Free Psychology? Why Psychological Research Is Incompatible with the Requirements of Clockwork Determinism

Stephan Lau^1*Roy Frederick Baumeister²

• ¹Federal University of Administrative Sciences, Berlin, Germany
• ²Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

This essay argues that the concept of strict causal determinism (or "clockwork determinism"), while being a powerful doctrine to reduce uncertainty, is not compatible with the way psychology does science. Specifically, we argue that psychological explanations are necessarily incomplete, that the specification and measurement of variables will always contain variance, and that psychological experiments cannot guarantee the degree of control necessary for strict deterministic relationships. Further, we argue that typical psychological causes do not fit the scale of clockwork-deterministic explanations. It is important to note that these arguments are agnostic to the question of whether clockwork determinism exists or not. Even if the universe works strictly deterministically, psychological explanations and paradigms would remain incompatible with the requirements posed by clockwork determinism. We judge this not to be of any problem for a thriving psychological science, unless (young) scientists see clockwork determinism as their primary epistemological foundation.