REDIRECT: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change
By Timothy D. Wilson
Little, Brown, 288 pp., $25.99
WHO’S IN CHARGE?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain
By Michael S. Gazzaniga
Ecco, 26p pp., $27.99
Common sense has a lot to say about human behavior and the human brain. Recent empirical research, though, strongly suggests that a good deal of what it has to say is wrong. This is both unfortunate and serious, since many of the practices and policies we choose as a society are based on our beliefs about human behavior and how to change it. Two new books from eminent brain researchers aim to apply these recent findings to questions of behavior, free will, and responsibility.
In “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change,’’ Timothy D. Wilson surveys a variety of social programs and policies that, it turns out, have been based on false assumptions about the way we think. He begins with the example of Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, whose premise is “that when people have experienced a traumatic event they should air their feelings as soon as possible, so that they don’t bottle up these feelings and develop post-traumatic stress disorder.’’ This might sound reasonable, but according to Wilson, it simply doesn’t work: In fact, empirical testing strongly suggests that CISD has a tendency to increase anxiety and depression by retraumatizing people, delaying any healing.
“Redirect’’ goes on to survey other misguided attempts to cure social ills. Programs intended to discourage kids from using drugs, committing crimes, and getting pregnant, and to promote racial tolerance all turn out to have no measurable effect or the opposite of the one intended. Fortunately, Wilson suggests, there is an alternative, which involves manipulating the narratives people tell about themselves to encourage positive rather than negative behavior. Wilson calls this the “story-editing approach’’:
“Most medical treatments are now tested scientifically before being widely implemented. But the same cannot be said of attempts to solve the major social and behavioral problems of our day, such as racial prejudice, adolescent behavior problems, drug use, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The same goes for advice given in countless self-help books about how to live a happier and more fulfilling life, and for parenting books that tell us how to raise our children . . . [U]nlike the many ineffective behavioral interventions that are in use today, the story-editing approach is like penicillin: it may violate common sense, but it works.’’
Particularly when criticizing various failed social policies and programs, “Redirect’’ is sensible and reasonably convincing. Wilson, a University of Virginia psychology professor, knows his behavioral research and is a fair and careful critic. Public administrators and policy makers should listen up. The book does not, though, offer as much to the general reader. It is hard to get a handle on just what the “story-editing approach’’ is, or how it is supposed to work: People looking to improve their lives, or parents wanting to know how they should raise their children, will likely find the advice disappointingly vague. (Tips include: “When your kids reach adolescence, keep in mind that their narratives will be shaped by their peers and the media,’’ and “Be a good consumer of information.’’) Much of the advice, too, feels like old news - after all, the story-editing approach, as Wilson writes, originates in the work of Kurt Lewin in the 1930s and 1940s.
Like “Redirect,’’ Michael Gazzaniga’s “Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain’’ is concerned with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. According to Gazzaniga, such stories do more than influence or guide our behavior: They quite literally create the self. Gazzaniga’s scientific assault on common sense is particularly directed toward the belief that human beings are unified agents with free will. The truth, Gazzaniga argues, is more complicated. Each human being is a complicated combination of various mental systems running simultaneously, and the appearance of a unified self is largely created by the interpretations and narrative creations of a brain module he calls “the interpreter’’: “That YOU that you are so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behavior as it can incorporate, and it denies or rationalizes the rest.’’
The parts of “Who’s in Charge’’ that concern the interpreter are reasonably interesting. The book runs into trouble, though, when Gazzaniga attempts to tackle the issue advertised in the book’s subtitle, the perennial philosophical conundrum known as free will. What he does convincingly manage to show is that the story of how the brain works is very complicated - far more so than common sense would have us believe. But what is the upshot of this for free will?
Gazzaniga’s position on free will is not at all clear. In the book’s conclusion he describes himself as having argued that “the whole arcane issue about free will is a miscast concept, based on social and psychological beliefs held at particular times in human history that have not been borne out and/or are at odds with modern scientific knowledge.’’ This is a surprising conclusion, though, since in the midst of the book Gazzaniga often comes across as taking a stand on the free will issue.
Sometimes the stand looks like a negative one. In Chapter Four he writes that “[t]he human interpreter has set us up for a fall. It has created the illusion of self and, with it, the sense we humans have agency and ‘freely’ make decisions about our actions. . . . Puncturing this illusionary bubble of a single willing self is difficult to say the least. Just as we know but find it difficult to believe that the world is not flat, it too is difficult to believe that we are not totally free agents.’’
Yet at other times Gazzaniga seems to argue that humans have free will:
“When more than one brain interacts, new and unpredictable things begin to emerge, establishing a new set of rules. Two of the properties that are acquired in this new set of rules that weren’t previously present are responsibility and freedom. They are not found in the brain . . . [They] are found, however, in the space between brains, in the interactions between people.’’
Supposing that “freedom’’ is not something entirely distinct from free will (Gazzaniga does not, at any rate, indicate that this is so) it is important to see how inadequate this is as an argument for human freedom. It is easy to see how interactions between brains could give rise to unpredictability, if by “unpredictable’’ we mean “so complicated that humans will never be able to predict it.’’ But in that sense of unpredictability a thing could be both unpredictable (because it is complex) and fully deterministic, and if brains are essentially complex machines running according to deterministic physical laws (as Gazzaniga himself writes, “Today we know we are evolved entities that work like a Swiss clock.’’) then adding more brains to the picture does not ever produce genuine freedom. (No matter how many billiard balls you add to an extremely large billiards table, they will still behave in a deterministic, albeit exceedingly complex, manner.) And this is true even if, as Gazzaniga points out, the brains can make choices that influence themselves: This still doesn’t seem to give us free will, just a more complex deterministic system.
I am not sure, then, just what Gazzaniga means by “free will,’’ and whether he takes himself to be defending it or attacking it. He is a bit clearer when it comes to moral responsibility: that, he thinks, we do have - we are responsible for our voluntarily performed actions, at least in most cases. But his main argument, unfortunately, is another version of the “there’s more than one brain involved’’ argument. “My contention,’’ he writes, “is that ultimately responsibility is a contract between two people rather than a property of a brain, and determinism has no meaning in this context . . . we have to look at the whole picture, a brain in the midst of and interacting with other brains, not just one brain in isolation.’’
The crucial question is: Just how does it help to look at the picture this way? No one, to my knowledge, has ever suggested that responsibility is “a property of the brain’’ - or, as Gazzaniga writes elsewhere, “a mechanism that resides in the individual brain.’’ (If we made an atom-for-atom duplicate of a murderer’s brain, would the newly created brain be as responsible as the original criminal for his crimes?) And what does it mean to call responsibility a “contract’’? If responsibility were a contract, why couldn’t criminals evade responsibility by simply refusing to sign it?
There is, as it happens, a vast and sophisticated philosophical literature on free will and moral responsibility - one that could have helped sort out this book’s confusions. That Gazzaniga does not refer to this literature, or show any signs of having familiarized himself with it, is disappointing and frustrating. It is not unreasonable to hope that scientific research will help us grapple more successfully with metaphysical problems of this sort. But that does not mean that the science allows us to discard the philosophy. When the problems are this hard we’re going to need both science and philosophy if we’re going to get anywhere at all.