Our new paper on Free Will and Punishment just accepted at Psychological Science
Our latest paper, Free Will and Punishment: Diminished Belief in Free Will Reduces Retribution, co-authored with a long list of collaborators (Joshua Greene, Johan Karremans, Jamie Luguri, Cory Clark, Jonathan Schooler, Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs) was just accepted at Psychological Science. In four studies, the paper shows that diminishing people’s beliefs about free will reduces the amount of retributive punishment they seek for wrongdoers. This was shown in multiple ways including through having participants read glossy popular magazine articles about neuroscience research, which encouraged a mechanistic view but made no mention of free will. Another study saw a decline in retributivism across the course of an undergraduate Cognitive Neuroscience class, with those who reported learning the most about the brain, showing the sharpest decreases in attributed blame and recommended punishment.
This paper complements our recent paper, Free to Punish: A Motivated Account of Free Will Belief, which shows the opposite side of the coin: people are motivated to increase their belief in free will when they are motivated to punish wrongdoers.
The abstracts for both papers appear below:
Free Will and Punishment: Diminished Belief in Free Will Reduces Retribution:
If free will beliefs support attributions of moral responsibility, then reducing these beliefs should make people less retributive in their attitudes about punishment. Four studies using both measured and manipulated free will beliefs found that people with weaker beliefs reported less retributive, but not consequentialist, punishment towards criminals (Study 1). Subsequent studies showed that exposing people to research about the neural bases of human behavior, either through lab-based manipulations or by virtue of having taken an undergraduate neuroscience class, reduced retributive punishment (Studies 2-4). These results illustrate the consequences that exposure to debates about free will and scientific research on the neural basis of behavior may have on attributions of moral responsibility.
Free to Punish: A Motivated Account of Free Will Belief:
Belief in free will is a pervasive phenomenon that has important consequences for prosocial actions and punitive judgments, but little research has investigated why free will beliefs are so widespread. Across 5 studies using experimental, survey, and archival data and multiple measures of free will belief, we tested the hypothesis that a key factor promoting belief in free will is a fundamental desire to hold others morally responsible for their wrongful behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported greater belief in free will after considering an immoral action than a morally neutral one. Study 2 provided evidence that this effect was due to heightened punitive motivations. In a field experiment (Study 3), an ostensibly real classroom cheating incident led to increased free will beliefs, again due to heightened punitive motivations. In Study 4, reading about others’ immoral behaviors reduced the perceived merit of anti-free-will research, thus demonstrating the effect with an indirect measure of free will belief. Finally, Study 5 examined this relationship outside the laboratory and found that the real-world prevalence of immoral behavior (as measured by crime and homicide rates) predicted free will belief on a country level. Taken together, these results provide a potential explanation for the strength and prevalence of belief in free will: It is functional for holding others morally responsible and facilitates justifiably punishing harmful members of society.