ABPG1203 Assignment Sample: Free Will, Determinism and Consciousness
For information and reference only – not to be submitted as your own work.
This extract shows how a strong answer to the ABPG1203 History and Philosophy of Psychology assignment (Open University Malaysia, September 2026 semester) can be structured. It covers the two reflective reports on free will and consciousness, plus model e-forum postings. You can browse other briefs on the Open University Malaysia question hub, and the companion guide, how to write the ABPG1203 reflective essay and journal entry, explains the method step by step.
Important: the personal beliefs and life examples below are illustrative placeholders. Your markers expect your own experiences, so replace every personal detail with something that genuinely happened to you.
What the assignment asks
| Task | Marks | Core demand (paraphrased) |
|---|---|---|
| Part I, Q1: reflective essay on free will and determinism | 20 (20%) | Explain both concepts, state your own position, justify it with personal experience and theory, then reflect on how the belief shapes emotions and thinking. |
| Part I, Q2: journal entry on consciousness | 20 (20%) | Define consciousness, outline the main theoretical perspectives, state your stance, justify it, and reflect on what it means for psychological research. |
| Part II: MyINSPIRE e-forum participation | 10 (10%) | Post on Descartes’ influence on modern psychology and on William James’ most influential contribution; submit your five best postings as screenshots. |
The whole submission runs to roughly 2,500–3,000 words excluding references, in English or Malay, with APA referencing. Each question is marked on an introduction, three content criteria, a conclusion and citation quality.
Model answer extract: Q1, free will and determinism
Introduction (illustrative)
Few questions in psychology are as old, or as practically important, as whether people author their own behaviour. Determinism holds that every event, including every decision, follows from prior causes. Free will, in its common form, holds that a person could have acted otherwise and that the choice originates in the person. This reflective essay explains both ideas, states a position of compatibilist leaning, and examines how that position affects my emotions and thinking.
(a) The concepts and a stated belief
Behaviourism offers the clearest deterministic account in psychology. Skinner (1971) argued that behaviour is shaped by environmental contingencies and that the feeling of autonomy simply reflects our ignorance of those causes. Neuroscience seemed to add support when Libet et al. (1983) reported that a measurable readiness potential began before participants reported awareness of the urge to move their hand.
The evidence is less decisive than it first appears. Libet (1985) himself did not conclude that conscious will is absent. He suggested that consciousness may still veto an action that the brain has begun preparing. The experiment also used a trivial, arbitrary movement, which says little about deliberate choices such as selecting a degree or ending a friendship.
Stated belief (illustrative): I hold that behaviour is caused, yet people are still responsible agents because reasons, values and deliberation are among the causes. This is a compatibilist position, and I adopt it because it fits both the experimental evidence and my sense that deliberation matters.
(b) Reasons, experiences and theory (illustrative)
| Situation (replace with your own) | Felt freely chosen or determined? | Theory used to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| Choosing a distance-learning programme after weighing cost, work hours and family duties | Mostly free: I compared options and could imagine choosing differently | Compatibilism: deliberation is itself a cause of the outcome |
| Checking my phone every few minutes while studying | Mostly determined: notifications trigger the habit before I decide | Skinner (1971): behaviour maintained by reinforcement |
| Following family expectations over festival travel plans | Mixed: social norms narrowed my options, though I accepted them | Social-cognitive influence on perceived choice |
Comparing these moments taught me that freedom is a matter of degree. Where I had time, information and the ability to reflect, I experienced more agency. Where habit or pressure dominated, I experienced less. That gradient makes more sense to me than an all-or-nothing verdict.
(c) Effects on emotions and thinking (illustrative)
Believing that my actions are caused has made me more forgiving of my own lapses. Rather than concluding that I am lazy, I ask what circumstances produced the behaviour and how to change them. At the same time, I am wary of treating determinism as an excuse. Experimental work suggests why. Vohs and Schooler (2008) found that participants nudged towards a deterministic view cheated more on a task, and Baumeister et al. (2009) reported that weakening belief in free will reduced helpfulness and increased aggression. Replications of such effects have been mixed, so I treat them as cautionary rather than conclusive, but they remind me that beliefs about agency can shape conduct.
Emotionally, the compatibilist view lets me keep pride in effort and accountability for mistakes without the burden of claiming total self-creation. Intellectually, it pushes me to look for causal explanations before assigning blame.
Conclusion (illustrative)
Free will and determinism are better understood as a spectrum of agency than as rivals with one winner. Skinner (1971) and Libet et al. (1983) show how much behaviour is shaped outside awareness, while deliberation and responsibility remain meaningful. My own experience supports a graded, compatibilist view, and recognising it has made me more reflective and more accountable.
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Model answer extract: Q2, journal entry on consciousness
Introduction and definition (illustrative)
Dear journal, today I tried to describe what it is like to be me reading this sentence, and discovered how slippery the subject is. Consciousness can be defined as subjective awareness: the experience of perceiving, thinking and feeling. Nagel (1974) captured the core puzzle by arguing that an organism has conscious states only if there is something it is like to be that organism.
(a) Main perspectives and a stated belief
| Perspective | Main claim | Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Introspective and functional tradition (James, 1890) | Consciousness is a continuous “stream” that serves the organism’s adaptation | Rich description of lived experience | Relies on self-report |
| Dualism (Descartes, 1641/1996) | Mind and body are distinct kinds of substance | Takes subjective experience seriously | Cannot explain how mind and body interact |
| Global workspace theory (Baars, 1988) | Conscious content is information broadcast widely across brain systems | Testable, links to attention and memory | Explains access more readily than experience |
| Integrated information theory (Tononi et al., 2016) | Consciousness corresponds to a system’s integrated causal structure | Offers a measurable quantity | Controversial and hard to test directly |
Chalmers (1995) distinguished the “easy” problems, such as explaining attention and report, from the “hard” problem of why any physical process is accompanied by experience. My position (illustrative) is that consciousness is a natural, brain-dependent phenomenon, and that the hard problem marks a real gap in current explanation rather than proof of a separate substance.
(b) Reasons and reflections (illustrative)
I reached this view partly through everyday experience. After a poor night’s sleep my awareness feels thinner and my attention narrower, which suggests that consciousness depends on bodily state. At the same time, I cannot translate the colour red into a description that someone born blind would understand, so some explanatory gap remains. That tension is why I value global workspace theory for what it explains and Chalmers (1995) for what it admits is unexplained.
(c) Implications for psychological research (illustrative)
If consciousness is private, then self-report is both essential and fallible. This affects how I read psychological studies. I now ask whether a measure captures behaviour, reportable experience, or both. I also see why the early introspectionists were criticised and why behaviourists turned away from the topic, a history that gives this course its structure. Finally, I accept that theories like those of Baars (1988) and Tononi et al. (2016) are best judged by the predictions they make, which keeps research honest about what it can claim.
Conclusion (illustrative)
Consciousness remains partly explained and partly mysterious. Treating it as a brain-dependent process allows psychology to study it empirically, while Nagel (1974) and Chalmers (1995) warn against assuming that the subjective side has been fully captured. This view shapes how critically I read research.
Model e-forum postings (Part II)
Posting 1: Descartes’ influence (illustrative)
Descartes (1641/1996) shaped modern psychology mainly by sharpening the mind-body question. His dualism positioned the mind as a thinking, conscious subject and the body as a mechanism, which framed centuries of debate over how mental life relates to the brain. Later schools either built on this framing, as with introspective psychology, or rejected it, as with behaviourism and many neuroscientific accounts. I would add that his emphasis on methodical doubt also encouraged a careful, evidence-first attitude. Do others think the interaction problem makes his legacy more a warning than a model?
Posting 2: William James’ most influential contribution (illustrative)
In my view, the most influential contribution is James’ (1890) account of consciousness as a continuous stream, together with his insistence that mental processes should be understood by what they do for the organism. This functional emphasis anticipated later work on attention, habit and emotion, and it connects directly to current debates about consciousness. A weakness is that his main method, introspection, was hard to verify. Even so, the stream metaphor remains a useful description of how experience feels from the inside.
Keep each posting to a clear claim, one or two sources, and a question that invites replies. Capture screenshots showing your name, topic title, day, date and time, as the brief requires.
How this extract earns marks
| Rubric area | What the extract does | Level aimed at |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Frames the debate, defines terms and previews the position | Excellent (4) |
| Criterion (a): concepts and stated belief | Explains determinism and free will with named sources, then states a clear stance | Excellent (4) |
| Criterion (b): reasons and experiences | Links concrete situations to named theories in a comparison table | Excellent (4) |
| Criterion (c): emotional and intellectual reflection | Introspective, balanced, and tied to research evidence | Excellent (4) |
| Conclusion | Synthesises the argument without adding new claims | Excellent (2) |
| Citation and references | Uses more than four APA-cited sources per question | Excellent (2) |
Want a subject expert to check your ABPG1203 draft against this rubric? You can get OUM assignment support with structure, sources and APA referencing.
About the expert
Psychology questions like this are covered by Nabilah Azman, who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from University of Malaya. Her profile lists specialisms in abnormal, social and developmental psychology, with academic work including essays, case studies, research papers and literature reviews, and 2,500 completed orders.
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References
Baars, B. J. (1988). A cognitive theory of consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
Baumeister, R. F., Masicampo, E. J., & DeWall, C. N. (2009). Prosocial benefits of feeling free: Disbelief in free will increases aggression and reduces helpfulness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(2), 260–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208327217
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
Descartes, R. (1996). Meditations on first philosophy (J. Cottingham, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1641)
James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). Henry Holt and Co.
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529–539. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00044903
Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 106(3), 623–642. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/106.3.623
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914
Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. Alfred A. Knopf.
Tononi, G., Boly, M., Massimini, M., & Koch, C. (2016). Integrated information theory: From consciousness to its physical substrate. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(7), 450–461. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2016.44
Vohs, K. D., & Schooler, J. W. (2008). The value of believing in free will: Encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychological Science, 19(1), 49–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x
