Dr. Roy Baumeister - The Science of Free Will

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Prepare for an unparalleled conversation with Dr. Roy Baumeister, a giant in the field of psychology whose influence spans continents and disciplines. With over 700 published works, including more than 40 books, Dr. Baumeister’s exploration of human behavior, free will, and self-control has shifted paradigms in how we understand ourselves and society. His groundbreaking book Willpower became a New York Times bestseller and transformed how we view personal discipline and resilience.

Currently affiliated with Harvard, Constructor University, and several global institutions, he’s received the prestigious William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a testament to his profound lifetime contributions. Dr. Baumeister is also the president-elect of the International Positive Psychology Association, continuing his mission to unravel the complexities of human motivation and well-being.

In his latest work, The Science of Free Will, he ventures beyond academia, examining how we make choices, navigate social structures, and create meaningful lives by weaving together the past, present, and future. Today, we’ll delve into his deep insights into the human psyche, the essence of decision-making, and the hidden forces that shape our potential.

https://roybaumeister.com/

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope that everybody is having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back. I got a show for you today that I think everyone is going to enjoy. It's going to be mind-blowing. So Prepare for an unparalleled conversation with Dr. Roy Baumeister, a giant in the field of psychology whose influence spans continents and disciplines. With over seven hundred hundred hundred published works, including more than forty, forty, forty books, Dr. Baumeister's exploration of human behavior, free will and self-control has shifted paradigms. and how we understand ourselves and society. His groundbreaking book, Willpower, became a New York Times bestseller and transformed how we view personal disciplines and resilience. Currently affiliated with Harvard, Constructor University, and several global institutions, he's received the prestigious William James Fellow Award from the Association of Psychological Science, a testament to his profound lifetime contributions. Dr. Baumeister is also the president-elect of the International Positive Psychology Association, continuing his mission to unravel the complexities of human motivation and well-being. In his latest work, The Sciences of Free Will, he ventures beyond academia, examining how we make choices, navigate social structures, and create meaningful lives by weaving together the past, the present, and future. Today, we'll dive into his deep insight into the human psyche, the essence of decision-making, and the hidden forces that shape our potential. Dr. Roy, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? I'm pretty well. I'm great. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, the pleasure is all mine. I've got a bunch of really cool questions from the audience and I figured we'd just dive right in here to both feet since I got you for a short amount of time and the conversation may be complex and engaging. So the first question that we have down that comes from Kevin Holt is, you have noted that viewing life as an interconnected narrative helps people find meaning. Do you think this drive to build a cohesive story of lives to moments is a form of self-made destiny? Oh, well, that's a nice way of putting it. I suppose so. Destiny sort of implies that it's there for you whether you choose it or not. And I think the point of free will is you're much up for choosing your own course. So you can reject your destiny. uh but still I I think the story is good and again I'm not an evolutionary psychologist but everything starts with evolution and we forget most other animals just live in the immediate here and now so they don't have a story sense uh of their own of their own identity they I mean they know their their families and so on uh dogs know their owners and all that but the idea of life is an ongoing story the way we think of it that you know what you're doing today is linked to where you were in the past and where you're going in the future and you're making choices to get to the future you desire and honor the promises you made in the past. All that, that's really an important part of the human experience that's pretty much limited to our species. Is that particular narrative like a free choice? To what extent is the narrative a free choice versus a psychological need? Well, you need some kind of narrative. It's very hard to live without any sort of meaning. But you can change and you can choose to some degree. Now, when you go back into childhood, it gets more complicated. My friend, the wise Dan McAdams has researched this extensively. He says, you know, people's stories, they start out as children. just learning to play a role you're like an actor and you figure out the script and children's games like playing house and so on what am I supposed to do how do I be the mommy or or whatever um and then a bit later uh you're still following the script but you have choices to make so you're more of an agent uh as they say you you can steer the story in one direction or another so you're not just doing what you're supposed to do and following a script you're helping to uh by by reacting to steer it in different ways and then sometimes sometime in the teen years there's another step when you start to be an author and that's when you can change the script and you know my parents brought me up uh to be this but I'm not gonna follow that route I'm gonna go somewhere else and do something else and you know and some people change and in their midlife or even later start a new a new chapter and a new a new direction so uh certainly your ability of an adult uh you can change uh the story not just make refinements along the way and you can uh even sometimes shift to a very new and different story It's interesting. I was sitting down to lunch with a family friend the other day, my wife and I, and we were talking about like culture and on some level. Isn't it weird? Like the first four letters of culture are cult. And it seems like so much of the societal norms are are there to tell us what to do on some level. You know, where does free choice and I know it's kind of a large question, but where do you where do you think about like the cult and culture and free choice? Like how much is how much society's norms and the cult of culture really telling us what to do? Well, I'd frame it a little bit differently. Every species has to figure out how to survive and reproduce, otherwise it goes extinct, right? So it needs a strategy to continue life. Biology has never been able to make life that goes on forever, so it has to create new life and sustain what it has. So our species, our strategy for it is culture. We organize our social life. based on shared understandings, division of labor, marketplaces, things like that. It's working really well for us. I mean, in about two or three hundred thousand years, we've gone from one first human to eight billion. uh meanwhile our closest relatives the chimpanzees are down to about three hundred thousand in the wild so uh so our strategy works uh culture but culture means most of the people have to follow most of the rules most of the time it's a it's a system uh morality is really to derive from uh the requirements of a functioning system. So things like the Ten Commandments we associate with the Judeo-Christian tradition, But you won't find any culture where they say, oh, our morals are exactly the opposite. We believe it's your duty to lie and cheat and murder and have sex with your neighbor's wife and all those things. No, systems work better when people respect others' lives and tell the truth and respect property and so forth. So morality derives from the requirements of the system. uh, and so culture tells us what to do and certainly it gets carried away or overreaches. And so it will tell us all sorts of weird things like neck ties, which seem to be going out of fashion. I know the Californians gave up on them some time ago, but, uh, uh, even here at Harvard, the professors don't wear ties to lecture anymore. Um, but, uh, So, yes, certain weird things happen. But the basic and the more important part of culture is rules so that people can work together and live together without killing each other and can ultimately produce more resources than they could if they were living alone and working alone so that we can live longer, happier and more lives with more offspring. You've written so many different books in a wide range of perspectives and ideas you've contributed to the world out here. Was there something different about this book? Was there something that made you go, I need to research this? Was there something that grabbed your attention and really wanted you to focus in on what this book talks about? Well, it's not different. It's part of the big picture. That's my goal. I want to... Given the advantages of my career as a social science generalist, I can learn a lot of basic things about people. And so I set my goal. I want to try to get as close to the truth as I can of what the human condition is all about, why we're here and what we're doing and how the mind works and so on. And so, well, the mechanism by which we choose our actions. that's an important part of it I mean psychology is a science of behavior used to claim that uh so how does behavior come about and so issues of free will are then very central uh to this so this this was a an issue that had to be done you you kindly mentioned my uh my earlier book on willpower well that was about self-control which is also a key trait that many researchers have found is one of the most important things for predicting success in life and people with good self-control live longer happier have stronger marriages make more money uh and so on so well self-control is one piece of free will um One aspect of it. So in a sense, this is a step further from that earlier book, although the problem of free will stands on its own. You don't have to have read the earlier one. But that's that's part of the logic of how does the human mind work? We've got another question coming in, and it talks about, as one of psychology's most prolific thinkers, you've explored themes like resilience and willpower. How does the concept of free will influence our capacity for resilience, particularly when we face circumstances beyond our control? All right, Till. Resilience is not something I've specifically written about, although it's an important topic, and I probably should get around to it before I'm... before I'm done. But resilience is a way of responding when you have a setback or misfortune, something goes wrong. We could say that that's a choice point. When you're defeated by life, how do you react to it? Do you get up and try again and look to do better the next time? Or do you give up and fold and go hide away? probably almost everybody will eventually give up if the failures are too relentless. But being resilient and being able to bounce back from a defeat, that's important because Nobody goes through life without the occasional defeat either. So resilience would be one sign, a way of marshalling your free will powers to deal with the situation. The essence of free will, the way I think of it, is the ability to act differently in the situation. It's a kind of flexibility in behaviour, which in biological terms is very adaptive and very useful, even as the basis of learning. so if you're defeated by something uh well you could go and just do it again uh I hope it works but but use your free will think something about my strategy didn't work out this time uh if it was pure luck maybe I'd do the same thing and I'll get a different result but if my strategy is flawed maybe I should you know pick a different strategy Think about the situation. Think about the opportunities. Think about how I could try again and maybe get a better result. So that would be a very key use of free will, basically addressing the same situation and looking for a different strategy after your first one failed. I love that. That's a great way to put it. Thank you. And the, the, that old quote comes to mind. There's a, there's a, I think it was Viktor Frankl's book, the space, there's a space between stimulus and response. Is that where free will resides? Do you think like you have that moment, that moment of clarity between stimulus and response and the longer you become familiar with it, the bigger that space gets, is that, would that be a good space for free will to dwell? Yes, exactly. The early psychologists who were often studying rats, they didn't want to talk about the mind or anything. So they looked at behavior as there's a stimulus, something coming in from the environment, and then the response to the behavior. But pretty soon they said, this is not adequate. You don't just have the responses. programmed you have the stimulus and then you process it in some way and right different individuals even different rats might process the same stimulus in different ways and of course in the complexity of human situations uh there's a much greater variety and so the scope for individual processing is considerably greater So yes, that's where free will can come. If it's a simple stimulus response, like a reflex or something, there's not much free will involved in that. But if, you know, say you're trying to quit smoking and your friend wants to go outside for a smoke and invites you along, well, You want to be with your friend, but you don't want to smoke. That's the point at which you make a decision. And that's the kind of thing free will is for. You recognize there are two options. Maybe you understand the consequences. I know a woman who had quit smoking celebrated. She said, something really good happened. And so I thought I'd have one cigarette. And she said, it was five years before I quit again. You've got to be aware of the contingencies. But yes, she made a free decision. Unfortunately, didn't accurately foresee the consequences. I love that word aware. Like it seems to be something that I'm becoming more aware of. You know, it's, it's interesting to think about that when you become aware of something, it's very difficult to not see it in your life. And it's, it's not like you didn't know about it. It's just, it was always in your periphery on some level like that. What, what role does awareness have in free will? That's a great question. Awareness also known as consciousness, um, it is utterly fundamental and central. I mean, there are essentially no theories by anybody of unconscious free will. If we have free will, it's based on conscious thinking and choosing. So, yes. Now, there are people who argue about consciousness and does it really do anything and so on I think the evidence is overwhelming that it does there are very solid experiments that will manipulate different thoughts or feelings and show that the behavior changes as a result so that uh so consciousness definitely has causal power it's true we do lots of things unconsciously and without thinking about them and to We do others that we may be vaguely aware of, but aren't really consciously intervening. So just deciding to walk to the grocery store, you decide to go. To do that, your feet have to make a lot of individual steps. Your brain has to issue commands to the muscles in your legs and feet to move you all along that way. But you're not conscious of any of that. You're conscious maybe to decide that I need some bananas or whatever, so I'm going to walk to the store. You make that decision consciously, and then the conscious mind sort of hands it off to the unconscious, which carries out the actions. And the only time consciousness might come back into play if you're walking there and your usual path is blocked because, I don't know, there's construction on the street. You think, oh, I have to take a different route. And so, again, then your conscious mind is engaged and you work out a different plan. And then it again hands it off to the unconscious and you're back to thinking about whatever is going on in your mind, your love life or your work or who knows, my fantasies, while your unconscious mind tells the feet to take one step and another step and another step and so on. Yeah, it's an incredible process to start taking time to think about, and I think it can open up a lot of doors and awareness to how you live your life. The question that comes to mind for me is this idea of a non-local consciousness. Do you subscribe to that camp, like there's something informing us on a different level? Yeah, I don't know if the psychoanalysts had that sort of thinking, or at least the collective unconscious. I love those ideas, but As I've spent most of my career in hardcore rigorous science, I don't really find much convincing evidence of those things. I would like to be persuaded, but consciousness is something the individual brain produces. That's not to say we don't share ideas like we're doing now. Consciousness can certainly influence another. And indeed, that's one of the key things that it's for, that... I think consciousness is crucial for talking. There's a line of research that people want to show that things we thought you needed consciousness for, well, you can sort of do them, maybe a watered-down version unconsciously. All that's good, and it's very impressive work, but nobody's been able to show that you can carry on a conversation unconsciously. I mean, I ask you to try to... you know try listening to music uh well try to just focus on thinking about something else while you're talking to them you really can't do it uh cognitive psychologists have noticed this for a long time but we thought well maybe that's the point of consciousness thinking is for talking uh conscious thinking because it's one of the basic things our species does and it does way better than any other other species I mean some animals communicate But none of them has what linguists would call a language. And yet every human society has one. In fact, most people spend most of the day talking. Including listening. So that is really crucial. So consciousness is crucial for that, among other things. it's interesting too. I, I, I love language and I love learning and I can't help but think about like the linguistic patterns we use. Like sometimes the, the, the words we use and the relationships we have are a mirror of the inner dialogue we have, which is sort of a mirror of the consciousness that we have or the mirror of the patterns in our life that we have. Maybe I, can you touch on that a little bit? Like I'm just, I'm just fascinated by it. I'd love to hear your opinion. Well, uh, I think this, uh, this is a little bit getting off the topic, but, uh, um when you learn a foreign language um you're often impressed about how they say things a little bit differently and uh I I'm passable at german and uh I learned to read french once uh but I don't dare try to pronounce it um but in french the adjective goes after the noun and in in german and english it goes before so we say a big man but they would say a man big um and so that sort of thing is fascinating now we're getting into the more more interesting and complex stuff about the talking we do to ourself all day and the uh that being part of the story really a life I I think is a sort of a cluster of stories uh often not very good stories It's true. Yeah, it is true. But we think about these as we go along. For example, going to the grocery store, I say, well, my girlfriend is coming over for dinner tonight and she likes, I don't know, asparagus, so maybe I better get some of that that'll make her happy. So that sort of thing goes on a lot and in our minds and uh language again so so fundamental to uh to the human condition it's it's it's one of the the big departures in evolution that uh uh pushed us forward to the the biological success of our species as I said every culture that we know has language uh and uh and no animal society has has amounts to a language we got here we go from our friend clint in arkansas he says how might free will play a role in our pursuit of happiness particularly when happiness often feels like a fleeting state yes well that's there's full of interesting things in that in that question um so so if we start if we go back to evolution nature doesn't really care if we're happy it cares that you know that we survive and reproduce and that's sort of what it what it measures to me it's even it's a It's a bit fanciful to say that nature cares at all. Nature wouldn't care if we all went extinct, but nature rewards us for not going extinct. Happiness, therefore, in the natural scheme is a means, not an end. We think of it as an end. We pursue happiness and all that. One thing parents say about their children is, I just want them to be happy. So that is seen as a supreme ultimate goal. But the way it's built into the mind, it's more of a means. You feel happy when things occur that will promote your chances to survive and reproduce. One of my big papers, for example, was on the need to belong as a basic human motivation. I was reacting, you know, Freud said the basic motivations are sex and aggression. I said, well, he's missing something there. We're strongly motivated to connect with others, to form relationships and not to break those relationships. And sure enough, if you look at the emotions, the positive emotions very routinely come from increasing social bonds, you know, getting married or joining a group or being accepted into some kind of elite thing. And by the same token, damage to relationship produces a lot of negative emotions. So it's sadness and grief and anger and jealousy and so on. So there's a pretty strong line up there that uh that the the emotions are there to help us feel uh even signal like anxiety is often a signal that some relationship is in trouble uh so uh so happiness is there to guide us to do things as far as nature cares, as far as nature built us to do things that basically will improve life, to prolong life and to help us reproduce. His point about happiness being fleeting, well, that's a complicated one. Certainly positive feelings come and go. One way to measure happiness is sort of the balance. If we ping you at about twenty times over the course of a week and ask you, are you feeling good or bad right now? If most of them are good, then you're a happy person. If most of them are bad, then you're counted as an unhappy person. So that's one way to do it. The other is the bird's eye view. How satisfied are you with your life as a whole right now? The thing is, these are remarkably durable. I remember some time ago reading the early research on that and they tracked people. First of all, they surveyed how happy, who was happy and who was unhappy and why. you know you're happy as you have a good marriage you're unhappy because you're a bad job and your boss is a jerk you're unhappy because you have money problems you're happy because you know all these things are very specific they follow the people up ten years later uh and so most of those things have changed you have a new job you have a new car all of the are mostly gone but the happy people are still happy the unhappy people are still unhappy is remarkably stable over ten years the best predictor you know they just found new things to be happy or unhappy about so you tend to think yeah I'm happy because of this but there's something about yourself that does it and I don't really this is not a nice romantic view but probably there's some genetic aspect yeah tell my students, you know, if you meet somebody, sometimes you can tell, I'll bet he was a happy baby. That's the kind of person you want to marry. Because they're going to be happy and they'll be pumping positive emotion into your life all the time. And other people are just sort of chronically miserable. And you get connected with one of those, well, that's going to make your life get worse. Unfortunately, nature has figured out that we can spot this and so when you're in love a lot of the negative emotions disappear so it has kind of a bait and switch uh idea that uh you know a real unhappy depressed sort of person will fall in love and be happy but that only lasts you know maybe a year and uh if you've gotten married then you've got the rest of your life uh to be with some miserable unhappy person I know some of those people. Yes. I'm sorry. Oh, it's amazing to think about in some ways that it almost feels like a magnet, you know, like sometimes those, I know I'm kind of birdwalking here, but it seems like some of the happy people that I know have found some of the miserable people and vice versa. It's almost like life is attracting these two. You guys are two polar opposites. You should be in the middle somewhere. Is there any, is there any sort of evidence for like that, that sort of attraction that happens between two opposites you think? Well, this has been much, much debated, actually. So do similar people attract birds of a feather or does it opposites attract? I'd say ninety, ninety five percent of the time it's the similar ones that win. There are some opposite cases, particularly like a dominating one and a submitting one. I mean, my parents marriage. My mother grew up scared of her father and mother and older mothers. They all told her what to do. So she wanted to marry somebody who would tell her what to do and what to think. And my father was happy to play that role. And so, I mean, they were married for seventy years. It worked very well, but they were clearly opposite on that trait. But for the most part, they were similar in lots of ways. I did look at self-control when I was doing that research. We've talked about that as part of free will. And on that, it seems like there's a sexual attraction of opposites. We had one big project where we looked at dating couples, married couples, and then same-sex friends. and looked at are they similar or different on self-control. Well, first of all, in terms of what made them happy, it was the total amount of self-control. It wasn't the difference. So it wasn't either similarity or difference that produced happiness. It's the more self-control either person has, the happier the other one is. But there was, in the dating couples, there was some sign of opposites attracting. um it goes to the idea that people really different from you the great daryl bem called it the exotic becomes erotic what's uh what's different from you becomes sexually uh exciting and so that the highly organized buttoned down everything in its place person is attracted to the wild and crazy one and vice versa so that was strong in the dating couples it was it was significant but weak in marriage and then there was no sign of it in the same-sex friends uh so it clearly goes with the sexual attraction because that's sort of the prominent in dating sex is there in marriage but there are lots of other things I read somebody say once that managing a marriage is like running a small business and so you want to have a partner who you know will pay the bills or take care of things and And so and so the opposite subtraction isn't there. And that's where, as I said, the over the long term, the higher both people are in self-control, the better the relationship does. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. Here we go. We got Gabrielle coming in. She says, how can insights from the science of free will inform the way we approach ethical decision making in a world increasingly characterized by complex moral dilemmas? That's exactly what it's for. The moral agent is one of the big aspects of free will. I think free will operating in society is two things, responsibility and autonomy. Autonomy is self-government to make your choices and responsible means understanding the consequences of your actions and accepting them. And so morality is very, very important. uh with that and uh so the human free will is is partly there uh to enable us to make good moral choices to think the situation through uh now this is uh not to deny people often make moral decisions based on a gut feeling that this is right or wrong but the gut feeling can be informed and changed by influence from others by talking about it by I studied guilt for a while and often guilt comes up. People didn't mean to do anything wrong, but they found out afterwards, say they hurt somebody's feelings or whatever, and then they feel guilty about that. And so they think about how did this come about? How can I avoid doing this again? And in that way, people learn and they become a better person. It's what's sometimes also called counterfactual thinking, whereas you replay the past, only you acted differently. you know especially after something went badly uh you think okay what could I have done differently that would have produced a better result uh and so you can really learn a lot from a single event much more again than other animals because it's not clear the other animals can do this can replay the past and say uh if only I had climbed the tree faster or whatever um but human beings do this do this a lot and we replay it and so uh you can have a even a life-changing experience from from from one event uh that you reflect on and learn from but that's a lot of what what free will is is consciously thinking about things uh understanding the sequences of events the narratives that this action leads to this result that action leads to a different result I did this I'm not happy with the result I should have done that next time I'll do the the other one uh so all that conscious thinking exploring multiple alternatives possibilities and using ideas to guide behavior because uh moral moral principles are often uh are that that's why people can talk about morality and debate what's wrong. The last part of Gabriel's question that modern life raises more and more complicated ethical dilemmas. Well, that's unfortunately true. It's nice to have a simple life and simple answers, but you've got to live in a complex modern world. There are all sorts of layers of argument. I heard people debating about vegetarianism and saying, well, it's nicer to the animals if we don't eat them. And others were saying, well, if we stopped eating meat and eggs, chickens would probably go extinct. There's like thirty four billion chickens in the world, mostly there because they make food for us. uh if if we stop doing that would they go extinct so the moral dilemmas are are are complicated yes in the modern life and especially as you adopt an increasingly global perspective but that's what we have the advanced power of the big brain for and the ability to talk to others about them is really important again It's interesting. I can't help but think of, there was a book I read a while back called The Fourth Turning, and it talks about just different generations. And I'm curious to get your ideas on, you know, we spoke a little bit about evolution, but how about the evolution of ideas? Do you think as every generation moves on, like our ideas change, like the same way language kind of changes in a way? Like, I know that's kind of a broad, broad, broad question, but what is your take on generations changing ideas? All right. So so human societies may be listed existed for one hundred fifty thousand years, one hundred forty thousand. We were hunter gatherers. Probably there wasn't a lot of change during that phase. But in the modern world, everyone's been saying, I think quite plausibly, that the pace of change has has greatly increased. So some things change faster than others, to be sure. Uh, but, uh, um, but in partly with the wider network, we can share more information, hear more different ideas and, and different approaches. It's easier to question how we do things because we encounter other people who do things differently, which again was probably not much the case for the first. hundred thousand, hundred fifty thousand years. So tradition that we work out a way to do things and that's the way we do it. And so we keep doing it that way. The older ones teach the young ones how we do things. Humans are especially adept at learning that not just how to do things, but how how we do things. I don't know if you know those studies on over imitation. So you can So let me say there's a box with food in it and you go over to the box and twirl around in a circle and pat your head on three times. And then you lift up one side of the box and the thing opens up and there's food inside. So a gorilla or a chimpanzee watching you will see that there's food inside. We'll go over to the box, open the food and get it. And it's not going to turn around in a circle or pat itself on the head. But the human child will do all those things. We'll copy the full procedure. It's sort of learning the cultural script as well as learning the pragmatic point that now there's food in the box. So we adapt that way and we learn the norms of our group and the language of our group. And so that's part of the human system. uh to change uh again we're more able to change as well into question systems and to think of alternatives which again is a big part of free will uh like the example of wolves for example wolves are extremely social animals uh but a pack of wolves living out in the forest uh will live pretty much the same way that they did ten thousand years ago uh they have not invented democracy or created technology or market economy they have not reinvented the roles of women female wolves uh anything like that uh the basic social structure remains the same whereas human societies are constantly changing it's uh it's one of the interesting things we talked about culture and it's common to talk about the culture as a as a thing as if it's stable and did you have to realize There are differences that are enduring, but yet all cultures are always continuing to change, some faster than others. But new information comes in and new opportunities and new society can be reformed with different kinds of systems. Democracy is really spreading over much of the world, but there were long periods where there was hardly any democracy. You can say there was some in the hunter-gatherers, but that was perhaps different and it wasn't a representative democracy either. Yeah. It's, it's just, it's mind blowing to some time. Sometimes I just, I just, I do that. I zone out and I think of the big picture and how the world's changing and it blows my mind. We got Lonnie coming in over here from New Jersey. Hello Lonnie. Given your experience bridging academic and popular spheres, how would you encourage people to approach the idea of free will in their everyday lives? Well, certainly you can use it to get better results if we think of... Obviously, the question threw me a little bit. Sorry. No worries. Take your time. So there are several key points. One is the limited energy aspect. And this was in my Willpower book, that all this extra thinking and stuff takes extra energy. And so your mind gets depleted. So free will is not something we're using all the time. We use it on crucial things. Like I said, an example where you're walking to the store and your path is blocked. Well, then you have to figure out a new path. But the rest of the time, you're just doing it automatically, which takes much less energy. So one thing is to realize the limited amount of energy that you have when you've made a lot of decisions. You'll start to make them more casually. There's a cool study. uh and some colleagues did with uh audi dealers when you buy a car uh you have a lot of decisions to make perhaps especially with an audi um so uh they changed the order in which people they scrambled the order for different people in which they'd make the decisions and they found that regardless of what the order was as people went along they're more and more likely to take whatever was standard So the first ones you think hard, exactly what do I want? What do I need in my car? And after a while, your decision making mechanism gets tired. It's used up some of its energy, ego depleted, as we say. And so you start to just go on automatic and we just follow whatever is standard or what everybody else does. So that's something to be aware of, that the powers of free will are limited. They're very useful and adaptive. You can think about the four main kinds of things that are affected there to go down from the grand concept of free will into more specific behavior. So self-control is one that's overriding one response to substitute a different response. You know, basically interrupting what you're doing, resisting temptation. um, maximizing your, uh, your work performance, uh, controlling your negative emotions, things like that. Um, rational choice is another thinking through logically what's the, you know, uh, the best thing to do. Uh, yeah, it's good to stop and do this periodically as you're, you know, we're in the habit of reacting automatically and say, well, stop and think, you know, what are all the options and what is the most sensible one of the lead to the result I want. Um, The third is planning. People do a lot of planning. It's not clear that other animals are even capable of planning, certainly beyond very minimal uh kinds of steps but we can make elaborate plans for I'm gonna do this and I'll do this and then it'll lead to that and that uh uh to get and and planning really does help you get to your goals uh people who do more planning are are more successful in life so uh planning is for and then finally active instead of passive responding uh to take control to uh to speak up to stand up to uh um Take initiative rather than just being passive and letting things happen to you and going along with the flow. Even perhaps criticizing a group and saying, I think what we're all doing here doesn't really make sense. It's not going to get us to the right answer. And some people will do that and a lot of people don't. They'll just go along with the group and follow along into disaster. So those would be things in everyday life where you can apply the free will, understand how it works, and really get the most out of it. That's a fantastic answer. Thanks for that. Ben, we got Ben Doc Askins coming in from Kentucky. And he says, looking back over your career, how have your own beliefs about free will evolved? Well, let me see. I think there was a period when I didn't believe in it. As a young man, I was smitten with the elegance of determinism, that everything is caused and everything is inevitable and the laws of physics must explain everything and they have no room for free will. And gradually, some were wise older people helped me see that that's really kind of a dead end sort of view. And I look back on that phase as intellectual masturbation. It's an elegant idea. It gives you a sense of superiority and so on, but it really doesn't apply to how we live our lives. We don't live in a deterministic world. know maybe some of the physical things are I could turn the light switch on and the lights come on um but uh but for human relationships there are they're built on multiple possibilities and options and um and indeed in psychology I've now become kind of an anti-determinist uh all the findings from scientific psychology are probabilistic not deterministic in other words psychologists will do an experiment and they change the odds of responding in a certain way but they don't guarantee it and deterministic is that cause always produces the same effect you know unless another cause which always overrides it uh happens to do so um it's sort of the clockwork universe everything is it universe is a giant machine and the future is completely inevitable um As I said, it's a seductive view. Christianity had its version of it in predestination. The scientists had it for a while, although modern science isn't really compatible with determinism either, as I understand it. Talking about quantum physics and even relativity theory poses some challenges. so uh yes my ideas have have indeed changed uh the uh long program of research of lab studies I I did with many talented colleagues on self-control and decision making and so on that really informed and changed my views as well the limited energy idea I didn't have in the early part of my career. And that just at first emerged from trying to learn about self control, just reading all the research I could find on it. And then we started doing experiments, and they were very well. So yeah, the idea that it takes extra energy to, to use free will to the fullest. And after you do your, your energy is somewhat depleted. So If you have another demand for self-control or rational thinking, decision fatigue is another term for this, then you won't do it as effectively until you have time to replenish with, say, rest or sleep or something else. Thank you for that. It's a wonderful answer, and I'm thankful that you shared it with us. I got my friend Hank Foley coming in that says, do you have any thoughts on psychedelics and altered states of consciousness? Well, I don't know what they have to do with free will, but I do. I mean, these things fascinate me as a psychologist, just as a way of exploring the hidden corners of the mind. Psychedelic means revealing the mind. And so that's what every psychologist wants. Yes, how can we learn about the mind? With some of those, I wrote some papers on LSD years ago. My takeaway or part of it was that it removes your defenses. So your mind is built a certain way, much of it as a result of learning to focus on certain things and ignore other things. And suddenly those defenses are gone. uh that's what's great about it because you can find all these things that are in your mind that you didn't know were there that's also what's occasionally awful about them because well you have your defenses for a reason it's true you take somebody who's you know has a lot of defensiveness and so on and give them lsd and then what what happens The saving grace with LSD is that your attention is span is short and your mind keeps leaping from one thing to another. So you might have realized, oh, my God, this is a terrible thing, but let it go. And then five minutes later, your mind will be on to something else. But the bad trips where people would seize on that and try to fight that, but they can't fight it. And so it would get this sort of self perpetuating panic reaction. that you can't let go. And then people go to the hospital, which is probably one of the last places you want to go on an LSD trip. It's so true. Yeah. So anyway, I think they're a fascinating tool for exploring the mind. There are also therapeutic applications, which are reasonably well supported and a number of them. And there's still being work on that. Yeah. some recent papers on ayahuasca and, uh, and, uh, ecstasy MDMA, uh, in terms of helping people accept things or change things about their lives. Uh, so, uh, the upside potential is good. Uh, they do not seem to be very addictive. So, uh, the, the downside is bad, but people will do crazy things on them. And so, uh, uh, there is a, there is a certain danger. It's, uh, When there are benefits for a lot and danger for a few, I mean, that's the societal dilemma. And do we deprive the many of the benefits of it to prevent the few from self-harm? I forget. Addiction researchers have talked about that, about the long tail to all these substances, even starting with alcohol. I mean, lots and lots of people drink alcohol. I've been known to have a glass of champagne myself. And it doesn't cause any problems or damages, but a few people really mess themselves up. They go drive cars or they become addicted and so on. And there's no perfect solution there. And we see worldwide all sorts of solutions from anyone can have alcohol anytime to restricted to adults past a certain age and under uncertain circumstances like not driving a car. to some countries that there's none whatsoever. I visited Saudi Arabia a few years ago, and even on the airplane flying there, they said, okay, we have to stop offering you drinks. This is your last chance to have alcohol until you're on the plane going home. And, well, they all worked reasonably well. I mean, the People in Saudi Arabia I met seem quite happy and are getting along really fine without alcohol. Other people enjoy drinking. Other people get into trouble. They drink too much and get into fights or sleep with the wrong person and make bad decisions. So that's getting off the psychedelic aspect. The psychedelics seem less dangerous unless you're driving a car or something. But my interest is partly the potential for exploring the mind and seeing what sorts of things might happen. And you can even realize how much of your understanding of the world is basically just a construct. Yeah, it's interesting to see some of the work on there where it shuts down the default mode network. And if you think of the default mode network as the way in which you go throughout your day and just make these choices on some level, it does have an interesting relationship, maybe with with free will on on a. psychedelic type of nature you know it brings up another question I have up you've toured around extensively you've you've worked with so many great people and you've got to see a lot of the world is there a difference in different cultures towards free will that's a good question and I'm sorry to say that I don't have a lot of evidence about that uh people everywhere seem to have the same basic intuitions about it. So, you know, some studies that ask, you know, if you put a ball on the hill, does it have to roll down? Well, yes, the ball does not have a choice. But if you have a person on the hill, can the person choose not to walk down? Yes. So they understand there is a difference that people are able to make choices and control their behavior. And in some sense, some fundamental sense are freer. uh than than others that seems to be uh fairly universal um in western civilization the notion of free will got tied up with the uh the christian uh doctrines because that was the dominant religion uh for a long time and still it is it's not as dominant as it was because a few religious people but uh um So free will was somewhat shaped by that sort of view. And some of the versions of it that free will means that the soul is causing behavior, reaching into the brain to do some stuff. That's a peculiar view that may be specific to Western views. But I don't know enough about... how other cultures, Islamic cultures or India, Hindu cultures, how they think about these things to really make a strong statement there. It's fascinating to me. I would say that the importance of acting responsibly autonomy and agency, those are pretty much requirements of human societies everywhere. So our specific theories about what free will is and how it works may vary depending on what religion and dominated or what philosophical school in different societies. But the basic everyday points of self-control and planning and decision making, those probably are pretty similar everywhere. I guess. Yeah, it makes sense. I it's, you know, it's interesting the more, the more we get involved in something, like the deeper you go, the bigger it gets. You know what I mean? Like you go in there, you're like, what about this one? That's the beauty of life and the complexity and the wonderful connections that we have and that we see in life. And Dr. Roy, this is a fascinating, I can't believe an hour has gone by. Like, I feel like it was five minutes and I still probably have like another fifteen questions in here to come up. But before I continue, maybe you can just fill us in a little bit more about, What is it that you want people to take away from this newest book that you've put out there? All right. The first point is you can make a scientific theory of free will that many of the past arguments and debates about it are really arguments over terminology. Even the scientists I know are skeptical of free will. They agree that the human mental system that controls action is radically different from anything else in nature. Here at Harvard University, there's nothing like Harvard University among any other species. They don't even have schools. Some of them do teach, but it's not even clear they have intentional teaching, that the babies are wired to imitate the elders. But the elders don't think, oh, today I got to teach the babies how to catch a worm or whatever. So evolution gave us something radically new and marvelous. And it's not unscientific. It's a brain system for functioning in culture. And that's the scientific problem. That's what we need to understand. uh so rather than arguing about does it deserve to be called free will or not um the the unscientific definitions I'm not making use of again like souls causing behavior or another one is causality doesn't apply you're from causality now scientific theories are causal theories but uh but the the important features of of free will like the time perspective that unlike other animals we can project into the future we can imagine several different uh possible futures that would result from the present depending on what I do on on which direction I go um that's that's the kind of stuff we need to uh explore and understand and that will furnish us with a uh with an understanding of free will, uh, or more broadly with the understanding of what's special about the psyche. It's beautiful. I, I would encourage everybody within the sound of our voice to go down to the show notes and check the links. And if you have any questions, go down to a Dr. Roy's links down there and reach out to him. Definitely check out the book, check out the other works and where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? Well, in terms of people who find me, my website, roybaumeister.com, which is maintained for me by other people, so it's a little behind, but it has my email address and so on, and we update it pretty well. Those are very nice people. So that keeps up with my latest works reasonably well. In terms of where I'm going, well, At my age, I've stepped back from teaching and administrative work and all that, which I, teaching was fun, administrative work I never liked. So I'm mostly devoting the next decade to peer scholarly work, to thinking and reading and writing. I'm not running a big lab anymore. I did that for many years and that was fun. But I work with people who collect data. But still, there's so much scientific work being published, and each one sort of addresses a small question. But somebody needs to read through a lot of these to address the big questions to put them together. And so that's kind of what I want to do. Right now, I'm reading about what are the effects of socializing, of interacting with others when you're physically alone, which is, I guess, what you and I are both doing now. Yeah. interacting. But email, of course, many of us spend a couple hours a day on email, and you're sitting alone in a room interacting with other people. And yet, I think it doesn't really engage the whole person to some extent that we may be be losing things, losing some of the response. I taught a seminar here last fall, and it turned out it was exactly fifty years since I'd been a senior like they were. It was mostly upper level undergraduates sort of reflecting on the differences. Back then, we didn't have all this electronic stuff. My junior year, I didn't even have a phone at all. And so it was much more intense competition than it was before grade inflation. So at dinner, we had to study for three or four hours. But then we would get together with our friends and some would go to the pub and have a beer. Those were the pot smoking days or whatever. We'd hang out and we'd talk in person and we would laugh out loud and so on. Now, I think a lot of them go alone back to their room. They send out text messages. They type LOL, laugh out loud. But everybody I've asked, I said, do you really laugh out loud every time you type? And they say, no. And laughing is good for the body and good for the mind. And that's just one of many physical things. So anyway, I'm sort of exploring this. I would say all my ideas are subject to revision. So I'll read as much as I can find and then try to figure out what's the big picture with that. So that's one thing I'm working on now and got other projects in the work too. It sounds fascinating. And I hope we continue to see lots and lots of papers published by it. I would love to learn more about these new things you're learning about and reading about. And I know my audience would as well. And so we'll hang on briefly afterwards, Dr. Roy, just for a few moments. But to everybody within the sound of my voice, I hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Please go down and check out the book. Do yourself a huge favor and learn about how free will can play. apart and freeing you from some of the burdens in life. If you have the energy to do it, that's all we got. Ladies and gentlemen, have a beautiful day. Aloha.