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Judgments of Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Percentage of participants who judged Jeremy acted of his own free will when he robbed a bank (negative), saved a child (positive), and went jogging (neutral), as compared with percentage of participants who judged Jeremy morally responsible when he robbed a bank (negative) and saved a child (positive).  

Judgments of Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Percentage of participants who judged Jeremy acted of his own free will when he robbed a bank (negative), saved a child (positive), and went jogging (neutral), as compared with percentage of participants who judged Jeremy morally responsible when he robbed a bank (negative) and saved a child (positive).  

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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 philosop...

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Determinism seems to rule out a robust sense of options but also prevent our choices from being a matter of luck. In this way, free will seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. If the concept of free will is coherent, something must have gone wrong. I offer a diagnosis on which this puzzle is due at least in part to a tension al...
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In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan (in press) have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance, and are rather willing to attribute free will no matter what. As evidence for this cl...

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... Since compatibilism (the view that free will is compatible with determinism) does not seem logically contradictory, the relevant characterization, if it exists, must be implicit and revealed only in certain patterns of intuitions. These intuitions then become the focus of lively debate: are we "natural compatibilists" (Cova, 2023;Murray & Nahmias, 2014;Nahmias et al., 2005) or "natural incompatibilists" (Nadelhoffer et al., 2020;Nichols & Knobe, 2007)? 31 This question is judged highly relevant on the assumption that, if we are "natural incompatibilists", it is plausible that our shared concept of free will makes it incompatible with determinism, making the denial of free will attractive to some. ...
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Ulysses, the strong illusionist, sails towards the Strait of Definitions. On his left, Charybdis defines “phenomenal consciousness” in a loaded manner, which makes it a problematic entity from a physicalist and naturalistic point of view. This renders illusionism attractive, but at the cost of committing a potential strawman against its opponents – phenomenal realists. On the right, Scylla defines “phenomenal consciousness” innocently. This seems to render illusionism unattractive. Against this, I show that Ulysses can pass the Strait of Definitions. He should sail straight towards Scylla. Supposedly innocent definitions land a concept that makes illusionism attractive without committing a strawman. Indeed, this concept, which captures what the phenomenal realist means, is explicitly innocent but implicitly loaded. Beyond the Strait lies another danger: the Sirens of Redefinitions. They incite our hero to redefine his terms to salvage verbally (weak) phenomenal realism – judged preferable to overt strong illusionism. Ulysses should resist the Sirens’ songs and choose overt strong illusionism over its weak realist reformulation.
... Since this is not contested by free will skeptics, findings cannot be attributed to them. Second, people generally assume that they have free will or, at the very least, take a compatibilist position in favor of free will (Baumeister & Brewer, 2012;Nahmias et al., 2005). Therefore, participants in correlational or manipulation studies need not represent the views of free will skeptics. ...
... The purpose of Study 1 was to understand whether any differences exist in perceptions of meaning in life and satisfaction between incompatibilist free will skeptics and laypeople. Because laypeople generally believe in free will (Baumeister & Brewer, 2012;Nahmias et al., 2005) and belief in free will should be positively associated with greater meaning and satisfaction, it follows that laypeople would score significantly higher on these outcomes than incompatibilist free will skeptics. However, if the views of skeptics have been ignored and their perceptions differ to that of participants typically categorized as free will disbelievers, it would instead be expected that no differences between skeptics and laypeople would be found. ...
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Belief in free will has been shown to positively associate with socially desirable behaviors and outcomes, such as meaning and satisfaction. However, studies have not focused exclusively on the beliefs of incompatibilist free will skeptics. Such skeptics may have different interpretations about what it means to disbelieve in free will than participants typically classified as free will disbelievers. Across three studies including a manipulation (total N = 620), the research examined the relationship between belief in free will and meaning and satisfaction in incompatibilist free will skeptics. Studies 1 and 2 found no differences in meaning and satisfaction between incompatibilist free will skeptics and participants believing more strongly in free will. Study 3 found that participants manipulated to disbelieve in free will perceived life to be significantly less meaningful and satisfactory than incompatibilist free will skeptics. Moreover, incompatibilist free will skeptics did not perceive life to be less meaningful and satisfactory than a control condition possessing significantly stronger belief in free will. Therefore, the negative outcomes
... Free will is often associated with the capacity for making choices between alternatives without internal or external constraints (Feldman et al., 2014;Monroe et al., 2014;Rigoni et al., 2017). Most laypersons seem to believe in some form of free will (Alquist et al., 2015;Monroe & Malle, 2010;Nahmias et al., 2005;Nichols, 2004;Sarkissian et al., 2010;Stillman et al., 2011). In philosophy, there is extensive debate about the very existence of free will, how it should be conceptualized in formal terms, whether it is compatible with determinism and biological evolution, and what the implications of free will might be for ethics and society (e.g., Dennett & Caruso, 2021). ...
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Pronin and Kugler (2010) proposed that people believe they have more free will than others. In their Experiment 1 they showed that U.S. American students evaluated their own decisions and life events as less predictable than similar decisions and life events of close others, presumably suggesting higher free will attributions. We conducted three pre-registered replications of this study, one with a Hong Kong undergraduate sample (N = 47) and two online samples from the USA (MTurk using CloudResearch: N = 126, Prolific: N = 858) (overall N = 1031). In Studies 1a and 1b that mirrored the target article’s mixed design (self-other between, past-future within), we found support for the original findings with weaker effects. In Study 2 we contrasted between-subject versus within-subject designs in a single data collection. We successfully replicated the effects with the between-subject design, whereas we failed to find support for the effect using the within-subjects design. This suggests support for the phenomenon in single evaluation mode assessing either the self or the other, but that people correct for the self-other asymmetry in perceived predictability when the judgment is made in joint evaluations mode. Materials, data, and code are available on: https://osf.io/ykmqp/. Open peer review: https://osf.io/d47kj
... Free will is often associated with the capacity for making choices between alternatives without internal or external constraints (Feldman et al., 2014;Monroe et al., 2014;Rigoni et al., 2017). Most laypersons seem to believe in some form of free will (Alquist et al., 2015;Monroe & Malle, 2010;Nahmias et al., 2005;Nichols, 2004;Sarkissian et al., 2010;Stillman et al., 2011). In philosophy, there is extensive debate about the very existence of free will, how it should be conceptualized in formal terms, whether it is compatible with determinism and biological evolution, and what the implications of free will might be for ethics and society (e.g., Dennett & Caruso, 2021). ...
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Pronin and Kugler (2010) proposed that people believe they have more free will than others. In their Experiment 1 they showed that U.S. American students evaluated their own decisions and life events as less predictable than similar decisions and life events of close others, presumably suggesting higher free will attributions. We conducted three pre-registered replications of this study, one with a Hong Kong undergraduate sample (N = 47) and two online samples from the USA (MTurk using CloudResearch: N = 126, Prolific: N = 858) (overall N = 1031). In Studies 1a and 1b that mirrored the target article’s mixed design (self-other between, past-future within), we found support for the original findings with weaker effects. In Study 2 we contrasted between-subject versus within-subject designs in a single data collection. We successfully replicated the effects with the between-subject design, whereas we failed to find support for the effect using the within-subjects design. This suggests support for the phenomenon in single evaluation mode assessing either the self or the other, but that people correct for the self-other asymmetry in perceived predictability when the judgment is made in joint evaluations mode. Materials, data, and code are available on: https://osf.io/ykmqp/. Open peer review: https://osf.io/d47kj
... The past two decades have seen an expansion of empirical explorations of philosophical questions that probe beliefs and attitudes about human agency in the general population (Björnsson and Shepherd, 2020;Nadelhoffer, Shepard, Nahmias, Sripada, and Ross, 2014;Nadelhoffer, Yin, and Graves, 2020;Paulhus and Carey, 2011;Stinnett, Rodriguez, Littlefield, and Alquist, 2022;Willoughby, Love, McGue, Iacono, Quigley, and Lee, 2019). These investigations have linked intuitions about free will to a variety of predictors, including attitudes about moral responsibility (Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner, 2005), cultural differences (Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich, 2001), social identity and religious beliefs (Baumeister, Bauer, and Lloyd, 2010), and individual differences in personality (Feltz and Cokely, 2012). Although no consensus has developed about whether people tend to conceive of free will and determinism as compatible (Chan, Deutsch, and Nichols, 2016), some empirical evidence suggests that folk beliefs about free will and determinism are not strongly coupled (Willoughby et al., 2019). ...
... The "Fred and Barney" vignettes are adapted from Nahmias et al. 2005. Participants are shown one of two versions of a short story about Fred and Barney, fictional characters (who are not intended to be cavemen). ...
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Philosophers and psychologists alike have long debated the etiology of beliefs about human agency. Recently, empirical investigations have shown that lay beliefs about free will and determinism represent stable and important individual differences. Despite a perennial interest in the sources of agentic belief, genetic and environmental influences on such beliefs have never been studied. We administered a battery of items assessing these beliefs to a unique sample of 394 adoptive and biological families with adult offspring to investigate the origins of agentic beliefs and their relationships. We found significant differences between adopted and biological offspring and between the parents of such children, particularly in beliefs about determinism. Biometric modeling revealed especially surprising results: unlike the vast majority of traits studied in family designs, agentic beliefs appear to be weakly or not at all heritable. Since genetic factors might be regarded as typical of the "initial conditions" in philosophical thought experiments about free will and determinism, it is especially ironic that beliefs about free will and determinism may be among the traits least influenced by genetic differences.
... Typically, approaches to examining folk beliefs on free will rely on experimentally designed vignettes that carefully control critical details. Such vignettes range, for example, from judging if free will is expressed when there is no deliberation involved in selecting a pen to write with (Vierkant et al., 2019), a supercomputer accurately predicting when someone will commit a robbery (Nahmias et al., 2005), to a son killing his father who has accused him of being lazy (Genschow et al., 2021). The aim is to use carefully crafted vignettes to present properties that reveal whether people's general views are compatibilist (free will is present even under determinism) or incompatibilist (free will is undermined because of determinism; e.g., Deutschländer et al., 2017;Feltz & Millan, 2015;Nahmias et al., 2005Nahmias et al., , 2007Nichols, 2011;Vierkant et al., 2019). ...
... Such vignettes range, for example, from judging if free will is expressed when there is no deliberation involved in selecting a pen to write with (Vierkant et al., 2019), a supercomputer accurately predicting when someone will commit a robbery (Nahmias et al., 2005), to a son killing his father who has accused him of being lazy (Genschow et al., 2021). The aim is to use carefully crafted vignettes to present properties that reveal whether people's general views are compatibilist (free will is present even under determinism) or incompatibilist (free will is undermined because of determinism; e.g., Deutschländer et al., 2017;Feltz & Millan, 2015;Nahmias et al., 2005Nahmias et al., , 2007Nichols, 2011;Vierkant et al., 2019). One of the most pervasive problems is that when empirically investigated, people do not appear to fully understand what compatibilism and incompatibilism mean. ...
... One of the most pervasive problems is that when empirically investigated, people do not appear to fully understand what compatibilism and incompatibilism mean. The result is that it is then hard to find evidence in support of theories that would predict that people tend toward compatibilism (e.g., Nahmias et al., 2005Nahmias et al., , 2007. This in turn has prompted considerable discussion regarding concerns resulting from the experimental materials designed to gauge "folk" beliefs. ...
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When we are victims of manipulation, then theory expects that our ability to freely choose is threatened by default. But, when looking at folk beliefs, we see nuance in the judgments made about choice and manipulation, which appear to be strongly informed by perspective and context. Regarding perspective, the negative relationship between free choice and manipulation is stronger when we explicitly see ourselves rather than others in the same autonomy-threatening contexts. When it comes to context, free choice is impacted more in some manipulative situations (e.g., microtargeting, subliminal priming, subliminal advertising, hypnosis) than others (e.g., jingles, product placement, political campaigning). The labile nature of the relationship between manipulation and free choice, which is in contrast to theoretical expectations, requires further investigation to expose whether these two factors (perspective, context) are robust. The present study stress tests these two factors by examining order effects (Experiments 1 and 2: manipulation vs. autonomy, autonomy vs. manipulation), as well as varying verbal descriptions (Experiments 1 and 2: manipulation vs. influence) and the way judgments are expressed (Experiment 1 ratings on scales 0–10, Experiment 2 forced choice Y/N). Consistent with previous research, the strength of the relationship between manipulation and free choice is amplified in specific contexts and when considered from a personalized perspective. The implications of this for theories on free choice and free will are discussed.
... However, this method soon ran into some difficulties. While the results of first studies suggested that most people were "natural compatibilists" (Nahmias et al., 2005(Nahmias et al., , 2006, later studies suggested that participants' answers depended on the content on the vignettes: abstract vignettes elicited more incompatibilist answers compared to concrete ones (Nichols & Knobe, 2007), while vignettes focusing on psychological determinism elicited more compatibilist intuitions than vignettes focusing on neuroscientific determinism (Nahmias et al., 2007). Searching to explain these conflicting results, Murray and Nahmias (2014) soon found out that a non-negligible proportion of participants presented with such vignettes tended to interpret certain deterministic vignettes as implying bypassing (i.e. the claim that agents' mental states play no role in the production of their decisions and actions). ...
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In the past 20 years, experimental philosophers have been investigating folk intuitions about the compatibility of determinism with free will and moral responsibility using vignettes depicting agents in deterministic universes. However, recent research suggests that participants massively fail to understand these vignettes. Moreover, it has also been proposed that these comprehension errors might even be systematic and thus unavoidable, threatening the project of probing folk intuitions about free will and determinism through vignettes. Through five studies, we suggest that past studies have overestimated participants’ failure to understand vignettes depicting deterministic universes, mainly by relying on unreliable samples and by using non-validated measures. We also show that using new vignettes that take more time to better describe what determinism is substantially reduces comprehension errors and their impact on participants’ intuitions. We conclude that, at least in the current state of the art, skepticism about the possibility to probe folk intuitions about the compatibility of determinism with free will and moral responsibility through the use of vignettes is premature.
... They found that a strong majority of participants answered "yes" to both questions. This suggests that ordinary people are natural compatibilists (Nahmias et al., 2005;. ...
Chapter
... Despite these precursors, experimental philosophy emerged only in the early 2000s as a self-aware research program in philosophy, with a series of influential articles (e.g., Knobe, 2003;Machery et al., 2004;Nahmias et al., 2005;Weinberg et al., 2001) and edited collections (e.g., Knobe & Nichols, 2008). Experimental philosophy was originally a topic of heated controversy in philosophy, since it challenged the dominant methods in philosophy, which left no room for empirical work (Williamson, 2007). ...
... The ability to make your own choices and determine your own outcomes underlie the basic notion of belief in free will [4]. Most people believe in free will [5], and intuitions about free will have been demonstrated cross-culturally [6]. Free will beliefs are widespread largely because they invoke feelings of personal agency [4]. ...
... Integral to the belief in free will is the view of an agentic self, unconstrained by environmental influences and having the ability to make choices [4]. Since most people report believing in free will [5], we expected that free will beliefs would shift across different time points of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both studies, conducted two years apart, generally supported this prediction. ...
... Our findings are also especially notable given that responses to COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions tend to intersect with political values. While most people believe in free will [5], research has shown that free will beliefs are associated with greater conservative worldviews [25], and political differences in belief in free will stem from differences in how people assign moral issues [26]. Across both studies, participants were fairly politically diverse, and they reported being slightly liberal/moderate on average. ...
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Among life-and-death health concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic were frustrations about the loss of personal freedom due to emergency quarantine. To test these perceptions, two studies examined whether belief in free will was resilient during different points of the pandemic. In Study 1, conducted in 2020, participants completed a writing task describing their lives before the COVID-19 pandemic, during the COVID-19 pandemic while under emergency quarantine, and during the COVID-19 pandemic while under state re-openings. Following each task, they completed belief in free will measures. Results indicated that free will beliefs were higher before the pandemic than during emergency quarantine. Free will beliefs were also greater during state re-opening than during emergency quarantine. Belief in free will did not differ between pre-pandemic and state re-opening. Study 2 replicated and extended these effects two years later. These findings highlight the brief loss of freedom during COVID-19 as well as the resiliency of agentic control.