Le libre arbitre au service du jugement émis envers des victimes de sexisme

Abstract

Research has shown that belief in free will promotes self-control and personal responsibility for outcomes and behaviours. Belief in free will also increases helping behaviours and decreases aggression. Belief in free will is positively linked to prosocial behaviours and arouses moral responsibility. On the contrary, belief in determinism undermines feeling of responsibility. In this experiment, the aim was to examine whether the belief in free will is likely to improve the judgment toward a victim of a sexist act when she protests discriminatory treatment. Despite that confronting perpetrators of sexism is a necessary behaviour in order to eradicate discrimination as well as to improve intergroup relations, target of prejudice are reluctant to confront prejudice because of the fear of social costs. We suggest that impacting evaluators’ feeling of responsibility would moderate their judgment toward a victim who confronts the perpetrator of a sexist act. They should rate that the victim's reaction is appropriate and judge her more positively. Thus, the salience of belief in free will should improve the evaluation of a victim who confronted the perpetrator compared to the control condition, whereas the salience of belief in determinism should deteriorate this evaluation. This effect would be mediated by the perception of the victim's reaction as appropriate. To test this hypothesis, female participants completed an autobiographical recall task in order to make salient the belief in free will, or in determinism, or no belief (control condition). Then, they read a fictive testimony of a victim of sexism in workplace who confronted (or did not confront) the perpetrator. Finally, they had to judge this victim. Results showed that in case of confrontation, the salience of free will belief improves the judgment toward the victim compared to the control condition, and the salience of determinism belief. Moreover, as expected, this effect was mediated by the perception of the victim's reaction as appropriate to the situation. However, the salience of those beliefs did not impact the evaluation of the victim who did not confront the perpetrator. Such results extend previous research concerning the impact of free will and determinism beliefs on social regulation of behaviors. The impact of believing in free will to struggle against sexism seems relevant to explore.