| Do human beings have free will or is the future fixed by preceding events, an inevitable outcome of the deterministic nature of the universe? Such questions lie at the core of the perennial debate concerning determinism and free will. Recently, however, some researchers have put aside questions of whether free will actually exists and instead sought to understand how a person's beliefs about free will influence their behavior. In a series of recent experiments, researchers exposed participants to statements encouraging belief in determinism and discouraging belief in free will, and found that these statements led to increased levels of several different types of antisocial behavior (Vohs & Schooler, 2008; Baumeister et al., 2009). This has raised concerns that belief in free will may serve an important prosocial function and, in turn, that encouragement, on the part of psychologists and neuroscientists, to believe in determinism may have an unintended detrimental impact on societal well-being. However, because prior work has consistently conflated statements encouraging belief in determinism with statements discouraging belief in free will, it is impossible to say whether the promotion of determinism is necessarily damaging to prosocial behavior. Additionally, the exact mechanism by which decreased belief in free will brings about increased antisocial behavior is not yet known. Although Baumeister et al. (2009) have suggested that the key mediating factor is impairment of self-control, this hypothesis has not yet been fully tested, nor has any specific suggestion been made for how self-control is connected to an individual's belief in determinism. In the present study, we highlight certain core aspects of belief in free will that may serve to link these various factors together and thus account for the observed behavioral changes. Furthermore, we suggest that belief in these core elements is frequently (though not always) compatible with belief in determinism and, consequently, that an individual can feasibly hold a strong belief in determinism without experiencing any increases in antisocial behavior. Whether this occurs, however, depends on how an individual interprets determinism; we predicted that a neutral or scientific interpretation of determinism would generate no conflict and would leave both belief in free will and self-control unharmed, while a fatalistic interpretation would tend to be damaging to belief in free will and self-control. We conducted a preliminary test of this model by encouraging participants to believe in both determinism and free will (i.e., to adopt a compatibilist belief) and subsequently measuring how this impacted their free will and determinism beliefs, their cheating behavior, and their perceived self-control. Finally, we also checked for changes in self-awareness, in order to test the viability of this variable as a confound. However, the results were inconclusive due to a lack of statistical significance across the board. Several potential causes of these null results are discussed, along with suggestions for future research. |
