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If You Don't Believe In Free Will, You Are Likely to Be a Cheater

Do you believe that you have control over your destiny? It may come as no surprise that if you do not, then you are more prone to bad behavior. Some findings from studies by experimental philosophers and psychologists, reported by John Tierney in the...

Do you believe that you have control over your destiny? It may come as no surprise that if you do not, then you are more prone to bad behavior. Some findings from studies by experimental philosophers and psychologists, reported by John Tierney in the Times, are shedding new light into how we think about free will, and how that affects our behavior. The takeaway: Don’t not believe in free will. Got it?

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In one experiment, some people read a passage from Francis Crick, the molecular biologist, asserting that free will is a quaint old notion no longer taken seriously by intellectuals, especially not psychologists and neuroscientists. Afterward, when compared with a control group that read a different passage from Crick (who died in 2004) these people expressed more skepticism about free will — and promptly cut themselves some moral slack while taking a math test. Asked to solve a series of arithmetic problems in a computerized quiz, they cheated by getting the answers through a glitch in the computer that they'd been asked not to exploit. The supposed glitch, of course, had been put there as a temptation by the researchers, Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a follow-up experiment, the psychologists gave another test in which people were promised $1 for every correct answer — and got to compile their own scores. Just as Dr. Vohs and Dr. Schooler feared, people were more likely to cheat after being exposed beforehand to arguments against free will. These people went home with more unearned cash than did the other people. This behavior in the lab, the researchers noted, squares with studies in recent decades showing an increase in the number of college students who admit to cheating. During this same period, other studies have shown a weakening in the popular belief in free will (although it's still widely held). "Doubting one's free will may undermine the sense of self as agent," Dr. Vohs and Dr. Schooler concluded. "Or, perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes." That could include goofing off on the job, according to another study done by Dr. Vohs along with a team of psychologists led by Tyler F. Stillman of Southern Utah University. They went to a day-labor employment agency armed with questionnaires for a sample of workers to fill out confidentially. These questionnaires were based on a previously developed research instrument called the Free Will and Determinism Scale. The workers were asked how strongly they agreed with statements like "Strength of mind can always overcome the body's desires" or "People can overcome any obstacles if they truly want to" or "People do not choose to be in the situations they end up in — it just happens." The psychologists also measured other factors, including the workers' general satisfaction with their lives, how energetic they felt, how strongly they endorsed an ethic of hard work. None of these factors was a reliable predictor of their actual performance on the job, as rated by their supervisors. But the higher the workers scored on the scale of belief in free will, the better their ratings on the job. "Free will guides people's choices toward being more moral and better performers," Dr. Vohs said. "It's adaptive for societies and individuals to hold a belief in free will, as it helps people adhere to cultural codes of conduct that portend healthy, wealthy and happy life outcomes."

Some good news: even if you don’t believe in free will, you probably do. Sort of. That’s because even if we consider ourselves to be determinists, we’re also likely to believe that we make choices. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." That helps explain the never-ending debate over morality and free will: we believe in personal responsibility on an intuitive level even if our logic forces us to recognize how much lies outside of our control.

A related question: if disbelief in free will leads to bad behavior, does one’s belief in free will make them more likely to do good?

Read more at The Times