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How much Free Will do we have?

Consider the following situation. Here we have Jerry. He was a young, newly married, promising stockbroker. One day his boss offered him some narcotics, and Jerry chose to accept. He quickly became addicted, eventually lost his job, was divorced from his wife, became homeless, lived in the forest and one day was mauled by a bear.

People said well, Jerry acted of his own free will. He played with fire and he got burned. But let’s go back a little bit. How much free will did Jerry really have? Addiction causes certain brain changes that make you crave the drug very strongly, and damages your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows you to inhibit impulsive behavior.

However, that’s not what I’m talking about. Did Jerry have the free will in that moment to make the decision not to accept his boss’s nefarious gift? “No, no thank you, though.” Let’s rewind the tape.

Jerry just got a job as a junior stock broker and his boss invites him to have a drink after the 4PM bell. He had a dinner date planned with his wife for her birthday, but that’s not until a bit later and he figures he’ll be done by then. What he really wanted to do right after work was take a quick nap because he’s a bit sleep deprived. But, he doesn’t want to disappoint his new boss.

He ends up having a couple drinks with his boss and some other new colleagues. It’s been a while, Jerry still hasn’t eaten, and it’s getting late. Jerry’s looking at the clock when he realizes his phone is seconds from dying, so he pulls up his wife’s number and tries to remember the digits by repeating them in his head.

While he’s trying to hold onto the digits, he starts to get up to go pee and suddenly his colleague Tom and his boss invite him to partake in inserting white powder into his nose. This makes Jerry uncomfortable, he’s never done this. His boss and colleague are looking at him expectantly and Jerry says “No, I better not.”

Tom says “C’mon Jerry, everyone here does it. We have three servings ready just for you.” Then his boss says “Yea it’s how we stay ahead of the game. And this is the good stuff so it’s not dangerous. Just give it one try.” Jerry looks at his boss, then at the clock, then at Tom and he nervously says “OK… Just a little bit.”

And, that’s how Jerry got his foot in a door he couldn’t close. So was Jerry totally in control here? Did he have the free will to just say “No” instead? Well, first off, when all this happened, Jerry was in the midst of trying to hold onto his wife’s number in his head.

Daniel Kahneman, author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” says that “Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation.” He explains that if someone were asked to remember a list of seven digits, then is offered the choice of sinful chocolate cake or virtuous fruit salad, the evidence suggests that “you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits.”

The other thing is that Jerry didn’t get a full night’s rest. Brain scans have shown that when you’re lacking sleep, the neurons firing in the prefrontal cortex begin to slow down. The prefrontal cortex is particularly important in problem solving, reasoning, decision making, and inhibiting inappropriate or immoral behavior.

As Kelly McGonigal points out in “The Willpower Instinct,” sleep deprivation impairs how the body and brain use glucose. Unless someone is in the rarer state of ketosis, glucose is the main fuel source for the brain. McGonigal says impairing glucose utilization: “is bad news for self control, [self control is] one of the most energy-expensive tasks your brain can spend its limited fuel on.

Your prefrontal cortex, that energy-hungry area of the brain, bears the brunt of this personal energy crisis.” Then, Jerry hasn’t eaten yet. Obviously this means less energy available for the prefrontal cortex. There are special glucose-detecting brain cells that are constantly monitoring the availability of energy.

When the brain detects a drop in the energy supply, self-control is the first expense to be cut. It is not entirely necessary for survival, and is one of the most energy expensive tasks the brain performs.

As Kelly McGonigal says “To conserve energy, the brain may become reluctant to give you the full mental resources you need to resist temptation.” Not only this, research at the University of Gothenburg found that ghrelin - the “hunger hormone” actually has a negative effect on both decision making and impulse control. Next, Jerry’s colleague Tom is actually from the same college as Jerry.

This is significant because, work by Dan Ariely shows that we are more likely to go along with immoral behavior if people like us are also doing it. Beginning in 2002, Dan and his collaborators began a series of studies on lying. They would give people 20 math problems and asked them to find the two non-whole numbers that add up to ten.

These are problems that anybody could solve if they had enough time, but participants are given only 5 minutes. At the end of the 5 minutes they are told to put their pencils down and count how many they completed.

Then, they were to take the sheet of paper and shred it. They were asked how many problems they finished and got paid 1 dollar for each problem. As you’d expect, participants cheated a little bit and lied saying they completed more problems than they really did. In one of these experiments, there is an actor who stands up within the first 30 seconds of starting and says he’s finished all the problems.

He goes up, gets paid for completing all the problems and leaves the room. He is obviously cheating and just showed that you can easily get away with it. This experiment was run at Carnegie Melon. Everyone participating is a Carnegie Melon student, but the actor who blatantly cheats right away is dressed in a University of Pittsburg sweatshirt. What happens?

The subjects know that it’s very easy get away with cheating, but they don’t think people like themselves are doing it. When the actor appears to be a Carnegie Melon student like everyone else however, cheating goes up. So it wasn’t really about getting caught, but it’s about what’s socially acceptable in their circle. The next thing is that the person offering Jerry the narcotic is an authority figure - Jerry’s boss.

A famous experiment known as the Milgram experiment demonstrates that people are surprisingly obedient to authority figures, even when it comes to immoral behavior. Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist began experiments on this in July 1961. One famous experiment had a subject sit in a room with a microphone and a device that the subject is told delivers painful electric shocks.

These shocks were being delivered to another person in another room who the subject was to give quiz questions to via the microphone. Whenever the other person got a question wrong, the subject was supposed to give a shock and then increase the voltage. The subject could hear that the person was in pain, but this was actually pre-recorded audio, and no one was really receiving shocks.

With each increase in voltage, the yells of pain from the electric punishment got more and more intense “….take it off, I’ve had enough of this!” and then at some point there was no more response. If the subject hesitated to continue delivering the shocks at any time, the leader of the experiment, who was in the room and wearing a white coat said there was no permanent damage and calmly asked them to please continue.

Before the experiment, It was predicted that only 1% of subjects would continue administering shocks until they got to the highest voltage. While the subjects giving the shocks were clearly uncomfortable- biting their fingernails, stuttering, sweating, trembling as the experiment proceeded, The results were that 60% of the subjects went on to administer all the shocks up to a final deadly 450 volt shock.

Milgram said that “relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” Lastly, Jerry had to pee. A study published in the journal “Consciousness and Cognition” by Michael Ent and Roy Baumeister found that the more people needed to pee, the less they believed in the concept of free will.

This is part of a type of psychological research known as “embodied cognition” that shows that the states of our bodies influence how we consider the world around us. If someone had a brain tumor and they suddenly start doing impulsive things, we might say that the tumor has compromised their free will.

Now, Maybe someone else in Jerry’s position would have said No, But, could we consider the combination of all these little unnoticed factors to be compromising Jerry’s free will? Then, What about unnoticed factors influencing our everyday actions?

We feel that we are the conscious controllers of our moment to moment decisions, but what if you could dig up all the unconscious factors contributing to these decisions? Would you feel less like you had free will? Maybe one morning you say “you know what, I’m gonna be spontaneous and have a peanut butter jelly sandwich for breakfast instead of my usual eggs.”

You might think that this exciting new choice is an expression of your free will, but what if it’s just something your unconscious decided for you based on things you weren’t aware of? For example, You’ve been hearing the name Jerry a lot which has you thinking of Jelly.

When you were at the grocery store yesterday, you saw that peanut butter was on sale, and there was a Reese’s peanut butter cups ad playing on TV last night. Also, the gradual addition of more sweets to your diet is causing you to crave sweeter foods in general.

But you’re not actually aware of any of these things in the moment, you just feel like you , the master of your mind, decided to have a PBJ. So, the question is: If unconscious factors are driving your decisions, would you still call that free will? If this question interesting, stick around for my next video as it will explore in depth whether or not we have free will, and why it matters.