Problems With The Free Will and Determinism Plus Scale (FAD-Plus)

A common tool used in various psychological studies attempting to assess how people act when they believe they have free will compared to when they do not is “The Free Will and Determinism Plus (FAD-Plus) scale“. The purpose of the scale is to distinguish between people who believe in free will and those who do not.

This scale asks participants to rate twenty-seven sentences regarding how much they disagree or agree with them (a 1 for totally disagreeing to a 5 for totally agreeing) . Seven of the sentences align with the belief in free will (or so the scale says), and the rest align with one of three types of “no free will” positions:

1) Scientific Determinism
2) Fatalism
3)  Unpredictability

Scientific Determinism has seven, Fatalism has five, and Unpredictability has seven sentences. One problem with a lot of studies is that they don’t bother to break these three down. Rather, they just suggest a lack of free will causes a particular action without separating these, even though these categories are extremely important.

Both fatalism and unpredictability fall into problematic containers of thought that lead to types of futility and defeatism. So if these are injected into a study’s assessment of “lacking a belief in free will”, this says nothing about holding the types of non-belief in free will that actually align with reality.  Let’s look at these parts of the FAD-Plus for a moment:

Fatalism

• I believe that the future has already been determined by fate.
• No matter how hard you try, you can’t change your destiny.
• Fate already has a plan for everyone.
• Whatever will be, will be – there’s not much you can do about it.
• Whether people like it or not, mysterious forces seem to move their lives.

Fatalism falls into the very futile and defeatist attitudes that I represented in this infographic as well as this article. It’s a “no free will” belief that simply doesn’t align with reality –  that (reality) being our thoughts, feelings, and actions are all part of the causal chains of events that lead to a particular outcome. A study that injects fatalism into the assessment of the “no free will” side simply injects in the assessment of “those who think they don’t have free will through poor reasoning”. The next is just as bad:

Unpredictability

• Chance events seem to be the major cause of human history.
• No one can predict what will happen in this world.
• Life seems unpredictable – just like throwing dice or flipping a coin.
• People are unpredictable.
• Life is hard to predict because it is almost totally random.
• Luck plays a big role in people’s lives.
• What happens to people is a matter of chance.
• People’s futures cannot be predicted.

This side of the scale goes into those who think they lack a belief in free will because they think all events are just random or chance occurrences. That there is no structure,  that most things just spontaneously happen, and nothing is predictable. This is just as problematic as fatalism in that people aren’t assessing that their thoughts and actions are important things that lead to important outcomes. And yes, both fatalistic and “random chance” ideologies will produce problematic actions as does the idea that what one thinks, says, or does simply doesn’t matter. And for those who aren’t familiar with why these aren’t consistent with reality, and uneducated about the topic of (the lack of) free will in the logical and rational sense, these defeatist buckets are easy to fall into (part of the reason I stress education when addressing this topic). If the study doesn’t assess people who actually understand hard determinism or hard incompatibilism, but rather injects in a temporary alignment of lacking free will through suggestion (e.g. reading a passage), often the first intuitions a person has are fatalistic.

So how about the actual rational side of the scale (7  out of the 27 sentences). Let’s look at these and see if they could be worded any better:

Scientific Determinism

• People’s biological makeup determines their talents and personality.
• Psychologists and psychiatrists will eventually figure out all human behavior.
• Your genes determine your future.
• Science has shown how your past environment created your current intelligence and personality.
• As with other animals, human behavior always follows the laws of nature.
• Parents’ character will determine the character of their children.
• Childhood environment will determine your success as an adult.

These aren’t too awful, but some are indeed problematic. Let’s take this for example:

• Science has shown how your past environment created your current intelligence and personality.

As someone scientifically minded, I’d look at that and go “Hmmm, well science has shown that BOTH environment AND genetics create your current intelligence and personality”. Therefore, a “more rational” response to that sentence is that I’d need to water down that rating to perhaps a 3 rather than the full agreement of a 5. Most of these sentences are problematic like this.  For example, these wouldn’t get a 5 agreement from me as they suggest this is genetic only and not environmental as well:

• People’s biological makeup determines their talents and personality.
• Your genes determine your future.

And these wouldn’t get a 5 from me as they suggest these are environmental only, and not genetic:

• Psychologists and psychiatrists will eventually figure out all human behavior.
• Childhood environment will determine your success as an adult.

The second one also leaves out that there are various factors as an adult that assist in determining one’s success, not only “childhood environmental conditions”.

This one could be up in the air because it might come from parental environment or parental genetics, but this leaves out the numerous other environmental causes that determine the character of the child:

• Parents’ character will determine the character of their children.

This one isn’t too bad, though could be worded better:

• As with other animals, human behavior always follows the laws of nature.

In other words, as someone who thinks there is no free will, I’d only give a 5 (totally agree) to one of the seven (if that). In fact I probably wouldn’t give most of the others under “scientific determinism” a 4 either. This is a problem if we are trying to differentiate between the other forms of lacking free will belief. So even the “Scientific Determinism” (what they call it) results would be problematic.

While we are at it, I might as well assess the “free will” sentences:

Free will

• People have complete control over the decisions they make.
• People must take full responsibility for any bad choices they make.
• People can overcome any obstacles if they truly want to.
• Criminals are totally responsible for the bad things they do.
• People have complete free will.
• People are always at fault for their bad behavior.
• Strength of mind can always overcome the body’s desires.

These aren’t too horrible either, but they could be better as well. For example:

• Strength of mind can always overcome the body’s desires

Sure, it cannot always, but strength of mind overcoming the body’s desires does not imply free will. In fact, I’d suggest this would be a deterministic process. Basically, each of the sentences should be written in a way that this cannot be interpreted as something other than a free will belief. Overcoming an obstacle can be entirely deterministic, and even people who believe in free will don’t necessarily believe that ANY obstacle can be overcome, or that people are ALWAYS at fault, and so on. These can lead to people who believe in free will overlapping with the deterministic ratings and vice versa.

I would have liked to see much clearer sentences such as:

A person could have, of their own accord, done otherwise than they did.

and:

Your thoughts and actions are a product of both genetics and environment

…as well as some addressing caused events and so on. It seems the sentences in FAD-Plus could actually be a whole lot better at representing a specific side of the debate. I can only suspect that the reason they are not is because they are developed by people who don’t really have the strongest grasp of the subject matter.

And as I already mentioned, another problem with most of the studies that use the FAD-Plus scale is that a temporary disbelief in free will is acquired  (through reading a passage) rather than the study being of people who actually hold and understand a hard determinist or hard incompatibilist position (even if they don’t use these words). In other words, these studies attempt to influence a person who has never thought of the topic or who actually has a belief in free will to begin with. This will be addressed in an entirely separate article. I also (very briefly) address these studies in a chapter of the book “Breaking the Free Will Illusion for the Betterment of Humankind“.

In the meantime, if you look at a study that is using FAD-Plus, you might want to take it with a grain of salt. You also want to look carefully into if the study is splitting out the different types of “no belief in free will” positions (which at the very least FAD-Plus has done). If it’s not clearly doing so, the study is worthless. If it is clearly doing so, we still need to assess the poor quality of the sentences used in FAD-Plus, among other things I’ll be addressing in another article (or two) that are even more important.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

'Trick Slattery

'Trick Slattery is the author of Breaking the Free Will Illusion for the Betterment of Humankind. He's an author, philosopher, artist, content creator, and entrepreneur. He has loved and immersed himself in philosophy since he was teenager. It is his first and strongest passion. Throughout the years he has built a philosophy based on analytic logic and critical thinking. Some of the topics he is most interested in are of a controversial variety, but his passion for the topics and their importance drives him to want to express these ideas to others. His other passions include pen and ink line art and digital artwork.

Latest posts by 'Trick Slattery (see all)

• Semantic Shift Day, August 31 – REMINDER! Mark your calendar! - August 1, 2020
• Debunking Dennettian Diatribe - May 2, 2018
• Compatibilism: A Parable (comic) - December 7, 2017