Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2019 Sep 11;14(9):e0221617. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221617. eCollection 2019.
Most people believe in free will. Whether this belief is warranted or not, free will beliefs (FWB) are foundational for many legal systems and reducing FWB has effects on behavior from the motor to the social level. This raises the important question as to which specific FWB people hold. There are many different ways to conceptualize free will, and some might see physical determinism as a threat that might reduce FWB, while others might not. Here, we investigate lay FWB in a large, representative, replicated online survey study in the US and Singapore (n = 1800), assessing differences in FWB with unprecedented depth within and between cultures. Specifically, we assess the relation of FWB, as measured using the Free Will Inventory, to determinism, dualism and related concepts like libertarianism and compatibilism. We find that libertarian, compatibilist, and dualist, intuitions were related to FWB, but that these intuitions were often logically inconsistent. Importantly, direct comparisons suggest that dualism was more predictive of FWB than other intuitions. Thus, believing in free will goes hand-in-hand with a belief in a non-physical mind. Highlighting the importance of dualism for FWB impacts academic debates on free will, which currently largely focus on its relation to determinism. Our findings also shed light on how recent (neuro)scientific findings might impact FWB. Demonstrating physical determinism in the brain need not have a strong impact on FWB, due to a wide-spread belief in dualism.
大多数人都相信自由意志。无论这种信念是否有根据,自由意志信念(FWB)都是许多法律体系的基础,减少 FWB 会对从运动到社会层面的行为产生影响。这就提出了一个重要的问题,即人们持有哪些特定的 FWB。自由意志有很多不同的概念化方式,有些人可能认为物理决定论是一种威胁,可能会降低 FWB,而另一些人则可能不会。在这里,我们在美国和新加坡进行了一项大规模的、具有代表性的、可重复的在线调查研究,调查了自由意志信念(FWB)在不同文化中的差异,这在深度上是前所未有的。具体来说,我们评估了自由意志库存测量的 FWB 与决定论、二元论和自由意志相关概念(如自由意志论和相容论)的关系。我们发现,自由意志论、相容论和二元论的直觉与 FWB 有关,但这些直觉往往在逻辑上是不一致的。重要的是,直接比较表明,二元论比其他直觉更能预测 FWB。因此,相信自由意志与相信非物质的心灵是相辅相成的。强调二元论对 FWB 的重要性会影响到关于自由意志的学术争论,目前这些争论主要集中在它与决定论的关系上。我们的研究结果还揭示了最近(神经)科学发现如何影响 FWB。由于普遍存在二元论信仰,大脑中的物理决定论可能不会对 FWB 产生强烈影响。