I wrote last week about how a bit of delusion can be a good thing. Nothing in life is categorically good or bad. So, having your heads in the clouds will result in you falling over from time to time. But equally, gazing too closely at your navel will trip you up too. One aspect of life where a bit of delusion can go a long way relates to the role that free will plays in explaining behaviour.
To be more precise, I’ll argue that we should delude ourselves more about agency as it applies to our own behaviour and be much less deluded about its role in explaining the actions of others. In discussing this here, I will draw on some of what I wrote in Happy Ever After: “volitional” is the last of nice social narratives I consider.
As I said in a recent Substack 60 seconder, if we went back a hundred years, we would think that free will played a much greater part in behaviour than we do now. Where we will be in another hundred years is an open question, but my prediction is that behaviour influenced by the ‘noise’ of real volition will have all but disappeared.
But belief in free will can be good for us. It has been shown to be associated with (but not necessarily the cause of) better job performance, for example, as measured by workplace performance evaluations. In one experiment seeking to establish causality, people induced to believe less in free will were more likely to take a sneak look at the answers on a test, or to steal from a money pot when given opportunity to, than those who were not primed in this way.
Regardless, it has long seemed odd to me why so many people seem to think that it’s OK for society to reward talent richly when it is determined almost entirely by genes, environment, context and luck and not at all by free will. Perhaps it is because we consider talent to be more highly correlated with good outcomes than luck alone and those good outcomes are a legitimate basis for reward. I could probably live with that explanation if the reward was somehow proportional to the good outcomes, and if we adequately compensated the talentless for losing out in life’s lottery. But the gross inequalities we observe in society show just how much we over-reward the talented and under-compensate the talentless.
It would be intuitive to most people that we have more control over how much effort we put in as compared to how much talent we have. We are seen to have a considerable amount of choice over how hard we work. Part of our attraction to effort in the West comes from the ‘American dream’ ideology that you can be whoever you want to be if you work hard at it. This idea permeates liberal democracies and has come to dominate our understanding of success. Not only is effort freely chosen, it has also become seen as the major determinant of success (perhaps directly as a result of the perception of free will associated with it).
It might be intuitive that we have more free will in relation to effort than to talent, and it lends support to the idea of social mobility: if you choose to work hard, you can make it. But can we really choose how hard we work? The answer is that we simply do not know. It could well be that your desire to work hard and to act upon that desire are both determined largely (and perhaps even entirely) by genes, environment, context and luck. Supporting this idea, associations have been found between children and their parents’ work ethic. So just because you think you are choosing to work hard does not mean that you have chosen that desire or the ability to act upon it.
If we continue to believe that life’s outcomes are largely the result of effort, then we will have much less concern for inequalities than if we believe those inequalities to be the result of chance. Only when we accept that most of life’s outcomes are determined mostly by factors outside our control will we be able to properly judge many of life’s inequalities as being unfair.
So, feel free to crack on with deluding yourself about how you are the master of your own destiny, but largely ditch the fanciful notion that we can all succeed if only we choose to work hard enough.