Choice and Free Will Essay -- Psychology

â€Å"Free will† is the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate. Free will has long been debated by scholars, philosophers, and psychologists. It is a subject that has been argued, theorized, and predicted to the extent of human ability, but recent data has been brought up by two psychologists named Shirley Matile Ogletree and Crystal D. Oberle. These two psychologists assess surveys given to college level students to evaluate the â€Å"common† or â€Å"plain† perspective of free will. They also bring up the questions like â€Å"Is free will compatible with determinism?,† â€Å"What is meant by free will and determinism by the average person?,† and â€Å"Does it make a difference what attitudes people have regarding free will and determinism?† Free will and deterministic perspectives are exceedingly argumentative points of view with hard deterministic views describing free will as non existent, and libertarian views d escribing free will as freely chosen actions being done by an autonomic organism, which led me to believe that both agents are apart of everyday choices with the free will perspective being a more logical and acceptable way of assessing human behavior. Ogletree and Oberle describe hard determinism â€Å"as completely caused by a combination of genetics, past experiences, and current circumstance, also clearly supports the incompatibility of determinism and free will—free will simply doesn’t exist.† This perspective is the most extreme of all deterministic views. It is a view that the authors of my source perceive as the explanation of human behavior. Although, there are other deterministic views held by others that do not take this extreme position. Soft determinism can be explained as humans being exhibited to both det... ...etic base pair of the possible three billion differences, the one different nucleic acid, the one different protein, and all the way down to the non living particles of which we were created from. It is this difference in each one of us that stems choice. The presence of choice is considered, to me, as free will. When fate lends its hand out to us with another option, fate, itself, is offering us choice, but is the choice we make already chosen for us? Works Cited Oberle, Crystal and Ogletree, Shirley . â€Å"The Nature, Common Usage, And Implications Of Free Will And Determinism.† Behavior and Philosophy. 1 December 2008. 1 December 2010. Coon, Dennis and Mitterer, John. â€Å"Psychology: A Journey.† Printed in the United States. 2010