Discuss the Free will vs. Determinism debate

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Free will vs. Determinism

        The free will vs. determinism debate has been argued by psychologists almost as long as the subject of psychology itself has been around. The deterministic approach explains behaviour as a direct result of 2 types of determinism; external/environmental stimuli (i.e. life events) and internal stimuli (i.e. genes). These stimuli create behaviour that is totally predictable which occurs in a regular, orderly manner – implying that people are just passively respondents. In contrast to this, the free will approach states that humans are free to choose their own behaviour and can therefore, break away from their biological programming and predispositions. However, it seems ignorant to believe fully in free will and there are no approaches which follow the belief of free will fully, thus, a multi-dimensional approach, of ‘soft determinism’, was devised. This is the belief that free will and determinism are coexisting factors of behaviour: it indicates that there are constraints within any situation, yet there are also a number of choices, which gives the individual a sense of free will.

The Behavioural approach is one of the many approaches that adopt a strict deterministic view of human behaviour. This is an environmentally deterministic approach which states that our behaviour is moulded, directly or indirectly, as a result of reinforcement provided by the environment; thus ‘conditions’ us to behave in a specific and predictable way. It is believed that the environment ‘writes upon the blank slate of our minds’ making us who we are. Psychologist Skinner went further and concluded plainly that freewill is an illusion created by complex learning. This approach has been successful in dealing with other problems, such as abnormal behaviour, but an ethical consideration which causes concern is the therapist’s manipulation of the patient’s behaviour by the therapist to achieve goals. This approach, like many deterministic views, is that it is extremely reductionist. Disregarding any form of individual intelligence, it reduces complex behaviours into a series of stimulus response units that respond to reinforcement. Therefore, this explanation may be more applicable to simpler, non-human behaviour, limiting the generalisability of the applications to the real world.

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Bandura provides the social learning approach of reciprocal determinism which is similar to that of soft determinism. This suggests that humans make the environment what it is therefore choosing their behaviour by our capability to make individual choices, which affects what we imitate. Consequently, people are controlled by the environment but also have a certain amount of control over it. This is a more accepted belief as this is far less deterministic than classical behaviourism.

Another deterministic approach is the Psychodynamic approach. At the core of this approach is the belief in ‘psychic determinism’ which is the view that ...

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