According to the American Heritage Dictionary determinism is “The philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs”. It is a concept, which states that free will does not exist, and that other external and internal circumstances and forces influence our every decision. Those who believe in determinism, such as Freudians and behaviorists, believe that you can only find out the truth about human behavior by looking at it through determinism (Eysenck 33). They believe that through the deterministic concept, you can predict human behavior very accurately, however in the 20th century this was contradicted by the recognition that an accurate prediction “is the exception rather than the rule” itself (Eysenck 33). The Russian scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, designed an experiment that demonstrates determinism and how scientists test it. He trained a dog to salivate when it heard a certain tone, by always playing this tone before he was fed.
Another part of this idea is soft determinism, which was first described by William James, an idea that says there are differences between voluntary and involuntary behavior, but not driven to the extremes like free will and determinism. It defines the differences as behavior impacted highly by other circumstances and behavior influenced only slightly.
Free will and determinism are two concepts on completely opposite ends of the spectrum, making them opposite. However, both ideas lead to the better understanding of behavior, where one claims to accurately predict behavior while the other believes it is up the human’s will. Some might say that free will can never let psychologists understand behavior, since it is completely random. Determinists are convinced you cannot predict behavior using the concept of free will since you cannot test it. You can easily make a prediction but there is no accurate way to justify it. If you were to say committing suicide was free will, determinists might say that this might have been caused by depression or mental issues, or any other sorts of pressure from environmental, political, physical and sociological factors.
Most psychologists agree that your history, your experiences and your surroundings have impacted your behavior. Your personality, which is an internal factor, has been formed and shaped through your past experiences. The question is “whether a solitary internal factor [free will] is somehow immune from the influence of the past” (Eysenck 35). That is how free will becomes difficult to understand, because if you (your personality) are making a choice, and your personality has been shaped by the past, then surely free will is also affected by the past. This would be another reason why different external and internal factors would affect your choices, which is one of the arguments that determinists use to defeat free will.
Some people say that choosing what music to listen to, what clothes to wear, or what clubs to go to is your own free will, however these things might also have been determined by for example a societal factor. If free will is true then it would mean that everyone would act randomly on what they felt like. This might mean everyone would forget the moral issues and start to murder and kill. In free will human behavior can hardly be predicted. There are many different arguments between what is true and what not, but it can be said that almost everything that is said to be free will could easily be determinism instead.
Most psychologists believe in determinism because of several reasons, one being that you predict, with some accuracy, human behavior. For example government law prohibits murder of other people and so it is predicted, because of moral, societal and government force, that people do not kill. However a disadvantage to determinism is that there are always exceptions, which leads us to the issue of determining if a criminal acted upon outside factors or free will. You can never be sure which one it is and so it becomes very difficult for doctors or police investigators, for example, to make these decisions, upon which the criminal might go to prison. A strength in determinism is that you can make predictions and test them to a certain extent. You can use the experimental method to make a prediction that a certain factor causes a certain behavior, and then test it. However this might sound easier than it is because we only have very little knowledge of these external and internal factors (Eysenck 34) and therefore it is almost impossible to accurately predict human behavior with this method.
Altogether, free will and determinism are two very different ideas, with several limitations and strengths to each. Free will is, commonly, what people would like to believe, but because it doesn’t make so much sense the second idea seems to present us with more predictable theories, and testability. However these don’t always prove accurate either, which leaves the sub concepts like soft determinism which includes the ideas of both. The debate will always come up with new arguments to defeat the other, and we wont see it end in the near future.