Vohs Kathleen D, Schooler Jonathan W
Department of Marketing, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2008 Jan;19(1):49-54. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x.
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.
道德行为是否依赖于对自由意志的信念？两项实验探讨了促使参与者相信人类行为是预先注定的是否会助长欺骗行为。在实验1中，参与者阅读了鼓励决定论信念的文本（即将行为描绘为环境和遗传因素的结果）或中性文本。接触决定论信息增加了在一项任务中的欺骗行为，在该任务中，参与者可以被动地让一个有缺陷的计算机程序揭示他们被指示自己解决的数学问题的答案。此外，欺骗行为的增加是由对自由意志信念的降低所介导的。在实验2中，阅读决定论陈述的参与者在一项认知任务中通过给自己过高报酬来欺骗；阅读支持自由意志陈述的参与者则没有。这些发现表明，关于自由意志的争论具有社会以及科学和理论层面的意义。
