Free will beliefs predict attitudes toward unethical behavior and criminal punishment

Significance Understanding the bases of moral judgment has been a longstanding goal of social science. Factors undergirding morality are argued to be both globally uniform and regionally variable. The current study found evidence of both. For residents of countries with low levels of corruption and transparent systems of governance, free will beliefs predicted greater support for harsh criminal punishment and an intolerance of unethical behavior. For residents of countries beset with corruption and obfuscation, free will beliefs predicted greater support for criminal punishment but were decoupled from judgments of unethical behavior. These findings confirm causal conclusions from experimental research about the influence of free will beliefs on moral judgments and demonstrate variation by sociopolitical context. Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables.

[1]  J. Hardin,et al.  Generalized Linear Models and Extensions , 2001 .

[2]  M. Brass,et al.  From Intentions to Neurons: Social and Neural Consequences of Disbelieving in Free Will , 2014 .

[3]  Kevin M. Carlsmith,et al.  Why do we punish? Deterrence and just deserts as motives for punishment. , 2002, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  J. Schooler,et al.  Believing there is no free will corrupts intuitive cooperation , 2016, Cognition.

[5]  Shaul Shalvi,et al.  The collaborative roots of corruption , 2015, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[6]  J. Haidt The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology , 2007, Science.

[7]  E. Fehr,et al.  Cooperation and Punishment in Public Goods Experiments , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[8]  C. B. Colby The weirdest people in the world , 1973 .

[9]  A. Norenzayan,et al.  It was meant to happen: explaining cultural variations in fate attributions. , 2010, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[10]  Charlotte H. Mason,et al.  Collinearity, power, and interpretation of multiple regression analysis. , 1991 .

[11]  F. Schneider,et al.  Shadow economies around the world: novel insights, accepted knowledge, and new estimates , 2011, International Tax and Public Finance.

[12]  R. Baumeister,et al.  Subjective correlates and consequences of belief in free will , 2016 .

[13]  Jan de Leeuw,et al.  Introducing Multilevel Modeling , 1998 .

[14]  Peter H. Ditto,et al.  Free to punish: a motivated account of free will belief. , 2014, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[15]  Joshua D. Greene,et al.  Free Will and Punishment: A Mechanistic View of Human Nature Reduces Retribution , 2014, Psychological science.

[16]  Simon Gächter,et al.  Intrinsic Honesty and the Prevalence of Rule Violations across Societies , 2016, Nature.

[17]  Kathleen D. Vohs,et al.  The Value of Believing in Free Will , 2008, Psychological science.

[18]  S. Levinson,et al.  WEIRD languages have misled us, too , 2010, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[19]  R. Eisinga,et al.  The reliability of a two-item scale: Pearson, Cronbach, or Spearman-Brown? , 2013, International Journal of Public Health.

[20]  R. Baumeister,et al.  Free Will in Scientific Psychology , 2008, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[21]  Michael C. Frank,et al.  Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science , 2015, Science.

[22]  Joshua D. Greene,et al.  For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything. , 2004, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences.

[23]  Bertram F. Malle,et al.  This Isn’t the Free Will Worth Looking For , 2017 .

[24]  Felipe De Brigard,et al.  Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal , 2010 .

[25]  D. Paulhus,et al.  Worldview implications of believing in free will and/or determinism: politics, morality, and punitiveness. , 2013, Journal of personality.

[26]  Jason Turner,et al.  Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about free will and moral responsibility , 2005 .

[27]  E. Fehr,et al.  Business culture and dishonesty in the banking industry , 2014, Nature.

[28]  E. Skoufias,et al.  Mitigating Myths about Policy Effectiveness: Evaluation of Mexico’s Antipoverty and Human Resource Investment Program , 2006 .

[29]  F. Crick,et al.  The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul , 1994 .

[30]  Leif D. Nelson,et al.  False-Positive Psychology , 2011, Psychological science.

[31]  D. Paulhus,et al.  The FAD–Plus: Measuring Lay Beliefs Regarding Free Will and Related Constructs , 2011, Journal of personality assessment.

[32]  Sophia Rabe-Hesketh,et al.  Multilevel and Longitudinal Modeling Using Stata , 2005 .

[33]  H. Sung Democracy and Criminal Justice in Cross-National Perspective: From Crime Control to Due Process , 2006 .

[34]  K. Vohs,et al.  Personal Philosophy and Personnel Achievement: Belief in Free Will Predicts Better Job Performance , 2010 .

[35]  C. Welzel,et al.  Development, Freedom, and Rising Happiness: A Global Perspective (1981–2007) , 2008, Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

[36]  Francis J. Flynn,et al.  Who's with Me? False Consensus, Brokerage, and Ethical Decision Making in Organizations , 2010 .

[37]  Leon J. Goldstein The End of History and the Last Man , 1993 .

[38]  Jennifer S. Beer,et al.  Deciding versus Reacting: Conceptions of Moral Judgment and the Reason-Affect Debate , 2007 .

[39]  R. Baumeister,et al.  Prosocial Benefits of Feeling Free: Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness , 2009, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[40]  A. Gelman Scaling regression inputs by dividing by two standard deviations , 2008, Statistics in medicine.

[41]  S. Schulman The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul , 1994 .

[42]  Christian Nestler,et al.  Freedom Rising. Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation , 2017 .

[43]  L. Skitka,et al.  Morality in everyday life , 2014, Science.

[44]  Francesca Gino,et al.  Self-Serving Justifications , 2015 .

[45]  J. Darley,et al.  The Psychology of Compensatory and Retributive Justice , 2003, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.