The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating
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.
In the video at 30 min mark there is an idea for an experiment almost anyone can test determinism vs free will with a bunch of school kids or retired folks at the bingo club or a nursing home…
Experiments consistently show that the belief in determinism is used as an excuse for bad behavior…
Many famous promoters of determinism may have bad or weird tendencies, which they try to justify by determinism…
This one is mine 😉
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hwqki
J-Mac:
For future reference, you can get a video to start automatically at a desired time by appending a parameter to the link, like so:
https://youtu.be/OhRGVGZejyQ?t=30m30s
J-Mac,
Who?
Thanks. I forgot about that but on the other hand people with high attention span, like you, could watch the whole video 😉
Coyne por exemplo…
Still smarting from my “attention span” remark, I see.
What “bad or weird tendencies” of Coyne’s has he tried to justify with determinism?
Short attention span is my tendency… Weird?
I read book synopsis, paper abstracts and summaries and I hardly ever have to read full text with the exception of quantum mechanics. People who know me write the essence of the email in the subject…
Coynes’ weird tendencies start with the “talking cat”… If you read his blog regularly like I used to, you’d have no problem figuring out why he insists on determinism at all cost…
Are you suggesting that Coyne’s obsessions with cats and ducks are because he is a determinist?
J-Mac,
Well, at least you own up to it.
I’ve never seen him make excuses for that.
He’s obviously a determinist, but I’ve seen no evidence that he uses determinism as an excuse for his cat obsession.
This is pitiful, J-Mac. You started out talking about “many famous promoters of determinism” with “bad or weird tendencies, which they try to justify by determinism”. Yet you haven’t named a single one.
keiths,
My initial comment:
Many famous promoters of determinism may have bad or weird tendencies, which they try to justify by determinism…
The experiments have consistently proved that people use determinism as an excuse for bad behavior…
You asked me who and I gave you one example of someone who you now confirmed to be a determinist. So, your last sentence is a contradiction of your own words…
I didn’t say that. It’s possible that he is trying to excuse his obsessive behavior with determinism…It could be his coping mechanism. The obsession may not be his fault just like someone’s homosexual or compulsive inclanation… Determinism may be just one of the coping mechanisms…
J-Mac,
Concentrate, J-Mac. I didn’t ask you to name a determinist. It’s frikkin’ obvious that Coyne is a determinist, and I don’t need you to tell me that.
I asked you to back up your claim. Your claim was that there are “many famous promoters of determinism” with “bad or weird tendencies, which they try to justify by determinism”.
I asked you who they are. You couldn’t name a single one, despite claiming that there are many.
You named Coyne, but then you provided no evidence that he qualifies as someone who tries to justify his “bad or weird tendencies” by appealing to determinism.
It would be interesting to measure what the subjects in these experiments imagine “free will” to be, as distinct from what philosophers and theologians have argued that it is. I wouldn’t be surprised if the lay belief in “free will” is just hopelessly vague and confused. Likewise for their concept of “determinism”. I don’t imagine that most subjects in these experiments would have read Spinoza or Dennett.
So now he is obsessed with determism!
And yet:
I think this paper should be interesting to you and people who believe not only in determinism but how vague the concept of time is on subatomic level…
Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect.
By Bem, Daryl J.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 100(3), Mar 2011, 407-425
Abstract
The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “time-reversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was 0.22, and all but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA
This Quantum Theory Predicts That The Future Might Be Influencing The Past
One of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics could be explained by an equally weird idea – that causation can run backwards in time as well as forwards…
https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-physics-theory-predicts-future-might-influence-the-past-retrocausality
I suppose the main (Peter Lorre) character in “M” blames determinism for his behavior when he cries that he can’t help himself–as do many people in courts of law.
I think this line of experimentation is interesting. It’s probably crappy research, but I note that if it’s correct, it seems to support the truth of determinism.
Agreed. If only Bem had pre-specified his Statistical Analysis Plan, like an experimental scientist.
The ongoing experiment that is Las Vegas would seem to refute that notion, at least at a practical level.
It seems to me that it is testing human psychology rather than physical determinism.
Neil Rickert,
Right, it’s a mess, but if you think about it, to the extent that determinists use determinism as an excuse, one can ask whether they’re determined to do that.
walto,
But are they physically determined to do that, or are they merely psychologically determined to do that.
Neil Rickert,
Who knows? Do the researchers care which it is?
Or are they physically determined to do that psychologically?
Quantum Mind Time Flies (Backwards?)
Time Flies (Backwards?)
“…Recently Professor Bierman (University of Amsterdam) repeated these experiments with subjects in an fMRI brain imager and found emotional responses in brain activity up to 4 seconds before the stimuli. Moreover he looked at raw data from other laboratories and found similar emotional responses before stimuli appeared…”
https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/content/quantum-mind-time-flies-backwards
ANOMALOUS ANTICIPATORY BRAIN ACTIVATION PRECEDING EXPOSURE OF EMOTIONAL
AND NEUTRAL PICTURES
Dick J. Bierman and H. Steven Scholte
University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, Netherlands
Abstract
The present study examined the neural substrates of anticipation in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ten subjects were scanned while 48 pictures were presented. Each stimulus sequence started with the 4.2 seconds presentation of a fixation point before and during which the anticipation was measured. After the exposure of the stimulus picture which lasted also 4.2 second there was a period of 8.4 seconds during which the subject was supposed to recover from the stimulus presentation. It is found that large parts of the visual cortex do show larger activity after emotional stimuli than after calm. All brain regions that show a difference have also a response on calms except for regions that are at or near the amygdala. Here violent and erotic stimuli do generate a response but the response on calm stimuli is flat.
Anticipatory effects tend to influence baseline values and hence influence the response values. This might be a problem if the subject is guessing the upcoming stimulus condition correctly but with proper
randomization this is theoretically impossible. Great care was taken to randomize stimulus conditions with replacement while using different pictures for each stimulus presentation .
Results suggest that, in spite of proper randomization, anticipatory activation preceding emotional stimuli is larger than the anticipatory activation preceding neutral stimuli. For the male subjects this appeared before the erotic stimuli while for the female both erotic and violent stimuli produced this anomalous effect.
Possible normal explanations of this apparent anomaly, also called ‘presentiment’, are discussed. Most notably the possibility that this effect is just a result of ‘fishing’ for the right analysis out of many possible analyses. Exploratory results are presented dealing with differential effects in the responses to emotional stimuli and calm visual stimuli.”
There is clearly something wrong with time on subatomic level…
But what?
J-Mac,
That paper was published in 2002. Has it survived methodological criticism, and has it been replicated?
They don’t eat the cherries!
“Orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) is a biological theory of mind that postulates that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, rather than the conventional view that it is a product of connections between neurons.”
Penrose and Hameroff didn’t want to use the word consciousness emerges instead of consciousness originates because they probably suspect all quantum information needed for conscious experience is already in the life system due to the conservation law…
Since Penrose is an atheist, they had to find a compromise…
Yes. Unfortunately 90% of supervising scientists were Christian and the other 50% non-religious…
Who cares what they believe? Their problem is that determinism is false.
Also let’s remeber, their absurd claim is not that “there’s determinism” or that “determinism dominates” but that “everything is determined” by “the laws of physics” no less.
Well, we don’t really have 100% free will in a sense that we can’t cause a nuclear war or contribute to the climate change that would destroy life on the earth…
Our free will can be compared to a ship that set sail to a particular destination and it will get there even if it get off course here and there…
Full disclosure, I’m a friend of Jerry’s. J-Mac, your shameful yet nondescript accusation tells us far more about you than him.
I guess it doesn’t matter what you call it, first it has to actually happen. What is the best evidence beyond suspecting?
In order to know that, you need to know how choices are made. When presented with two mutually exclusive options , how does one makes the decision which to choose without being influenced by one’s life experiences, physical state, limited knowledge. Or do those things, in some amount determine your choices.
So you would accept that deterministic factors are equally important as “ free will” . If not , what is the ratio?
Everything material certainly is highly influenced material processes, even designers, at some point require the use of a material process. Even creation ex nihilo results in a material product.
Depends if you have a nuclear weapon.
We don’t need no stinkin’ climate change to choose to destroy life, it is just the laziest way to do it.
Look at Odyssey, it all worked out.
It is interesting — appalling, even — that the basic argument of this post is that you should believe in free will even if it is false.
A version of the Argument From Consequences that is being used when it is alleged that the Nazis were just following Darwin’s orders, so therefore …
(Just to clarify, I am not arguing whether free will does or does not exist. Resolving that is above my pay grade.)
I think that the basic message is more likely to be:
“My beliefs automatically make me a more moral person than you, so I get to feel good about myself without doing anything, like actually behaving friendly or nice.”
I know, right? They just must have missed it. I saw the headline in the Times about that and read the story (weirdly, it was in the Metro section!). Unfortunately, even I missed this item when it was on TV the night before. I hear it was good though and that the guy said that he actually proved it last year but was waiting until some of the Trump news died down to get the word out.
Maybe there’s STILL too much Trump news for a lot of people to realize this!
It’s not just about people. Quantum Mechanics shows that the output is not determined by the input. Unless superdeterminism is true, but so far there’s no scientific basis for that.
Look, determinism – the philosophy claims that there is no free will. That claim is what QM invalidates. Free will proponents have always accepted a mix of determinism, randomness and an unexplained residual we call free will. Your choice is between:
a) 100% determinism (Laplace – soundly proven false),
b) x% determinism and (100-x)% randomness (call it the post QM determinism), and
c) y% (determinism+randomness) < 100% of output.
It's that simple. In addition, a) is known wrong and b) is "mission impossible" besides the fact it does not account for the difference between the living and the inert. So what's left?
Huh? And what the heck is a “material process”? What about “material product”? At some point you have to ask: is there such thing as a particle? And if so, how is it different from a wave?
C’mon. It’s waaay simpler than that!
Yeah, like early last week was such a time. But that’s been solved too. Wednesday the 29th, IIRC.
Nonlin:
No. Compatibilists — and I am one of them — hold that free will is compatible with determinism.
Again, no. The Many Worlds Interpretation of QM is deterministic.
For the third time, no. Many free will proponents, including me, reject the existence of your “unexplained residual”. It’s incoherent. But since free will is compatible with determinism, we don’t need that unexplained residual.
Jerry Seinfeld?
You should probably blame Yogi Berra for the 90%/50% analysis ..😉
I just couldn’t resist the temptation of “predicting” keiths next objection…
I hope you understand that I can’t really be responsible for my “bad behavior”…
It had already been determined by natural processes and sheer dumb luck 13.8 billion years ago… 😂
Input = cause?
Output = effect?
The basic argument of the OP is that the belief in determinism has consistently been proven to be an excuse for bad behavior, like cheating…
Darwin must have been predetermined to be fooled into believing of the omnipotence of natural selection…as were you…😉
I was thinking more in terms of the nuclear weapon as powerful as the meteor that selectively killed all the dinosaurs on at least two continents…
If people ever get a hold of such a selective, and yet powerful weaponry, even the belief in determinism is not going to save us… 😉
It all depends what one is predetermined to believe about the climate change…
The Northwest Passage begins to re-freeze…
The pollution was predetermined billions of years ago anyways… as was human stupidity in general…
Why should I lose my sleep over something I can’t even change? 😉
This is the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense…
That’s why so many people are attracted to illusions…