Think You're in Charge? That's Cute!

Free will, decision-making, and the illusion of control. Your brain might be calling the shots.
This morning in the SFC common room, I found myself choosing between green tea and black coffee. I reached for the coffee. But later, I wondered, why? Was that choice mine? Or had my brain made the decision long before I was aware of it? We like to think of ourselves as in charge of our own minds. The idea that we have free will, real conscious control over our actions, is comforting. But psychologists have been doubting this assumption for decades. What if our sense of control is just that: a sense, not a fact?

The Free Will Debate

In the 1980s, neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment that lit a fire under the free will debate. His setup was simple but ingenious. Participants were asked to move a finger whenever they felt like it. They watched a clock and noted the exact moment they felt the urge to move. Meanwhile, Libet was measuring their brain activity. The results found that brain signals associated with movement, what’s called the readiness potential began about 300 milliseconds before participants reported deciding to move (Libet et al. 1983). In other words, their brains had already initiated the action before they were aware of having chosen it. From a psychological perspective, this was unnerving. If the decision happens before conscious awareness, who or what is really making the decision? Libet himself believed that we might still retain a last-moment ability to veto the action, something he called ‘free won’t’ (Libet: Mind Time, 2004). But the damage was done. The clean, comforting idea of conscious free will was fractured.

To understand why this might happen, it helps to know that your brain isn’t just a passive responder. It’s a prediction machine. Psychologists and cognitive scientists often describe the brain as constantly forecasting the next moment based on past experience, environmental cues, and internal patterns. When you catch a falling phone or finish someone’s sentence, you’re relying on this predictive mechanism. Even your ‘decisions’ are often anticipatory. You don’t decide to start walking the moment the traffic light turns green, you’re already halfway into the step. You don’t consciously think, ‘Now I will reach for my keys’, your arm is moving before the thought fully forms. This means a lot of our behavior is automatic, built from layers of habit, memory, and unconscious processing. Conscious thought might be less a driver and more a narrator, explaining, after the fact, why we did what we did (Friston, 2010).

So what is consciousness, then? Are we calling the shots? Split-brain experiments in psychology, where the two hemispheres of the brain are severed (usually to treat epilepsy), have shown some interesting results. When one side of the brain takes action, the other (which handles language) often invents a reason for it. ‘Oh, I picked up that object because I wanted it,’ says the patient, even though the action was triggered by an instruction they didn’t consciously hear (Gazzaniga, 2011). This supports a theory common in psychological literature: the self is a storyteller. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’. The former lives in the moment, the latter rewrites it into something coherent (Kahneman, 2011). Maybe free will, too, is a neat narrative we tell ourselves after the events have already happened.

This can feel bleak, like we’re just biological robots on autopilot. But Libet’s findings have been debated and challenged. More recent experiments with different methods have produced mixed results. Some show that the readiness potential doesn’t always predict action (Schurger et al., 2012). Others question whether timing awareness is reliable at all. There is no definitive conclusion just yet. Perhaps the most meaningful psychological finding here is that even if free will is partly an illusion, believing we have it makes a real difference. People who feel in control tend to be more motivated, mentally healthy, and resilient. Perceived autonomy matters. Even if it’s built on subconscious scaffolding (Ryan and Deci, 2000).

Back in the common room, I still don’t know if I really chose the coffee. But maybe that’s not the point. Whether or not free will exists in the absolute sense, the debate itself reveals something deeply human: our need for meaning, for agency, for authorship. Maybe our freedom isn’t in the moment of decision, but in how we interpret it afterward, in how we grow from our choices, even if they’re not as ‘free’ as we think.

So the next time you reach for your cup, pause. Reflect. Maybe you didn’t choose it. Or maybe your brain did and you just agreed. Either way, it’s time for an existential crisis.