Dataset Information

For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures.

ABSTRACT: Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one's actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one's actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions.

SUBMITTER: Hannikainen IR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6848273 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures.

Hannikainen Ivar R IR Machery Edouard E Rose David D Stich Stephen S Olivola Christopher Y CY Sousa Paulo P Cova Florian F Buchtel Emma E EE Alai Mario M Angelucci Adriano A Berniûnas Renatas R Chatterjee Amita A Cheon Hyundeuk H Cho In-Rae IR Cohnitz Daniel D Dranseika Vilius V Eraña Lagos Ángeles Á Ghadakpour Laleh L Grinberg Maurice M Hashimoto Takaaki T Horowitz Amir A Hristova Evgeniya E Jraissati Yasmina Y Kadreva Veselina V Karasawa Kaori K Kim Hackjin H Kim Yeonjeong Y Lee Minwoo M Mauro Carlos C Mizumoto Masaharu M Moruzzi Sebastiano S Ornelas Jorge J Osimani Barbara B Romero Carlos C Rosas López Alejandro A Sangoi Massimo M Sereni Andrea A Songhorian Sarah S Struchiner Noel N Tripodi Vera V Usui Naoki N Vázquez Del Mercado Alejandro A Vosgerichian Hrag A HA Zhang Xueyi X Zhu Jing J

Frontiers in psychology 20191105

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (<i>N</i> = 5,268) spanning twenty countr ...[more]

PMID: 31749739

Similar Datasets

Project description:For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will. Seven studies support this hypothesis by demonstrating that a variety of logically irrelevant (but motivationally relevant) features influence compatibilist judgments. In Study 1, participants who were asked to consider the possibility that our universe is deterministic were more compatibilist than those not asked to consider this possibility, suggesting that determinism poses a threat to moral responsibility, which increases compatibilist responding (thus reducing the threat). In Study 2, participants who considered concrete instances of moral behavior found compatibilist free will more sufficient for moral responsibility than participants who were asked about moral responsibility more generally. In Study 3a, the order in which participants read free will and determinism descriptions influenced their compatibilist judgments-and only when the descriptions had moral significance: Participants were more likely to report that determinism was compatible with free will than that free will was compatible with determinism. In Study 3b, participants who read the free will description first (the more compatibilist group) were particularly likely to confess that their beliefs in free will and moral responsibility and their disbelief in determinism influenced their conclusion. In Study 4, participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will. Participants also reported that immaterial souls were compatible with scientific determinism, most strongly among immaterial soul believers (Study 5), and evaluated information about the capacities of primates in a biased manner favoring the existence of human free will (Study 6). These results suggest that people do not have one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism. Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility. Recommendations for future work are discussed.

Dataset Information

For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures.

Publications

For Whom Does Determinism Undermine Moral Responsibility? Surveying the Conditions for Free Will Across Cultures.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets