On Will, Freedom of Will, and Willpower
There are few psychological phenomena that are more consequential to the human condition than will and its derivatives: willpower and freedom of will. The ability to exercise will deliberately and consciously is, arguably, among the most important defining features of psychologically complex life.
Despite its importance, the concept of will is neither well understood nor well described. Colloquially, all three related concepts—those of will, freedom of will, and willpower—are often used interchangeably. Let’s begin by disentangling them.
At the core of the notion of will lies a competition of motives. The role of will in that competition is to transform simple, single-motive behaviors into more sophisticated multi-motive versions. For example, eating when one feels hungry is extremely simple. This behavior is centered on a single motive—to remove the unpleasant sensation of hunger. However, by exercising will, we can introduce new motives to the equation.
If one is stranded on an island with a limited supply of food, there will be an additional motive for preserving scarce resources. Conversely, if one has been indulging a bit too much, there can be an additional motive for losing weight and improving one’s fitness. Thus, will transforms the initial single-motive behavior aimed at satisfying hunger into a more complicated multi-motive behavior that also considers the importance of preserving food for the future or of not breaking the diet.
Willpower, in turn, is the efficiency of this ability to deliberately make such behavioral transformations. Those who are proficient at it can be said to have strong willpower. It is important to note that the process of modifying one’s behavior is complex and involves more than sheer grit and emotional perseverance. For instance, having a vivid imagination that helps you depict how beautifully you’d look in your favorite swimming suit after losing thirty pounds is also part of the mechanism of willpower. So is the ability to “talk yourself” into a desired course of action.
When it comes to willpower, what matters is the efficiency of increasing the relative appeal of consciously chosen motives (losing weight) over the appeal of more primitive, automatic, or otherwise undesirable ones (sating hunger by any means). Different people manage their motives using different techniques, depending on their natural disposition and specific circumstances.
Motives fulfill two related functions: meaning making and calling to action. If you intellectually “chose” a motive but still aren’t acting on it, despite being able to do so, it means that you haven’t yet imbued that motive with enough relative appeal to outcompete the other motives that hold you back (like fear of failure or sheer laziness). It doesn’t mean that every time when you choose to relax over doing something productive you fail to exercise willpower—only when you consciously prefer to pursue one motive but in reality pursue another. Enjoying a movie night with friends instead of working on a school paper is not a willpower problem in itself. However, it becomes one if you actually wish you were working on a school paper.
Armed with this understanding of will and willpower, we can now define the concept of freedom of will. The question of freedom of will boils down to the belief in people’s ability to consciously and actively manage the relative appeal of competing motives. If you believe that people are fundamentally capable of that (as I do), you believe in freedom of will. If you don’t (as classical behaviorists don’t), then you consider freedom of will a fiction. I talk about belief here because at our current level of technology it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of free will with scientific rigor. We don’t have tools to demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt whether the choice of a motive was made by a person through a deliberate internal effort or whether it was simply a response to multiple external stimuli that the person rationalized as a conscious choice after the fact.
Since some of the most fundamental elements of human civilization, such as ethics, law, government, and friendship are predicated on the existence of free will, we should require extraordinarily strong evidence to the contrary before seriously entertaining the possibility that freedom of will doesn’t exist.
Distinguishing the terms
The Three Related Concepts
All three concern the conscious management of competing motives—but describe different things.
Hunger creates an immediate urge to eat. Food scarcity, health goals, or other concerns can be introduced as additional motives that must also be considered.
Visualization, self-talk, planning, and reframing can make a chosen motive more compelling. Willpower involves more than grit or emotional endurance.
The unresolved question is whether people genuinely manage their motives through deliberate internal effort—or merely experience predetermined responses as personal choices.
As mentioned above, I believe that freedom of will exists. Had I thought differently, I wouldn’t have chosen my line of work as a psychotherapist because it would have been a completely useless endeavor. Unless, of course, we take the behaviorist logic to its inevitable conclusion and assume that I’ve never chosen anything anyway but merely reacted to an impossibly complex set of stimuli to which I’ve been exposed over my lifetime.
I want to finish this piece where I started—namely with the connection between the notion of will and the psychological reality of being a human. Regardless of what personality theory you find the most compelling—Freudian, Adlerian, Perlsian, Maslowian, or any other—at its foundation you will always find the same two things: the motive structure and the intentionality of its management. These two elements form the basis of personhood and give life meaning and direction.
When we say that we like somebody, what we are really saying is that we like what motives drive that person in life and how he or she balances and actualizes them. Thus, human personality, as we understand it, cannot be separated from the concept of will. In the absence of free will, saying that we love somebody would be, in effect, saying that we love the interplay of that somebody’s genes and the external stimuli that somebody has been exposed to up until now. What a sad and diminished world it would be.