Not so motivated after all? Three replication attempts and a theoretical challenge to a morally motivated belief in free will.

Abstract

Free will is often appraised as a necessary input to for holding others morally or legally responsible for misdeeds. Recently, however, Clark and colleagues (2014) argued for the opposite causal relationship. They assert that moral judgments and the desire to punish motivate people's belief in free will. Three replication experiments (Studies 1-2b) attempt to reproduce these findings. Additionally, a novel experiment (Study 3) tests a theoretical challenge derived from attribution theory, which suggests that immoral behaviors do not uniquely influence free will judgments. Instead, our nonviolation model argues that norm deviations of any kind-good, bad, or strange-cause people to attribute more free will to agents. Across replication experiments we found no consistent evidence for the claim that witnessing immoral behavior causes people to increase their general belief in free will. By contrast, we replicated the finding that people attribute more free will to agents who behave immorally compared to a neutral control (Studies 2a and 3). Finally, our novel experiment demonstrated broad support for our norm-violation account, suggesting that people's willingness to attribute free will to others is malleable, but not because people are motivated to blame. Instead, this experiment shows that attributions of free will are best explained by people's expectations for norm adherence, and when these expectations are violated, people infer that an agent expressed their free will to do so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).