Junk science used to promote arguments against free will

If the purported effectiveness of large social priming effects implies the nonexistence of free will, where does that leave us now that we know that social priming doesn't actually have large effects?

Jessica Riskin wrote this interesting review slamming a book by biologist Robert Sapolsky. The book in question argues that people and animals have no free will, and Riskin does not find Sapolsky’s argument convincing.

The interesting angle to me in this story is that it seems that Sapolsky backs up his argument based on unreplicated studies of social priming and the like. I haven’t looked at Sapolsky’s book, but just as an example, here’s a New York Times article he wrote in 2010 where he refers to multiple “brilliant studies” by John Bargh, author of the elderly walking study that later notoriously failed to replicate. It may be that Sapolsky has moved on from Bargh, but if you read that NYT article you’ll see he’s leaning very heavily on the social-priming paradigm. (For some background on the replication crisis, see this article from a couple years ago.)

Indeed this came up on the blog a couple years ago, when we discussed this post by Kevin Mitchell, who wrote:

Gotta hand it to Sapolsky here . . . it’s quite ballsy to uber-confidently assert we do not have “the slightest scrap of agency” and then support that with one discredited social psych study after another . . .

Thinking about it now, though, I have some sympathy for Sapolsky. Sure, he got conned by all that social priming stuff, but a lot of people got conned: the editors of Psychological Science and PNAS; the staff at NPR, Ted, and Freakonomics; Daniel Kahneman, Larry Bartels; . . . indeed, I assume that Bargh etc. themselves were conned, in that they were presumably true believers in their theories. Sapolsky’s a biologist–he’s not a psychologist or a statistician and would have no particular expertise in the theory of social priming (such as it is) or the quality of the evidence behind it. So it would seem unfair of me to expect that that he would’ve escaped this particular mass delusion of academic and public social psychology.

Now it’s 2025 and Sapolsky should know better, but, hey, he’s a busy man and probably does not have the time or energy to rethink his premises. That’s too bad but maybe is to be expected.

Amusingly, if you follow the links, you’ll see that Mitchell was pointing to a podcast where Sapolsky was being interviewed by . . . junk-science-promoting physicist Sean Carroll (see here)! Put ’em all on NPR or Ted and we’ll have achieved the black hole of junk science, from which no bad idea, once it enters, can ever escape.

Riskin’s review is interesting for his historical perspective and also in that it connects Sapolsky’s arguments against free will with his credulity regarding junk psychology experiments. This is interesting–I hadn’t thought it about this way before, and I think Riskin has a point. If it were really true that people were so easily manipulable by subliminal signals, then the world would be a much different place. Conversely, now that we know that that people aren’t so easily manipulated–you can’t really cause large shifts in people’s attitudes on immigration by flashing subliminal smiley faces on a screen–, this should cast doubt on the anti-free-will position.

Also relevant is our piranha paper, which explains mathematically why all these large effects cannot coexist.

P.S. There’s only one thing in Riskin’s article that seems wrong to me. She writes:

Sapolsky’s solution to the problem of what to do with those convicted of crimes is radically at odds with this definition of humanitarian policy. He recommends that society regard them as the passive objects of their fate and commit them to a medical-style “quarantine.” He gives few details, but does mention a familiar array of practices, from physically confining people to requiring them to register with the local police and wear tracking bracelets. It’s hard to see how this would be better than, or even very different from, being punished in the existing system.

Are you kidding? Being constrained by having to being requited to “register with the local police and wear tracking bracelets” seems a lot better than being put in jail or prison. You can see your friends and family, you can go to work, all sorts of things, within whatever the restrictions of your sentence. From what I’ve read, jail and prison can be barbaric, also it puts you in constant contact with other criminals and isolates you from civil society. I get that Riskin disagrees with Sapolsky’s philosophy and his politics, but that’s no reason to say that non-prison confinement or restrictions on freedom are no better than jail or prison.