Would there be more crime if we all thought we lacked free will? Different results in negotiatons?

A research study of free will and morality (linked to below) has been in my "To Blog About" file for a while. Scientific American just published "Free Will versus the Programmed Brain" in which this same research is discussed. I took that as a message from the e-Gods to quit procrastinating.

In the study, participants were given a passage to read from a science book. Half of the participants were given a passage that said there is no such thing as free will. The other half read a passage about the importance of studying consciousness, with no mention of free will. Participants then were asked to complete a survey about their belief in free will.

Now for the intriguing part of the research: Participants were given a task at which they could cheat.

The results were clear: those who read the anti-free will text cheated more often! ... Moreover, the researchers found that the amount a participant cheated correlated with the extent to which they rejected free will in their survey responses.

The author of the Scientific American article goes on to discuss some questions.

• How far does the effect go? "Presumably the experiment didn’t also lead to a rash of criminal activity among those who read the anti-free will passage."
• Is the effect permanent? "[W]hat would happen if those people were brought back to the lab two weeks later?"
• Are philosophers and scientists who reject free will less moral?

That third question leads to three other questions.

People who explicitly deny free will often continue to hold themselves responsible for their actions and feel guilty for doing wrong. Have such people managed to accommodate the rest of their attitudes to their rejection of free will? Have they adjusted their notion of guilt and responsibility so that it really doesn’t depend on the existence of free will? Or is it that when they are in the thick of things, trying to decide what to do, trying to do the right thing, they just fall back into the belief that they do have free will after all?

I urge you to read and think about the questions this short article poses. As I may have mentioned in the past, the prevailing opinion in neuroscience is that we do not have free will. (I am a firm believer in free will so it is fortunate that the neuroscientist with whom I work is of the same belief.) The existence or nonexistence of free will obviously is not just the concern of scientists; it has profound societal and cultural implications. Just one example of where the question is germane: Criminal law. Personal responsibility without free will is very different from with free will.  (See previous post.) In another arena, I'd like to see how belief/non-belief in free will would affect negotiations.

Do we have free will? What do you think?

Notes: If you are interested in this question of free will and the split in what neuroscientists believe, I urge you to read The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Click to read the study "The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating." [pdf]

Image credit: Alvimann.