Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Free Will and Determinism - Coggle Diagram
Free Will and Determinism
Free Will
Central to humanistic psychology, Maslow and Rogers argued that self-determination was crucial for human beings
Believe that psychologically healthy humans beings needed self-development and self-actualisation - a person can only experience personal growth when they take self-responsibility
Determinism
Suggests external and internal forces drive an individuals behaviour
This would imply that we can predict behaviour
Hard determinism
(fatalism) - says that all human behaviour has a cause so it should be possible to identify and describe the cause, the assumption is that internal and externa; forces control everything we think and do and we therefore have very little room to make our own choices
Soft determinism
- Traits and behaviour determined by external or internal forces but an individual can still exercise some control via thought processes, this later became important in the cognitive approach
Biological determinism
- There is an increasing body of research to suggest we are biologically determined, this goes deeper than just the influence of genes on our physical characteristics but also suggests our behaviour are genetically determines, for example: genetic explanation to OCD is inherited and that individuals inherit specific genes which causes OCD e.g COMT and SETR gene
Environmental determinism
- Behavioural psychologists suggests that all behaviour is caused by previous experience through classical and operant conditioning
Psych determinism
- In his psychoanalytic theory, Freud suggests that human personality was formed from out innate drives and also our early experiences, these are therefore internal and external forces
A03
(Free will)
S: Adopting a freewill approach suggests that people have conscious control over how they think/feel, this is especially important for treatment of MH as it gives individuals control and responsibility for their recovery, in addition people who have internal LOC, believing they have high degree of influence over events and their own behaviour tend to be more mentally healthy, this means that taking a free will approach may have a positive impact on mind and behaviour
L: Some psychologists such as skinner, argue that free will is an illusion, skinner insisted that our behaviour is in fact environmentally determined, even if we are unable to recognise it, also more recent evidence provides some support for skinners claim e.g Libet found that the motor regions of the brain become active before a person registers conscious awareness of a decision. this means that many responses are determined and that although we may believe that we have free will, skinners claims that free will is an illusion
A03
(Determinism)
S: Determinism is consistent with the aims of science, this has implications for research and treatments, science focuses on investigating causes and making predictions, a deterministic view allows the causes of human behaviour to be identified, this means therapies and treatments can be developed if behaviour can be predicted and controlled e.g SSRI and OCD, this means taking a deterministic view can lead to improvements in patients lives and has PA
L: If a determinist stance isn't consistent with the way in which our legal system operated and has implications for society, in addition taking a deterministic view can be socially sensitive, if a certain genetic makeup predisposes people to violent criminal behaviour, it is not clear whether they can be held responsible for their actions, a deterministic view therefore poses issues for the justice systems as rehabilitation may seem impossible and it is unclear what to do with individuals who are found to have the same genes
O:
A soft-deterministic position may provide a compromise in the free will-determinism debate.
For example approaches which have a cognitive element such as Social Learning Theory recognise the influence of both free will and determinism.
For instance, Bandura argued that although environmental factors in learning are key, we are free to choose who or what we attend to and when to perform certain behaviour.
This means that a soft-deterministic position is a more balanced approach to the free will – determinism debate.