The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.     

Overstepping the boundaries of free choice: Folk beliefs on free will and determinism in real world contexts

We know little about the commonality of folk beliefs around applications of psychological research on the unconscious control of behaviours. To address this, in Experiment 1 (N = 399) participants volunteered examples of where research on the unconscious has been applied to influence their behaviours. A subset of these were presented in Experiment 2 (N = 198) and Experiment 3 (N = 100). Participants rated the extent to which the behaviour being influenced in these contexts was: (1) via the unconscious, (2) free, (3) the result of prior conscious intentions, (4) under conscious control. Relative to judgements about the extent to which behaviour was influenced via the unconscious, the remaining judgements regarding conscious control of behaviours were either higher (e.g., political contexts) or lower (e.g., therapy). This study is the first to show, using ecologically valid examples, the folk beliefs people share on psychological constructs concerning free will and determinism.     

The speed of free will

Do voluntary and task-driven shifts of attention have the same time course? In order to measure the time needed to voluntarily shift attention, we devised several novel visual search tasks that elicited multiple sequential attentional shifts. Participants could only respond correctly if they attended to the right place at the right time. In control conditions, search tasks were similar but participants were not required to shift attention in any order. Across five experiments, voluntary shifts of attention required 200–300 ms. Control conditions yielded estimates of 35–100 ms for task-driven shifts. We suggest that the slower speed of voluntary shifts reflects the “clock speed of free will”. Wishing to attend to something takes more time than shifting attention in response to sensory input.     

The neuroscience of "free will"

Advances in neuroscience over the past 40 or more years are causing a re-visiting of an old debate: Does man possess free will over his actions, or do forces out of his control determine his behavior? Philosophers and biologists since the beginning of recorded history have taken positions on each side of the debate. Recent discoveries of brain activation prior to conscious awareness and genetic conditions that induce impulsive violent behavior are fortifying the perspective that biological determinism is basic to the human condition. But some contemporary thinkers are conflicted in this viewpoint since “free will” is a necessary element for self-determination and for attributing personal responsibility for one's actions. Hence, modifications of strict determinism have emerged which try to incorporate the features of determinism enforced by neuroscience findings with some element of “free will”, making the two seemingly opposed positions compatible. How successful this will be to rescue “free will” in the long term depends on future discoveries in neuroscience and genetics. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The weirdness of belief in free will

It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English “free will” with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of “free will” do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.     

The complex tapestry of free will: striving will,indeterminism and volitional streams

The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation (uncaused causes, noumenal selves, non-event agent causes, etc.) that cannot be accounted for by ordinary modes of explanation familiar to the natural and human sciences. Doing this, I argue, requires piecing together a “complex tapestry” of ideas and arguments that involve rethinking many traditional assumptions about free will. The paper also argues that one cannot get to the heart of historical debates about free will without distinguishing different kinds of freedom, different senses of will, and different notions of control, among other distinctions. I especially focus here on different notions of freedom and control that are necessary to make sense of free will.

     

Reasons-sensitivity and degrees of free will

Some actions are free and others are not. But free will also comes in degrees. This paper offers a novel account of degrees of free will, taking as its starting point the idea that an action is free to the extent to which the agent was sensitive, in acting, to reasons for or against performing that action. Though lip service is often paid to the idea that reasons-sensitivity comes in degrees, however, the details turn out to be harder to pin down than one might initially have thought. I criticise three recent accounts of degrees of reasons-sensitivity, arguing that none of them succeed in capturing our intuitions about degrees of free will in particular cases. I then defend an alternative approach, which combines a causal account of sensitivity with my own preferred metaphysics of degrees of causal contribution. As well as avoiding the problems faced by its rivals, I’ll argue that this account provides a novel response to the situationist threat to free will, arising out of empirical studies purporting to show that ‘situational factors’ play a larger role in producing actions than we typically assume.     

The free will of corporations (and other collectives)

Moderate holists like French (Collective and corporate responsibility, 1984), Copp (J Soc Philos, 38(3):369–388, 2007), Hess (The Background of Social Reality – A Survey, 2013), Isaacs (Moral responsibility in collective contexts, 2011) and List and Pettit (Group agency: The possibility, design, and status of corporate agents, 2011) argue that certain collectives qualify as moral agents in their own right, often pointing to the corporation as an example of a collective likely to qualify. A common objection is that corporations cannot qualify as moral agents because they lack free will. The concern is that corporations (and other highly organized collectives like colleges, governments, and the military) are effectively puppets, dancing on strings controlled by external forces. The article begins by briefly presenting a novel account of corporate moral agency and then demonstrates that, on this account, qualifying corporations (and similar entities in other fields) do possess free will. Such entities possess and act from their own “actional springs”, in Haji’s (Midwest Stud Philos, 30(1):292–308, 2006) phrase, and from their own reasons-responsive mechanisms. When they do so, they act freely and are morally responsible for what they do.     

The non-problem of free will in forensic psychiatry and psychology

This article demonstrates that there is no free will problem in forensic psychiatry by showing that free will or its lack is not a criterion for any legal doctrine and it is not an underlying general foundation for legal responsibility doctrines and practices. There is a genuine metaphysical free will problem, but the article explains why it is not relevant to forensic practice. Forensic practitioners are urged to avoid all usage of free will in their forensic thinking and work product because it is irrelevant and spawns confusion.