For me, free will means that we have the ability to make our own decisions, choose our own action, and carve our own path. The discussion in this Rose Café revolved around where this free will comes from and how we can see it develop in early childhood. I tried to pinpoint at how early in my life I realized we all have free will and that we don’t just have to do what’s expected of us. I went as far back as fifth grade when a classmate of mine was making the point that if God exists then why do bad things happen in the world and I replied that each person exercises their own free will and some people choose to exercise theirs that way. Of course, the argument in more convoluted than that, but what did I know as a fifth grader?

Free will seems like one of those concepts that can exist with its opposite. For me, free will means exercising control over the conscious actions that I take. However, occurrences that may happen in my life, I don’t think I have ultimate power over. The choices that I make may lead me to a situation, but the probability of that situation happening also depends on other people’s choices. My own choices and other people’s choices may or may not be fated to happen at the time that they do. I think it is an interesting field of thought to explore.

This presentation and discussion introduced me to the concept of free will. The most interesting part of the presentation to me was the videos of the children and how they think. In the video of the kid being offered a present, but told he needed to look away while it was getting wrapped, you could physically see how difficult he had to work to restrain himself from looking in the direction of the present. I found the marshmallow video we talked about also very interesting, where kids were asked to choose between either eating the marshmallow right away or waiting and getting more marshmallows. I feel like it is easy to say that you would rather wait and get more marshmallows, but in reality, there is no guarantee that more marshmallows will come, and the only certainty is the marshmallow on the table in front of you. The videos illustrated the concept of free will in an interesting way – many of the kids in the videos said that if a tasty food was in front of them that they wanted, they would have to eat it – they would not have a choice. However, the older kids generally said that they could choose not to eat their favorite food even if it was in front of them and they were very hungry.

The videos provide some evidence that free will is a learned behavior, not something inherent as I had expected. Theoretically, kids need to be taught that they can control their own behavior – that even if they want something so much, they can still choose not to have it. Since the older kids knew they had free will but the younger kids did not, it seems that self-control comes with time and experience. This discussion really opened up my mind to concepts that I had never thought about before, and I found it so interesting that I now would like to take a psychology class during my time at Cornell to learn even more about it.

House fellow Tamar Kushnir started her discussion on free will in the most unique way. She said, “Sit in silence. What did you notice?” I guess I had never just sat and observed in that way, as we live in a very hustle-and-bustle society. It is rare that I even have time to just sit by myself, let alone watch the actions of others. Her thought provoking question truly opened the dialogue for the night. 

I had never really considered free will and its role in everyday life. I always assumed that it was simply a concept of personal choice. I never considered the societal pressure that exists in this concept. She brought my attention to this as she asked us to sit in silence and raise our hand whenever we felt like it. It took a while for someone to finally be the first to do so, and others easily followed. I chose to not follow suit, and I sat merely observing others. 

I think it is also interesting to consider this in the scope of age. Professor Kushnir studies this concept in children. Her studies conclude that when children are asked if they have to do something, such as eat ice cream, children less than four-years-of-age will respond with a passionate yes. Older children recognize that we have a choice. Is this a result of the same societal pressure found when we were asked to raise our hands? Or, is it a result of serious cognitive growth? 

The only thing holding me back from doing anything is myself. An individual with “Free Will” is capable of making vital decisions and choices in life with own free consent. The individual chooses these decisions without any outside influence from any sources. I do however, believe in determinism. Some factors in our life are out of our own control. To establish determinism, we can admit by denoting that some events in our lives happen because of prior reasons without yet losing our sense of freedom. We choose how to react to these circumstances, we choose what route to take in reaction to the things that happen to us.

Due to barriers within society, some may have more freedom and a greater ability to make use of the “free will” I speak of. To some extent, I believe that the existence of a free will motivates us to exist as a society. Knowing that we are in control encourages me to keep going, reach for the ‘impossible’ and try new things!

So when we were talking about Free will the marshmallow experiment came up. The marshmallow experiment is when you leave a marshmallow in front of a little child and tell them if you don’t eat this for 5min then you will be a given one. This experiment is about delayed gratification and maybe this is on me but I do not understand what that had to do with free will. Free will is the idea that we have the freedom to make whatever decisions we want. Free will in my opinion is something that really only works in the religious sense because in the police state of a country we live in where everybody is constantly filming and things such as your actions, words, and likeness no longer belong to you, one cannot ever feel as if their choices are there own. How am I suppose to dace like nobody is watching when I know that like 7 people have their phones out recording. Free will in this day in age is not free it comes at a great price do do what you want/ what is best for you.

I genuinely had never thought of the concept of Free Will before house fellow Tamar Kushnir provoked discussion about it at the Rose Cafe. Throughout the discussion it was extremely difficult for me to grasp what the Kushnir meant by free will. Having never heard about free will in the academic sense I was confused as to what she meant when she kept asking if we have free will. I always though we did, as I was capable to do whatever I wanted. However, further into the discussion Kushnir explained that the concept of Free Will is a a developed concept as you mature and are able to communicate your thought. This talk was extremely interesting to me as I learnt about something that I was not familiar with.

It is really interesting to consider whether we have free will or not and to what degree we have control over our actions. People always say that they want to achieve x thing, like losing weight or stop procrastinating, but most of those milestones are inevitably not hit. Why do those failures happen? Most of those goals focus on improving yourself so there isn’t anything stopping you except you. The classic experiment when you leave a child in a room with a marshmallow and tell them that if they don’t eat it within fifteen minutes, they’ll get another one shows that there are limits to our willpower. There are constraints to our ability to control ourselves. If you had to go to the store to get a back of chips versus it sitting in front of you, you would have more self control in the former case rather than the latter. At some point, it seems that biological mechanisms overwhelms mental abilities.

I learned that children start developing a sense of willpower when they are very young. The answers to questions like if your favorite food was in front of you, would you need to eat it changes from of course to not necessarily “needing” to eat it but wanting to. It is fascinating that self control starts developing so early. Even more questions come to mind, like how does self control develop, why does it develop, and why does it sometimes not develop, etc. The little kids developed tactics like distracting themselves by moving around and play with their hands, just as we develop techniques like making sure the junk food isn’t out in the open to help us self-regulate.

I got the chance to sit down with Ms. Kushnir and talk about free will for an evening. We explored what free will was about, and if we as human beings, really have the option to do anything we please. Before we began, she had us participate in an activity. She told us to raise our hand whenever we felt like it, and then she proceeded to stare out at us intently. Although initially, I felt pressure to raise my hand for the sake of the simulation, I slowly realized that I really didn’t want to raise my hand. And then I told myself… I guess this must be the whole point of this exercise – so if that’s the case I won’t raise my hand.   I ultimately never raised my hand, and although I felt like I didn’t do so on purpose, I also partially felt like that was me “winning” (by not participating). In my opinion, although we technically have free will and can do anything we please, I feel as though our “free will” is placed under certain mental restraints in accordance with society so as to not be seen as strange or deviant.

The concept of free will is very interesting. It seems that since a young child we have developed the ability to make our own decisions. However, the older you get the more prone you are for your free will to be controlled by societal pressures. In the talk, she had us do an exercise where we had to move our body whenever we felt like it. There was a pressure to move your body just because she put the idea into my mind. The same goes with different things in my life. Sometimes I will dress a certain way because of societal pressures, but one can say that at the same time I am still utilizing free will. No one is pressuring me to buy something. It is my own internal battle and mind that is steering me toward purchasing a certain item. Everything outside of my mind are influences, but at the end of the day I myself am choosing to do something. This concept gets so confusing because I am being influenced, but I ultimately make the final decision. This introduces the concept of should, have to, or want to do something. This all plays an important part in how we exercise our free will. This concept is extremely fascinating and I would love to learn more about it.

I recently had the pleasure of hearing a riveting presentation about ongoring research (at COrnell!) about how children understand the concept of free will, and relate it to themselves. In particular, I was intrigued when the conversation turned to an experiment where children are given a difficult task of self-control and then asked whether or not they could have done something other than what they did. What interested me most was the speaker’s remark that, when faced with moral quandaries, children gave different responses to the same sort of question than they did when faced with the task of self-control. Perhaps a child is better able to understand (and believe in) free will as an abstract concept (such as they are able to handle abstraction) than as a immediate question about themselves and their free will, the former being much more present in the discussion of morality (can someone choose to do right versus wrong?)? In any case, the discussion at the Rose Cafe was an intriguing one, and has given me much to chew on over winter break.

During this week’s Rose Cafe, we went over the concept of free will, that is to say, does it exist at all? To start off, we were told that we could choose to raise our hands at any given time, but we did not have to. Slowly but surely, several people in the room began to raise their hands; when asked, it was because it was implied that they felt they “should”, even though it was not a command. This led us into a frank discussion over what exactly we believed caused us to follow particular paths, therefore limiting our free will. Some people thought it was the idea of implied rules, that there are informal ideas ingrained into our minds that we feel we must follow out of obligation. Others thought that it was whatever was deemed socially acceptable. Others still believed it was out of the constraints of one’s life. I believe that free will is an amalgamation of all of these factors. The lives we lead are not without their constraints, which makes free will an inherently difficult concept to grasp. However, it still does exist. We can still make choices, and we can still forge our own paths, as countless others have before us.

While a definitive answer to the question of whether or not we have free will doesn’t really exist, it was well worth our time to discuss it, nonetheless. It’s not a question I think of too often, but if one were to press me for an answer I’d probably say we don’t truly have free will. After all, that’s the stance many neuroscientists take, and they generally seem to know what they’re talking about. However, at the start of our meeting we were told this: if any of us wanted to check our phone at any point or do anything else, we could do it. We then proceeded to sit around semi-awkwardly in silence for a minute or two, though it felt like longer. Some of us weren’t sure what to do with ourselves so we looked around the room and at each other. Others laughed a little bit uncomfortably. I did both of these before taking out my phone and checking the time. Finally, the silence was broken and we moved on from that activity, and from it we pivoted into our conversation on free will. By identifying the fact that none of us particularly felt as though anyone was forcing us to do or not do something in that exercise, we recognized the fact that we all feel responsibility for and ownership of our actions to some extent. From this, we concluded that most of us at the very least feel like we have an amount of free will. However, fascinatingly enough, it seems as though our feelings of free will aren’t exactly set in stone from birth. We watched a few videos examining children and situations involving them and free will, and one in particular stood out to me. A child was asked the following hypothetical: if a plate of the child’s favorite food were placed in front of them, could they choose not to eat it? I’d wager that most people would say that one could absolutely abstain from eating the food, but this particular child disagreed with that notion, instead asserting that in such a situation they’d have no choice but to eat it. I suppose this mentality does a lot to explain the behavior of children, but I was still surprised by it. Leaving this talk, I felt as though I left with more questions than answers, but not in a bad way. Free will is a tough topic to wrap one’s head around, and I’ll be sure to spend some time trying to do so myself.

Sit in silence…and wait. What do you notice?

That is how house fellow Tamar Kushnir started her discussion on Wednesday night at the Rose Café. This task showcased our voluntary actions, and prompted a thought-provoking discussion about free will and its consequences. I had never before thought about how to define the concept of free will. Is it that we have a choice? Is it that we feel we can do something? What about social pressures or individual constraints? These questions floated around the room as we discussed what free will is, and how to tell if we have it.

I found it fascinating that Professor Kushnir studies free will in children, where she will set up a situation and then ask a child if they have to do something, or whether they can choose not to. Her research suggests that children undergo huge changes in the perception of free will between the ages of 4 and 7. I hadn’t thought about the development of our conscious before! As we grow physically, we also grow mentally in the ability to distinguish between situations, have choice, and control ourselves. I wonder if age has impact beyond development as well, and now want to learn more about free will and its impact!