Abstract
Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 49-54 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| Journal | Psychological Science |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2008 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Vanessa Ding, Alison Boyce, Nicole Mead, and Azim Shariff for their assistance with this manuscript. We are grateful for funding from the Canada Research Chair program and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHCR; both authors), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; J.W.S.), and the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (K.D.V.).