Why psychological scientists should disdain determinism

Abstract

This essay strives to challenge a conceptual foundation of psychology that is questioned all too rarely: causal determinism. Specifically, the issue we have an argument with is the idea that human behavior is characterized by strict and inevitable sequences of cause and effect. We make two arguments against this notion. First, we argue that, even if true, this conception of determinism is useless and misleading for psychological theories, because psychological theories typically must explain how agents respond to situations defined by having multiple alternative possible outcomes. Second, we argue that this determinism is probably wrong, outdated, and circular in its reasoning. Alongside these arguments, we present results of a survey among fellow researchers, assessing their beliefs on the topic. Results show that psychologists are indeed discordant about this issue, and tendencies to endorse notions of causal determinism are more prevalent in younger than older scientists. We respect this diversity of opinion and seek to make the case that psychology theory would be best served by abandoning the wrongheaded idea of human behavior being inevitable and physically predetermined and replacing it with a brain-based agent operating in a world defined by multiple genuine possibilities and probabilistic causation.