinating work by psychologist Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia shows that such “moralizing gods” are relatively new cultural inventions. Hunter-gatherers, whose lifestyle has dominated 99 percent of human history, do not invent moralizing gods.

Everything about the evolution of cooperation and prosociality is facilitated by stable, transparent relationships built on familiarity and the potential for reciprocity;

It was not until humans started living in larger communities that religions with moralizing gods started to pop up. As humans transitioned to villages, cities, and then proto-states, for the first time, human sociality included frequent transient and anonymous encounters with strangers. Which generated the need to invent all-seeing eyes in the sky, the moralizing gods who dominate the world religions.[12]

Do atheists run amok? Most people sure believe that, and antiatheist prejudice runs wide and deep. There are fifty-two countries in which atheism is punishable by death or prison.

Mock juries give atheists longer jail sentences; defense attorneys increase their likelihood of success in emphasizing their client’s theism; people put the supposed atheist’s name further down on a hypothetical list for an organ transplant; custody of a child has been denied to parents because of their atheism. Some states still have laws on the books barring atheists from holding public office; in more enlightened cantons, voters are less likely to elect people because of their atheism.

People in most countries surveyed associate atheism with moral norm violations, such as serial murder, incest, or necrobestiality.[*7]

But you can’t do that with studies of things like religiosity. You don’t take two groups of blank-slate volunteers, command half to embrace religion and half to reject it, and then see who is nice out in the world.[*9]

Once you actually observe what people do, rather than listen to what they say, there’s no difference between theists and atheists in rates of blood donations, amount of tipping, or compliance with “honor system” payments; ditto for a lack of difference in being altruistic, forgiving, or evincing gratitude. Furthermore, there’s no difference in being aggressive or vengeful in experimental settings where subjects can retaliate against a norm violation (for example, by administering what they believe to be a shock to someone).[20]

Back to that self-selection challenge: when compared with atheists, religious people are more likely to be female, older, married, and of higher socioeconomic status, and to have a larger and more stable social network. And this is a minefield of confounds because, independent of religiosity, these are all traits associated with higher levels of prosocial behavior.[21]

controlling for involvement in a social community significantly lessens the difference in rates of depression among theists versus atheists). Once you control for sex, age, socioeconomic status, marital status, and sociality, most of the differences between theists and atheists disappear.[22]

Where religious people tend to become more prosocial than atheists is when you remind the former of their religiosity.

When religious people are not thinking about their religious principles, they sink into the same immoral muck as atheists. But remind them of what really matters, and the halo comes out.

while prosociality in religious people is boosted by religious primes, prosociality in atheists is boosted just as much by the right kinds of secular primes.

Prosociality in atheists is also prompted by loftier secular concepts, like “civic,” “duty,” “liberty,” and “equality.”[*11]

Work by psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University groups moral concerns into five domains—those related to obedience, loyalty, purity, fairness, and harm avoidance. His influential work has shown that political conservatives and highly religious people tilt in the direction of particularly valuing obedience, loyalty, and purity. The Left and the irreligious, in contrast, are more concerned with fairness and harm avoidance.

One can approach a moral quandary as a deontologist, believing that the morality of an action should be evaluated independently of its consequence (“I don’t care how many lives it saves, it’s never okay to…”). This contrasts with being a consequentialist (“Well, I’m normally opposed to X, but the good that it will accomplish in this case outweighs…”).

Scandinavian countries are the most secular in the world. How do they stack up when compared with a highly religious country such as the U.S.? Studies of quality of life and of health show that Scandinavians fare better (on measures such as happiness and well-being, life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and rates of death in childbirth); moreover, poverty rates are lower, and income inequality is tiny in comparison. And measures of the prevalence of antisocial behavior, crime rates, and rates of violence and damaging aggression—from warfare to criminal violence to school bullying to corporal punishment—are lower.

Across a broad range of countries, lower average rates of religiosity predict higher rates of all these salubrious outcomes. Moreover, cross-nationally, lower average rates of religiosity in a country predict lower levels of corruption, more tolerance of racial and ethnic minorities, higher literacy rates, lower rates of overall crime and of homicide, and less frequent warfare.[29]

as societies become more economically stable and safer, rates of religious belief decline.[30]

Which leads us to a really crucial point: religious prosociality is mostly about religious people being nice to people like themselves. It’s mostly in-group. In economic games, for example, the enhanced honesty of religious subjects extends only to other players described to them as coreligionists,

How about when it comes to out-group members? In those circumstances, it is atheists who are more prosocial, including more accepting of and extending protection to Thems.

Finally, some oft-cited studies looked at how aggressive subjects would be to an opponent in a game (e.g., the volume of loud noise they would choose to blast the other player with). Such aggressiveness was increased when subjects had first read a passage mentioning God or the Bible, relative to passages without that; aggressiveness was increased even more when subjects read a passage about biblical vengefulness sanctioned by God versus the same description of vengefulness without the divine sanction.[34]

Skepticism about the existence of a moralizing god(s) doesn’t particularly generate immoral behavior; this is the case for underlying reasons that help explain why being skeptical about free will doesn’t either.

To my knowledge, only one study has examined this explicit question, carried out by psychologist Damien Crone, then at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and philosopher Neil Levy, whose ideas have already been discussed.

people who most defined themselves by their moral identity were the most honest and generous, regardless of their stance about free will.[36] The identical pattern holds when considering religious belief and morality.

And then there is category B, covering the range from apatheists, for whom saying that they don’t believe in God is like saying that they don’t ski,[*17] as well as those whose religiosity is out of habit, convention, nostalgia, an example for the kids—of the 90 percent of Americans who are theists, probably half fall into this category, given that approximately half don’t go to religious services regularly.

For example, highly religious and highly secular people score the same on tests of conscientiousness, coming out higher than those in the third group. In experimental studies of obedience (usually variants on the classic research of Stanley Milgram examining how willing subjects are to obey an order to shock someone), the greatest rates of compliance came from religious “moderates,” whereas “extreme believers” and “extreme nonbelievers” were equally resistant.

Here is our vitally important reason for optimism, about how the sky won’t necessarily fall if people come to stop believing in free will. There are people who have thought long and hard about, say, what early-life privilege or adversity does to the development of the frontal cortex, and have concluded, “There’s no free will and here’s why.” They are a mirror of the people who have thought long and hard about the same and concluded, “There’s still free will and here’s why.”

If the world is deterministic on the level that matters, isn’t everything thus already determined? The answer is that we don’t change our minds. Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before, are changed by circumstances around us.

the goal of this chapter is to reconcile an absence of free will with the fact that change occurs.

This is a machine that is entirely mechanistic in biological terms and that changes adaptively in response to a changing environment; it has even been used as a model by roboticists. I dare anyone to invoke the concept of free will in making sense of this Aplysia’s behavior.

We’re watching a machine that did not choose to change its behavior; its behavior was changed by circumstances via logical, highly evolved pathways.[2]

The circuits and molecules of the Aplysia are all the building blocks we need to make sense of behavioral change in us.

the hard reality is that we are unimaginably more complex than an Aplysia but are biological machines with the same building blocks and the same mechanisms of change.

Humans, being conditioned to blink their eyes, and marine sea slugs, conditioned to withdraw their gills, haven’t shared a common ancestor for more than half a billion years. And here we are, with their neurons and ours using the same intracellular machinery for changing in response to experience. You and an Aplysia could trade your cAMPs, PKAs, MAPKs, and so on, and things would work just fine in both of you.[*6]

Rats that experienced such “maternal separation” early in life are, as adults, a mess. They are more anxious, show more of a glucocorticoid response to mild stress, don’t learn as well, are easier to addict to alcohol or cocaine. It is a model for how one type of early-life adversity in humans produces dysfunctional adults,

In other words, along with all the other deleterious consequences of maternal separation, you have animals that don’t acquire this adaptive response as readily. It is caused by an epigenetic change in the brain, such that forever after, there are elevated levels of receptors for glucocorticoid stress hormones in the equivalents of neuron 2. Block the effects of glucocorticoids in that adult rat, and eyeblink conditioning becomes normal.[*8]

Once the amygdala activates, it triggers a variety of responses. The sympathetic nervous system is activated, the heart beats faster, blood pressure rises. Glucocorticoids are secreted. Your typical rat or human freezes in place.

Local neurons there act as coincidence detectors, repeated stimulation of the auditory branch induces all sorts of changes in the amygdala involving cAMP, PKA, CREB, all the usual, and a tone now elicits the same terror that a shock does.[8]

The acquisition, consolidation, and extinction[*10] of the conditioned fear of something neutral like a tone reflects the organism’s history even more. Extinction will occur faster if, in the seconds before, there are high levels in the amygdala of endocannabinoids (whose receptor also binds THC, the most active component of cannabis)—this makes it easier to stop being afraid of something. The amygdala becomes less likely to store away a conditioned fear response as a stable memory if, in the previous hours, the individual has taken an SSRI antidepressant like Prozac (which makes people ruminate less about negative thoughts). The amygdala will be less active and harder to condition if, in the days before, it was exposed to high circulating levels of oxytocin, which helps explain how oxytocin can promote trust. In contrast, if the organism has been exposed to high levels of stress hormones in the previous month, it becomes easier to generate a conditioned fear response

if an organism was exposed to lots of Mom’s alcohol back during fetal life, it has a harder time remembering a conditioned fear.

If you are exhausted, hungry, or drunk. If something frightening happened to you in the previous minute. If, as a male, your testosterone levels have been soaring over the last few days. If, in recent months, you’ve been chronically stressed by, say, unemployment.