Abstract
Studies indicated that people behave less responsibly after exposure to information containing deterministic statements as compared to free will statements or neutral statements. Thus, deterministic primes should lead to enhanced risk-taking behavior. We tested this prediction in two studies with healthy participants. In experiment 1, we tested 144 students (24 men) in the laboratory using the Iowa Gambling Task. In experiment 2, we tested 274 participants (104 men) online using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. In the Iowa Gambling Task, the free will priming condition resulted in more risky decisions than both the deterministic and neutral priming conditions. We observed no priming effects on risk-taking behavior in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. To explain these unpredicted findings, we consider the somatic marker hypothesis, a gain frequency approach as well as attention to gains and / or inattention to losses. In addition, we highlight the necessity to consider both pro free will and deterministic priming conditions in future studies. Importantly, our and previous results indicate that the effects of pro free will and deterministic priming do not oppose each other on a frequently assumed continuum.
Highlights
Free will is a hotly debated research topic in psychology and other disciplines such as philosophy, the neurosciences, or physics
Post-hoc LSD pairwise comparisons showed that participants in the pro free will condition chose the safe decks significantly less frequently than those in both the deterministic priming condition, Mdiff = -4.809, 95% CI [-8.901, -.717], p = .022, d = .28, and the neutral priming condition, Mdiff = -4.376, 95% CI [-8.475, -.277], p = .037, d =
An independent t-test showed that the Determinism subscale scores were higher in the deterministic priming condition (3.06± .571) than pro free will priming condition (2.79± .571), t(1, 254) = 3.861, p < .000, 95% CI [0.1353, 0.4170], d =
Summary
Free will is a hotly debated research topic in psychology and other disciplines such as philosophy, the neurosciences, or physics. Free will can be understood as the capacity of an entity (humans in the current case) to make autonomous and conscious decisions [1]. A deterministic viewpoint, on the other hand, involves that any event can be fully explained by the physical state of the world preceding that event. This viewpoint applies to living entities such as humans. In the latter case, deterministic viewpoints assume that any human behavior can be fully explained by the person’s prior state (physical or mental). Free will assumptions entail that we can choose between different ways of behaving in any given situation, while deterministic assumptions entail that we can only behave in one possible way, namely the one that is determined by the anteceding situation
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