Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal? (original) (raw)
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Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1
- Official Conference Proceedings, 1970
This study examined the effects of belief in free will on attribution of moral responsibility. Past research conducted in Western countries has found that people's belief in free will influences subsequent social judgment and behavior. For example, induced disbelief in free will caused participants to give lighter prison sentences of the criminal (Shariff, Greene, Karremans, Luguri, Clark, Schooler, Baumeister, & Vohs, 2014). What seems to be lacking, however, is a study which test generalizability of the findings across cultures. The authors therefore attempts to explore whether disbelief in free will results in forgiveness for the criminal in Japan as well. In the experiment, we employed English-Japanese translation to manipulate participants' belief in free will (free will vs. control vs. determinism). Then we presented hypothetical scenarios involving an assault which was caused by a third person or a participant's friend. Participants were asked to rate moral responsibility and sentencing of the criminal. The analyses revealed that participants in the determinism condition judged sentencing of the third person (criminal) less severely. In contrast, disbelief in free will does not have an effect on sentencing of the friend (criminal). These evidence leads to the conclusion that some basic assumptions of the effects of free will beliefs could be generalized across cultures. Implications are discussed with regard to the difference of sentencing judgments between the third person and friend, and also with regard to effects of free will beliefs on attribution of moral responsibility.
Consciousness and Cognition 27 (2014) 100–108
Belief in free will is widespread, and this belief is supposed to undergird moral and legal judgment. Despite the importance of the free will concept, however, there remains widespread confusion regarding its definition and its connection to blame. We address this confusion by testing two prominent models of the folk concept of free will—a metaphysical model, in which free will involves a soul as an uncaused ‘‘first mover,’’ and a psychological model, in which free will involves choice, alignment with desires, and lack of constraints. We test the predictions of these two models by creating agents that vary in their capacity for choice and the presence of a soul. In two studies, people’s judgments of free will and blame for these agents show little to no basis in ascriptions of a soul but are powerfully predicted by ascriptions of choice capacity. These results support a psychological model of the folk concept of free will.
Moral Responsibility and Free Will: A Meta-Analysis
Fundamental beliefs about free will and moral responsibility are often thought to shape our ability to have healthy relationships with others and ourselves. Emotional reactions have also been shown to have an important and pervasive impact on judgments and behaviors. Recent research suggests that emotional reactions play a prominent role in judgments about free will, influencing judgments about determinism’s relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, the extent to which affect influences these judgments is unclear. We conducted a metaanalysis to estimate the impact of affect. Our meta-analysis indicates that beliefs in free will are largely robust to emotional reactions.
Mind & Language (forthcoming)
Philosophical tradition has long held that free will is necessary for moral responsibility. We report experimental results that show that the folk do not think free will is necessary for moral responsibility. Our results also suggest that experimental investigation of the relationship is ill-served by a focus on incompatibilism vs. compatibilism. We propose an alternative framework for empirical moral psychology in which judgments of free will and moral responsibility can vary independently in response to many factors (including beliefs about determinism). We also suggest that, in response to some factors, the necessity relation may run from responsibility to free will.
The Correlates and Consequences of Believing in Free Will
2021
Research has indicated that weakening people's belief in free will may likewise weaken their belief in moral responsibility and potentially license them to morally transgress. Recent studies in social psychology suggest that diminished belief in free will is associated with a range of antisocial or otherwise negative outcomes. For example, cheating, unjustified aggression, and less prosocial helping behaviour. In response to these findings, illusionist philosophers have recommended that even if scientists somehow conclusively showed that free will does not exist it might nevertheless be necessary to foster widespread belief as a useful fiction. In the opposing camp, free will disillusionists maintain that belief in free will has a dark side that we would be better off without. The problem they say, is the close connection between free will and the belief that people justly deserve what they get. So rather than having the instrumental benefits that illusionists claim, belief in free will is too often taken to justify treating people in severe and demeaning ways. Who then is correct? I report empirical results comparing the beliefs and attitudes of free will sceptics and people naïve to the debate. Results are consistent with the claims of disillusionists. Free will sceptics are more compassionate and are less likely to believe in just deserts and harbour retributive attitudes.
Judgments of Moral Responsibility: A Unified Account
Recent work in experimental philosophy shows that folk intuitions about moral responsibility are sensitive to a surprising variety of factors. Studies by Nichols and Knobe (2007) suggest that whether people take agents to be responsible for their actions in a deterministic scenario depends on whether these actions are described abstractly or concretely, and on how serious moral transgression these actions seem to represent. Studies by Nahmias et. al. (2007) show that the kind of determinism involved can affect assignments of responsibility. When deterministic scenarios were described using reductionist explanations of action, subjects were significantly less prone to ascribe responsibility than when the deterministic laws were described as involving ordinary psychological concepts. Finally, a study by Knobe (2003) suggests that people are significantly more inclined to hold an agent responsible for bringing about bad side effects than for bringing about good side effects when the agent just doesn’t care about these side effects. Elsewhere (Björnsson & Persson ms), we have presented an analysis of our everyday concept of moral responsibility that provides a unified explanation of paradigmatic cases of moral responsibility, accounting for the force of both typical excuses and the most influential skeptical arguments against moral responsibility or for incompatibilism. In this article, we suggest that it also explains the divergent and apparently incoherent set of intuitions revealed by these new studies. If our hypothesis is correct, the surprising variety of judgments stems from a unified concept of moral responsibility. Björnsson, G.; Persson, K. (ms) The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility. Forthcoming in Noûs Knobe, J. (2003) Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis 63, pp.190–93. Nahmias, E.; Coates, J.; Kvaran. T. (2007) Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: experiments on folk intuitions. Midwest studies in Philosophy XXXI Nichols, S.; Knobe, J. (2007) Moral responsibility and determinism: the cognitive science of folk intuitions. Noûs 41:4, 663-685
The free will inventory: Measuring beliefs about agency and responsibility
Consciousness and Cognition, 2014
In this paper, we present the results of the construction and validation of a new psychometric tool for measuring beliefs about free will and related concepts: The Free Will Inventory (FWI). In its final form, FWI is a 29-item instrument with two parts. Part 1 consists of three 5-item subscales designed to measure strength of belief in free will, determinism, and dualism. Part 2 consists of a series of fourteen statements designed to further explore the complex network of people's associated beliefs and attitudes about free will, determinism, choice, the soul, predictability, responsibility, and punishment. Having presented the construction and validation of FWI, we discuss several ways that it could be used in future research, highlight some as yet unanswered questions that are ripe for interdisciplinary investigation, and encourage researchers to join us in our efforts to answer these questions. This is true regardless of whether or not we actually have free will, a related but orthogonal issue that we will not be exploring here.
Surveying freedom: Folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility
2005
Philosophers working in the nascent field of 'experimental philosophy'have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions.
Free will, moral responsibility, and mechanism: Experiments on folk intuitions
2007
214 intuition runs deep and that it is driven by people's tendency to view a reductive, mechanistic explanation of behavior—for instance, in the neuroscientific language of neural processes and chemical reactions—as inconsistent with a mentalistic (or intentional) explanation—in the psychological language of thoughts, desires, and plans.