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A brief history of free will
In the past century, attempts within psychology and psychiatry to elucidate the scientific underpinnings of human behavior have steered academic thinking away from a belief in 'contra-causal' free will, the idea that individuals consciously choose to carry out certain actions and, under the exact same conditions, could have chosen to do otherwise. Such movement took root with Freud's psychic determinism and the primacy of the unconscious, as opposed to conscious deliberation, in governing action, though Freud suggested that freedom in decision making could result from successful psychoanalysis and modern psychoanalytic theory seems to still allow for some variant of free will (Felthous, 2008). The rise of experimental psychology exemplified by Skinnerian behaviorism later shifted causal explanations for behavior from the internal to the external, nearly rendering 'concepts such as free will or conscious choice... no more than quaint holdovers from psychology's philosophical beginnings' (Sappington, 1990). Still, cognitive behavioral therapies are based on the principle that thoughts can be consciously altered to effect behavioral change, while empirical research on self-efficacy and locus of control suggests that believing in the competence to control one's actions and life course may not only make an impact on behavior, but also be vital to mental health (Sappington, 1990; Waller 2004a , b ). As a result, while enhanced psychological understanding of the determinants of human behavior has eroded the concept of free will, it remains possible to adopt at least three distinct philosophical stances on the issue, including hard determinism (the universe is deterministic; there is no free will), libertarianism (the universe is not deterministic; there is free will), and compatibilism (the universe is deterministic; there is free will).
Although age-old debates about whether the universe and human behavior are deterministic are unlikely to be resolved in the near future, neuroscientific discoveries in recent years do warrant an update concerning the role of free will in human decision making and action. Answers to some of the following questions are now well within the grasp of neuroscience: (1) How reliable is our subjective sense of free will? (2) Is volition localizable in the brain? (3) Can some psychiatric disorders be understood as disorders of free will and/or self-control?...