Free Will and Unconscious

4 Commentsby   |  11.22.10  |  The Schools of Psychology (Part IV-B)

Our unconscious mind relies on previous experiences, on expectations, and on prior knowledge. We have control of the memories and facts that effect our unconscious choices. In the example given in class with the people’s pictures being flashed next to a figure that we had been taught in our history class to be either good or bad, we would then describe the person as being good or bad. Some people would argue that we have no control over how we relate the two picture to each other. I however, believe that we have control over how we view those people and the things that we associate with those people. We have been taught to view Hitler as an evil person who caused a mass genocide, so we would have associated negative qualities with Juice’s picture. But if we had chosen to associate Hitler as a good politician and successful leader, then we would have associated those qualities with Juice. So we do have free will over our unconscious because we chose how we will remember circumstances and people. We can remember the good qualities or the bad qualities and those are what will later play a role in how we judge similar situations.

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4 Comments

  1. Mary Tomkins
    2:23 pm, 11.22.10

    I disagree somewhat. I mean, I believe in free will, but the way I see it, free will applies to conscious decisions. There are some things we cannot control, which you said. From what I understood of the experiments, we would automatically associate Juice with the first thing that popped into our heads when we saw Hitler’s picture. It seems to me that’s not really something we can control. Just like word association games, the point is that we can’t think about it, we don’t have time to decide. There are some things about our minds that we cannot control, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have free will, since we can still choose to do the right thing and treat Juice well whether or not he reminds us of Hitler. šŸ˜€

  2. Stephanie Bell
    2:39 pm, 11.22.10

    But we chose how we originally decided to view Hitler or the word in the association game. For someone who had been taught that success was unattainable, I would be curious to see if they still had better performance. When we remember events like prior dating, we can look at them as good or bad. When we associate things with our ex’s are dependent on how we viewed our relationship with them. For me, I have very few negative feelings about previous relationships, so when people ask me about my ex boyfriends I remember the positive experiences. For some of my friends, they had “horrible” relationships and when you ask them about it they only remember the negative aspects of the relationship.

  3. Rebekah Hernandez
    9:22 pm, 11.28.10

    Stephanie, I agree with you to an extent, but I must admit that I agree with Mary to a larger extent. It is true that we have control over how we code certain information. We can control whether we view Hitler as a mass murderer or a genius politician. As a result of the choice we decide to make, when we are presented with certain stimuli our unconscious will act on the information we have made a conscious decision to code in a particular way. However, sometimes certain instincts are beyond our free will. For example, if someone is shown the word ā€œrapeā€ very quickly what will he or she think of? Undoubtedly, the personā€™s thoughts would be negative. But, in accordance with your thinking as I understand it, if that person had decided to code the word ā€œrapeā€ as ā€œan opportunity for God to make something good out of a really suck-y situationā€. That person might have a different unconscious reaction. My argument, in contrast to this, is that certain stimuli are beyond our tampering and changing. We have primal instincts to view rape negatively. Likewise, we have been engrained to view Hitler negatively. To change these views, I would argue, is not impossible, but it would be difficult. This is because one would have to un-engrain a primal or learned view and engrain another view in its place. Only then would our unconscious pick that new engrained view. Thank you for your post and making me think:).

  4. Austin Fontaine
    6:14 am, 11.30.10

    Well that is fair, but you rely on it being a choice as to how we view those figures. It all depends on which qualities of the individual you were exposed to and how those were presented to you. Hitler: evil genocidal authoritarian who took advantage of a weak country to further his own means OR Hitler: concerned German citizen who sought to purge the unworthy filth from the streets of the country that the Jewish filth had tried to destroy. The same information can be shown in multiple lights, however traditionally delusional those may seem, and the way information is framed has a great impact on the way it is recieved. I do not believe that there is any actual will involved in how we interpret information. There is only the prior information we have recieved, and the basic personality foundation we have had from birth (confrontational, skeptic, accepting, ect.)

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