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https://psyche.co/ideas/why-you-should-try-living-without-free-will-for-two-weeks
Why you should try living without free will for two weeks
by Tara-Lyn Camilleri, evolutionary biologist
Set aside the philosophical debates and act as if there is no free will. It leads to less blaming and better questions
You're driving in heavy traffic when you hear the screech of tyres, followed by a thud. You glance to the lane beside you and see that a black sedan has just slammed into the back of a silver SUV.
At first, the explanation seems uncomplicated. Brakes constrain motion, but not enough to overcome the car's momentum, and the collision causes damage. A leads to B. Cause and effect in its simplest form.
Then you notice the drivers.
From the black sedan, music still playing, steps a young man in a tailored suit. You notice the car is a new BMW. He checks his phone and then surveys the damage to his vehicle. In the silver SUV, a woman in her early 40s turns immediately to the back seat to check on two children. You notice the family stickers on the rear window, and her hair coming loose as she leans inside the car.
You are no longer tracing forces and distances, but interpreting people, and your thoughts start to race. As the search for causes becomes a search for blame, a further assumption settles in, that somewhere in this chain of events, someone could have chosen otherwise.
It was probably the BMW driver's fault. He checked his phone and the damage to his car before he even thought about the other people. He was probably looking at his phone while driving. Reckless.
This way of thinking is not confined to road accidents. When someone is late, we assume they failed to manage their time. When someone struggles with addiction, we say they need more self-control. When a person gains weight, loses their temper or falls into debt, the explanation often arrives quickly: they could have chosen otherwise.
Across these situations, complex interactions of biological, psychological and environmental influences are replaced with a narrative about personal choice.
To break this habit, I suggest a small experiment. For two weeks, try living as though free will were not the most useful way to interpret behaviour. You don't need to decide whether it exists. If you live as if there is no free will, blame is no longer the default; behaviour must instead be understood in terms of the conditions that produced it.
When someone says they believe in free will, they usually mean that, in a given set of circumstances, we all have the freedom to choose differently. But I take a deterministic view of behaviour: what we do emerges from our biological state at any given moment, and that state itself is the product of how our body and brain grew, including genetic influences (development), what's happened to us until now (life experience), and the current immediate and wider situation (environment). Environmental influences matter because biological systems are plastic and change in response to them. Determinism need not imply fatalism - the idea that outcomes are fixed regardless of what we do. I agree we have agency, but I believe our will to act is itself shaped by biological and environmental causes rather than freely chosen.
I arrived at this position gradually through an unusual mix of experiences. I first studied psychology, later worked in addiction services and the technology sector, and eventually returned to academia to study biological anthropology and evolutionary biology, researching how conditions experienced in one generation can influence the next. Across these settings, I kept encountering the same pattern: behaviour made far more sense when understood as the product of interacting biological, developmental and environmental forces than as the result of free choice.
Illness eventually forced this lesson on me personally. After a parasite infection during primatology fieldwork left me chronically ill, effort and determination no longer reliably produced the outcomes I expected. The experience made it impossible to sustain the familiar idea that people simply choose how their lives unfold.
That perspective shift has been a revelation and it's why I'm inviting you to try it for two weeks.
Why we believe in free will
Belief in free will endures because it provides a reassuring explanation for failure and misfortune. If people freely choose their actions, then failure, illness, addiction, poverty or harm can be traced back to personal weakness or flawed character. That narrative protects us from hopelessness: They failed because they didn't work hard enough. That won't happen to me because I'll work harder.
The stronger the belief in free will, the more we overestimate the role of personal choice, and underestimate situational and historical factors, particularly when judging other people. Experimental research finds that people who endorse free will more strongly judge wrongdoing as morally blameworthy, and indicate stronger support for punitive measures like punishment and retribution.
If substance use is treated as a failure of self-control, the response is to expect abstinence through individual effort alone
Yet this is misguided because studies show that rehabilitative interventions are more effective when they take into account the situational conditions, past and present, that lead to offending (such as poor education and environmental instability) rather than simply increasing the severity of punishment.
Another consequence of strong free-will beliefs is poorer diagnosis of behavioural problems and the pursuit of the wrong remedies. Consider addiction treatment. If substance use is treated primarily as a failure of self-control, the response is to expect abstinence through individual effort alone. However, studies show that structured financial-incentive programmes, which change the situational conditions surrounding the behaviour, lead to greater improvements in abstinence rates compared with control groups. People's behaviour changes, not because they suddenly 'choose better', but because the environment makes abstinence more likely.
But without free will, what's the point?
Challenges to free will are often met with understandable anxiety, largely because of concerns about what might replace it. If no one could have chosen otherwise, nothing is anyone's fault. This is what many fear as moral nihilism: the collapse of blame, responsibility and ethical judgment altogether. Or people imagine the alternative to free will is fatalism: If I couldn't have chosen differently, nothing I do matters, so why try at all?
Some laboratory studies have found that when people are told their behaviour is entirely predetermined in a way likely to engender fatalist beliefs (ie, it is the inevitable output of brain mechanisms over which they have no influence), they become more likely to cheat or exert less effort in short-term tasks.
This is why I want to be clear about what could replace free will. I'm not endorsing fatalism, but rather an evidence-based view of how our behaviour actually emerges.
I believe we are constrained but not powerless. Exercising agency doesn't require us to be free agents
Across neuroscience and behavioural science, human behaviour is consistently shown to emerge from interacting biological and environmental factors: genetics, development, stress, trauma, resources, norms and history. None of this implies that our future is inevitable.
Because our biological systems are plastic, when inputs change, behaviour can change. Evidence-based interventions work precisely because behaviour is responsive to conditions. For example, children raised in disadvantaged environments show better developmental, educational and later-life outcomes when early caregiving and learning conditions improve. The constraints remain, but the probabilities change.
Although I don't believe we have free will, I do believe we're agents capable of influencing each other and the world around us, albeit that our agency is itself determined. We are constrained but not powerless. A person trying to quit smoking is not independent of cravings, stress or addiction history. But when the environment changes - through support, medication and reduced stress - different outcomes become more likely. Exercising agency does not require us to be free agents.
Letting go of free will doesn't mean abandoning responsibility, nor should it excuse harm. But it can help us more accurately determine what went wrong when harm occurs. Instead of asking who deserves the blame, the questions become What produced this outcome? and What would make a different outcome more likely next time?
Return to the crash scene for a moment. The explanation that first formed in your mind might have been quick and simple - the BMW driver was careless.
But once you start asking what produced the behaviour, the picture becomes more nuanced. The BMW driver's hormones and attention may have been compromised by a night of broken sleep. The glance at the phone might have been a message from a spouse updating him about the infant who kept them both awake. Or it might have been a demand from a micromanaging boss expecting an immediate reply. The car itself might not even be his, but a company car tied to a job where vehicle damage has consequences for his livelihood.
None of this removes the damage done to the SUV or the risk to the children in the back seat. But it does change our perception of the driver, and the explanation for the crash. What first appeared as a simple failure of personal choice begins to look more like the convergence of biological states, social pressures and the wider circumstances surrounding him.
When I stopped living as though I had free will
I had rejected free will intellectually long before I stopped living as though it were true. My scientific training had already convinced me that behaviour emerges from layered biological and environmental influences rather than isolated acts of choice. But like most people, I still carried the cultural habits of free-will thinking: the assumption that effort should reliably produce outcomes, that persistence should eventually bend circumstances to our will.
Chronic illness made that assumption difficult to maintain. The more I pushed, the worse I often became. Some days effort helped, but other days it triggered setbacks from which it took me weeks to recover. The familiar bootstrap narrative - that grit guarantees progress - turned out to be an application of free-will thinking to a system that couldn't respond differently. Try as I might, I cannot just choose a well body. My agency has not disappeared but is narrower.
My experience exposed to me most clearly how readily we turn real limits into moral judgments and blame ourselves or one another, even for things like illness. Once you see the limits of free-will narratives in your own body like this, the broader cultural patterns become difficult to ignore. Again and again, we overestimate choice and willpower, and underestimate conditions.
I'm no longer making judgments and decisions from default blame and threat-detection mode
Dropping free will didn't make me naive. I'm a survivor of deliberate cruelty. I've had boundaries ignored intentionally. I've also been harmed by people who meant well but lacked insight or capacity. The difference now is not that I excuse it - it is that I no longer stop at This is their fault.
When something harmful or unhelpful happens, I ask: What conditions produced this? What history, what stress, what incentives, what blind spots? Is this likely to change? Is this a pattern? The answers often calm me because I'm switching the parts of my brain I'm using, from blame to problem-solving - and that allows me to see more clearly.
Sometimes that clarity leads to empathy and compassion. Sometimes it leads to firmer boundaries. Sometimes it leads to distancing myself altogether. But I'm no longer making judgments and decisions from default blame and threat-detection mode. I'm making them based on available evidence.
Blame and anger have lessened, but they have not disappeared. Habits of moral judgment reassert themselves easily. I do the exercise I'm asking you to do each day, and I do it imperfectly.
Try it for two weeks
Living without free will for two weeks doesn't require denying harm, injustice or accountability. It means changing the questions you ask. You don't have to settle the philosophical debate about free will or determinism to try this. For two weeks, simply treat behaviour as something produced by conditions rather than pure choice.
When something goes wrong, replace Who is at fault? with What produced this outcome?
This becomes harder when the stakes rise, because blame feels protective. Especially in periods of instability or threat, certainty is comforting. Free-will narratives offer that certainty: someone chose badly, and that explains everything.
But try interrupting that reflex. See what happens when you delay the verdict and look for causes instead. If your experience is anything like mine, you'll find that letting go of free will, even temporarily, makes room for something more useful: more accurate problem-solving, attention to causes, less shame, blame and reactive anger, and a clearer sense of where agency actually lies.
Tara-Lyn Camilleri is an evolutionary biologist, writer and former University of Oxford scholar whose work examines behaviour, belief, trauma and social systems through a biological lens. Her essays and commentary have appeared in The Conversation and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) website.
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