One excellent way to bring a dinner party to a close, if it’s late and you’d like your guests to leave, is to raise the philosophical question of “free will”. Do we have any? It certainly seems that way. Suppose I’m at the supermarket, about to reach for a jar of blackcurrant jam: surely it’s within my power to change my mind and switch to apricot? Yet some philosophers say it isn’t. After all, every molecule in the universe – including those in my limbs and brain – is subject to the laws of physics: A causes B, B causes C, in predictable ways (with some randomness thrown in, courtesy of quantum mechanics). Seen this way, my jam-choosing sits at the very end of a vast chain of causes and effects, reaching back through millennia. From the moment of the Big Bang, you could have predicted I’d go for blackcurrant.
This is an outrageous thought, so the usual response is to reject it – or, in the dinner party scenario, suddenly to remember you’ve an early start tomorrow. But while philosophers debate if everything is predetermined, psychologists have basically established something only slightly less disturbing: a large proportion of your decisions aren’t independently made by you. In his new book, Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger puts the figure at 99.9%: that’s how many of your choices are significantly influenced by forces of which you’re unaware. We choose music and novels, clothes and careers, because others did. Or we choose the opposite, to show we’re not like them – a phenomenon marketers call “snob effects”. You probably named your child in order to sound similar, but not identical, to names that were in the air at the time: after Hurricane Katrina, fewer American kids got named Katrina, but girls’ names starting with a hard K shot up, Berger writes. We choose our politics partly to mimic or rebel against our parents; and we’ll support or reject the exact same policy, research suggests, depending on whether it’s described as right- or leftwing.
Taken individually, these effects aren’t surprising. What is striking is the volume. Pop psychology tends to present these “hidden persuaders” as anomalies, as if we usually make up our own minds, and only occasionally get blown off course. But, reading Berger, you get the feeling it’s the other way round: we’re mainly robots, acting out the influences of our environments, lucky if we manage a tiny sliver of independent thought. Even the decision to kill yourself is heavily influenced by the immediate availability of the means to do so. When you remove people’s access to those means, they often don’t just “find another way”; rather, a suicide is prevented.
Is this lack of autonomy a cause for alarm or relief? When it comes to ordinary daily decisions, probably the latter. If my choices are my own, I’ll be constantly anxious about choosing well. But if every “choice” I make is inevitably shaped by countless unseen pressures, I can relax a bit. If I ever write my autobiography, I have the first line: “Due to circumstances beyond my control…”
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
