- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be
understood in terms of the movement of molecules’, while another group reads
something like, ‘I have feelings of regret when I make bad decisions because
I know that ultimately I am responsible for my actions’, or texts unrelated to
free will.
In one such study, those who read about determinism were more likely to
cheat on a maths test (Vohs and Schooler, 2008). That these effects were really
due to the manipulation was supported by the finding that professed belief
in free will was reduced after the reading, and this was correlated with the
cheating behaviour. A second study also used pro-free will statements such
as ‘I am able to override the genetic and environmental factors that some-
times influence my behavior’ and ‘Avoiding temptation requires that I exert
my free will’. People who read these were less likely to overpay themselves for
performance on a cognitive task than those who read the pro-determinism
statements.
Another set of experiments tested whether inducing deterministic beliefs would
induce a ‘don’t bother’ attitude, undermine a sense of responsibility, reduce
helping behaviour, and increase aggression (Baumeister et al., 2009). Those who
read pro-free will statements did report more willingness to help others and less
aggression, but the results suggested the effects were not due to either increased
energy to act or an increased sense of responsibility.
A closer look at the mechanisms involved suggests that when people are induced
to disbelieve in free will, low-level sensorimotor effects can take place even if peo-
ple’s explicit ratings of sense of agency are unchanged. These include changes
in intentional binding (perceptions of how close in time an action seems to its
effects; see Concept 9.1), post-error slowing, action-cancellation, and motor
preparation for action (Lynn et al., 2014). So, beliefs might intervene at the senso-
rimotor level and then have a cascade of further effects: on the level of intentional
effort exerted, and in turn on our pre-reflective sense of agency and responsibil-
ity, regardless of how we report on it.
What is going on here? All this empirical work makes clear that our sense of
agency is not a unitary thing, but consists of many different components, of
which belief is just one. We may doubt whether these brief experimental manip-
ulations really change people’s beliefs in a meaningful way. Thinking about free
will and determinism for half an hour is a far cry from the life-long training that
some people undertake when once they come to the conclusion that free will is
illusory (Blackmore, 2013).
If we accept the findings, however, can we conclude that believing in free will
is essential to maintain moral behaviour or even that encouraging people to
give up such belief (perhaps by acquainting them with the evidence in a chap-
ter like this one) is bound to lead to unethical behaviour and the breakdown
of civil society? This is an argument with a long history. The sixteenth-cen-
tury Catholic theologian Erasmus wrote that an educated elite might be
able to cope with the dangerous idea that there is no free will but the gen-
eral public was too weak or ignorant to handle such knowledge (1524/1999,
pp. 11–12).
