An Error Theory for Incompatibilist Intuitions: More X-Phi on Free Will

My student, Dylan Murray (a Neurophilosophy Fellow here at Georgia State), and I have carried out a study to examine whether ordinary people sometimes say determinism threatens free will and moral responsibility because they misunderstand determinism to entail things like fatalism or epiphenomenalism.  (Our results suggest that the answer is yes and that they do so more than ‘sometimes’!)  This study is also aimed, in part, to challenge the idea that Nichols and Knobe’s studies (Nous 2007) demonstrate that most folk have incompatibilist intuitions (and that the compatibilist intuitions they express are driven by emotional bias).  Hence, the results of this study supplement results from Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer & Turner (2006) and Nahmias, Coates & Kvaran (2007) suggesting that most people do not have incompatibilist intuitions.

We present the study and arguments in a draft of a chapter for the forthcoming volume, New Waves in Philosophy of Action (Palgrave-MacMillan), edited by J. Aguilar, A. Buckareff and K. Frankish, and it can be found here (figures appear at the end of the paper):

Download N&M Experimental Philosophy on Free Will DRAFT 7_20_09

We also plan to do some follow up studies and write a journal article.  So comments on the studies and the arguments are most welcome. 

Here’s the abstract:  We discuss recent work in experimental philosophy on free will and moral responsibility and then present a new study. Our results suggest an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. Most laypersons who take determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility apparently do so because they mistakenly interpret determinism to involve fatalism or “bypassing” of agents’ relevant mental states. People who do not misunderstand determinism in this way tend to see it as compatible with free will and responsibility. We discuss why these results pose a challenge to incompatibilists.

Comments

[Mark Smeltzer]

Eddy,

Nice paper. I am interested to see how it is received. This part caught my interest off the bat,

Our hypothesis is that many people who appear to express incompatibilist intuitions are interpreting determinism to entail what we will call “bypassing,” and they take such bypassing to preclude FW and MR. But, we will argue, it is a mistake to interpret determinism to entail bypassing.

I have long thought that fear of bypassing was at work in the neo-incompatibilist pyschology, and I find that when I discuss these issues with neophytes that it is often one of the concerns that has to be addressed before the conversation can progress.

Has that been a common experience for you as well (outside of this study)?

Moreover, do you think that intuitions about "bypassing" play any role in explaining other incompatibilist intuitions like AP or US?

[Kip]

Eddy,

I'm sure I'll have much more to say after I read the paper more carefully. But here are some initial comments:

1. It's great to see someone suggesting an error theory for incompatibilist. One of my common complaints has been that compatibilists don't have one. This paper helps address that concern.

2. Your paper seems focused on what non-specialists think about free will. Do you think that your error theory also applies to specialists?

Take the classic incompatibilists who didn't believe in free will: Russell, Einstein, Spinoza, etc. Do you think that these folks were also guilty of conflating determinism and bypassing (etc.)?

Or, more directly, do you think people like Derk Pereboom, Galen Strawson, etc., are guilty of the same mistake?

If not, then there is still a huge mystery: why would these people think that free will doesn't exist? If some of the "folk" believe in incompatibilism for bad reasons, and some specialists believe in incompatibilism for mysterious reasons - who cares about what the folk think? It seems that---even though studying the folk is tremendously valuable for its own sake---we should be more interested in what the specialists think.

Perhaps incompatibilist folk and incompatibilist specialists favor incompatibilism for the same reasons. But if the folk are making as simple of a mistake as you suggest, I would be surprised if Einstein did too.

[Cihan]

Kip,

When you were suggesting an error theory for compatibilism, I don't remember that you made a distinction between specialists and non-specialists - correct me if I'm wrong on this.

Just world phenomenon, illusion of control and so on were (implicitly) suggested to apply to specialists. Or that's how I remember it.

Now that someone's come up with an error theory for your view, evidential standards are suddenly higher.

[Kip]

Cihan:

You're right: I didn't suggest a specialist/non-specialist distinction then, because I don't think there is one there.

That is, I suspect the data would show that the specialists are, or were, just as vulnerable to those biases as the "folk." I have no data support my theory, though, so I don't press it.

So I'm willing to go there. My question to Eddy and compatibilists is: are you also willing to go there? Does Eddy believe, or suspect, that his error theory applies to specialists as well as non-specialists?

If it doesn't, or if he don't assert that it does, there remains a fascinating mystery: why did sophisticated thinkers, like Einstein, still endorse incompatibilism? Presumably not because they confused determinism and bypassing.

Einstein probably wasn't confused about the meaning and consequences of physical determinism, right?

[Eddy Nahmias]

I'm glad to see at least a couple people have looked at the paper--thanks!

Mark, yes, in my experience, many students seem to feel the bite of determinism because they initially (mis)understand it to mean fatalism--that the future is fixed such that certain things will happen no matter what you try to do--or epiphenomenalism--that your actions are caused by the past and laws without 'going through you' (your conscious self). The latter view I think is fueled in part by substance- or property-dualist intuitions. Sometimes, these mistaken reactions to determinism are encouraged by the way the debate is framed, but sometimes I think it's because people understand "determinism" to mean "what threatens free will" (and "determined" to mean "unfree") and fatalism and epiphenomenalism are the clearest placeholders for "what threatens free will." When intro texts and classes start off by calling it "The Problem of Free Will and Determinism" or "Free Will vs. Determinism" it's easy to see how this might happen. The debate gets framed from the start as if compatibilism is the counter-intuitive position.

Kip rightly wonders, however, why we should care about these mistaken conceptions of determinism by the folk. Clearly, some people, including very smart people think determinism, properly understood, is incompatible with free will. He asks a good question (though Cihan is right that it should cut both ways). There's lots to say in response (and maybe we should say more in the paper). Here, I'll just say:

1. One of my main targets has always been the claim that incompatibilism has *widespread* intuitive appeal (and compatibilism is a revision of ordinary views and common sense). If I can damage that claim, that's a start. And I do offer some reasons why I think that claim is important for incompatibilists in this paper and in "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" (e.g., libertarian free will is more metaphysically demanding so why accept it if there's little intuitive support for it?)

2. I think some incompatibilists, especially hard incompatibilists like those Kip mentions, are stripping off a small part of the ordinary notion of "free will" to say it is incompatible with determinism (or impossible). Though I think they are wrong about even this part (i.e., the powers required to deserve retributive suffering), I also think they are missing much of what people associate with free will, such as self-control, rational deliberation, etc. And then to say we don't have free will risks saying we lack those capacities, when determinism certainly doesn't threaten them. This is why I worry when scientists (and the media) report that free will is an illusion. If people take that to mean, e.g., willpower and rational planning are useless, that would be both false and bad.

3. Finally, I don't know, maybe some specialists took their position early on because they thought determinism involves bypassing and then they shifted their focus to AP or US. I certainly don't think philosophers are immune to such mistakes. As I've said before, Dennett's Elbow Room grabbed me early--if I'd read PvI's Essay on Free Will first, maybe I'd be an incompatibilist (but then I'm not sure I'd be me!).

[Eddy Nahmias]

I just ran across this movie review titled "'Knowing' tackles free will versus determinism," which supplements some of the points in my previous comment. The author writes: "At the risk of boring everyone to tears by slipping into college professor mode [sic!], determinism is the belief that everything is pre-determined, that everything is working towards its fate. When someone says “everything happens for a reason” this is determinism at its bare essence. Free will, on the other hand, asserts that we make our own fate, that the decisions people make with their lives actually have meaning and consequence."

The rest of the article uses "determinism" to *mean* "fate" and "the opposite of free will."

[tnadelhoffer]

Eddy,

As always, I think you have a done a nice job of advancing the debate. That being said, I would like you say a little bit more about the contribution that answers to the "no control" question made to participants' composite by-passing scores. As you state in the footnote:

“One might, however, think the “no control” question is inappropriate to indicate bypassing, perhaps because one believes that determinism should be interpreted to mean agents have no control over what they do. We disagree with this view. Though removing this question from our analyses does reduce the statistical strength of some of our results, it does not alter our general findings.”

I, for one, do think it is inappropriate—especially since it gets to the heart of the worries expressed by source incompatibilists. Keep in mind, the question was worded as follows:

No Control: In Universe [A/C], a person has no control over what they do.
[Bill/Jill] has no control over what [he/she] does.

Obviously, this can be interpreted in several ways—only two of which are especially relevant to my present concern. On the one hand, there is an epiphenomenal reading whereby you’re asking whether *my* beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. can play a causal role in my behavior in a deterministic world. On the other hand, there is source-hood reading whereby you’re asking whether I am *ultimately* in control over (or responsible for) my beliefs, desires, intentions, and actions in a deterministic world.

As you know,I, for one, think that determinism does not preclude the former kind of control even if I happen to think that it does preclude the latter. You, on the other hand, think that both kinds of control are compatible with determinism. But given that there is this ambiguity in the way you have operationalized “by-passing” and given that you concede in the footnote that removing answers to the “no control” question did weaken the strength of your results, I would like for you to (a) say a bit more concerning how much statistical strength is lost once the “no-control” question is removed, and (b) whether you considered the possibility that folks who made the “by-passing mistake” you have purportedly identified were really just trying to express (albeit badly) what I take to be
legitimate source-hood worries.

[Dan Speak]

Great work, Eddy (and Dylan!). I’ve enjoyed the paper very much and have been challenged by its arguments and statistical findings. Very cool stuff.

I have a lot of questions and may work up the energy to ask them all eventually. For now, let me pose this one. What do you think of the possibility that your findings do not support an error theory for incompatiblism so much as they support the view that the folk are not what I’m tempted to call “radical incompatibilists.” Radical incompatibilism treats the philosophical stakes in the compatibility debate as of the highest order. If determinism is true, then we lose all of morality, personhood, reasons-responsiveness, etc. But a moderate incompatibilist might suggest that, while determinism would undermine various deep features of our intuitive self-conception, it wouldn’t undermine them all. Why not think that the pull in different directions that emerges from the mildly conflicting results we’re seeing between your stuff and the Nichols and Knobe stuff points toward folk moderate incompatibilism?

[Cihan]

Thomas,

You write that:

"As you know,I, for one, think that determinism does not preclude the former kind of control even if I happen to think that it does preclude the latter. You, on the other hand, think that both kinds of control are compatible with determinism."

I don't think this is true. Qua Mark Balaguer's paper that was featured sometime ago, I don't think, assuming determinism, anybody disputes that people don't have *ultimate* control over their actions.

Rather, they assert that the kind of control we have, not ultimate by any stretch of imagination, is compatible with moral responsibility.

Again returning that Mark's paper, we don't disagree on facts about human decision making processes. We agree on the "external" facts but rather disagree on the "internal" (i.e. semantic, conceptual) facts - if what I'm trying to get with internal-external distinction makes any sense.

Also, let me note:

"Finally, I don't know, maybe some specialists took their position early on because they thought determinism involves bypassing and then they shifted their focus to AP or US."

I was a staunch libertarian when I first got interested in the subject. I thought Kane was right. For a brief while, I warmed up to compatibilism due to Frankfurt-style cases. Soon, I understood the error of my ways and converted to free-will non-realism 8-).

[tnadelhoffer]

Cihan,

I disagree. I think that (a) some agent causal theorists (e.g., Chisholm as well as many Christians who have expansive views of the power of the immaterial soul) think we have ultimate control over at least some of our beliefs, decisions, and actions, and (b) some compatibilists--including Eddy!--think we are ultimately in control over who we are and what we do in the morally important sense even if they admittedly don't think we are causa sui. But I will let Eddy correct me if I am wrong about this. Indeed, I am sure he will already have a well developed error theory to explain away my claims about him before he chimes in! :)

[Tom Clark]

If the main issue about determinism is that people misconstrue it to entail by-passing or fatalism, then we shouldn't find many indications that intuitions about AP or US play a role in worries about determinism. My experience, however, is that many folks find determinism demoralizing precisely because they see, correctly, that if determinism is true and given circumstances as they were, their thoughts, desires, plans and choices couldn't have been otherwise. What many seem to want, but can't have under determinism, is to have done otherwise in the actual situation as it arose, under the exact same conditions, with the exact same thoughts, desires and plans. As someone put it on a discussion board in defending free will: “My preference is the result of my nature/nurture. My will can decide whether I follow my preference or do the opposite." This isn't a worry about conscious mental causation or the causal efficacy of one's actions, it's wanting to be an uncaused or ultimately self-caused arbiter of one's own thoughts, desires and plans in a situation in which there are genuinely open possibilities, contra determinism.

I don't know what percentage of people have this intuition, but I run into them all the time in discussions about free will. I suspect that their libertarianism is tied to dualism (believing in a soul or non-physical mental agent) which in turn is reinforced by psychological and cultural factors (a few of which are listed here). Eddy's paper makes a convincing case for his hypothesis, but I think there might be a sizeable minority of incompatibilists out there who aren't mistaking determinism for by-passing or fatalism.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Thanks for the comments everyone. Dylan and I appreciate it. There's lots to say, but I'll *try* to keep it reasonably brief.

Thomas, I think Cihan is closer to the mark. I do not think that it is possible to be the *ultimate* source of one's decisions or actions in the sense that G. Strawson is arguing against with the Basic Argument. Strawson's clearly right that we (nor any other finite being) can complete an infinite regress to be responsible for some part of the mental states that bring about later mental states or decisions. And I don't think agent causationists can get you that kind of ultimate control either (though they may get you some other kinds of control).

But (1) such sourcehood is impossible regardless of the truth of determinism (indeed, in such a way that it verges on incoherence), (2) I do not think such control is necessary for free will or moral responsibility, and (3) I'm not convinced that many ordinary people explicitly or implicitly require such sourcehood for FW or MR.

I think the most plausible explanation for people's reading determinism to entail that agents do not control anything is that they think of the agents as out of the loop, not that they think the agents *do* control things in the ordinary sense of your decisions controlling your intentions, etc., but that the agents *don't* ultimately control the mental states that lead to the decisions that lead to the mental states that lead to the decisions that....

It is possible that the implicit reasoning goes as you seem to suggest: Determinism--> No Ultimate Sourcehood (US) --> No Control. But our participants' responses suggest this reasoning would then have to also continue: No Control--> Decisions, Beliefs, Desires are causally inert (and agents can't do otherwise even if past were different and trying doesn't matter). We're checking the stats to see how much the control question matters (and we'll let you know), but I suspect it just weakens the statistical strength of the composite score, just as removing any of the other two data points would.

Dan, your explanation makes lots of sense--it's sort of what I meant in point 2 of my earlier comment (that some incompatibilists seem to be stripping off what I take to be a thin part of the ordinary notion of free will and focusing on its being incompatible with determinism, or impossible). This is one reason I think exp phil has something to offer. We need to figure out how important/central this strip of the concept is to know how much we are revising if we say it does not exist. Obviously, I'm suggesting that this strip is thinner than many suppose and that, at a minimum, radical incompatibilism is unjustified.

Tom, I don't doubt that people express the ideas you describe (I hear them too). But I'm not sure they are expressing a commitment to the *unconditional* ability to do otherwise (in *exact* same circumstances), rather than a commitment to their being able to make an efficacious choice about whether to act on various alternatives they are considering, e.g., on one of their preferences or another. I think that many people express worries about determinism not because of AP or US but because of the worry that it would mean that their subjective self is not making an objective difference to what happens. The dualism comes into play, I think, because people (rightly!) cannot easily see how their subjective self can make a difference in a world described in the objective (usually reductive) terms of modern mind science and its laws. I say "rightly" because we indeed do not *yet* have a good theory to explain how this is actual (or really even possible, though I think more and more people are accepting that it's possible that mental states are brain processes even though they don't see exactly how--Dylan and I are working on another study to explore this idea).

[tnadelhoffer]

Eddy,

You state the following about sourcehood:

"But (1) such sourcehood is impossible regardless of the truth of determinism (indeed, in such a way that it verges on incoherence), (2) I do not think such control is necessary for free will or moral responsibility, and (3) I'm not convinced that many ordinary people explicitly or implicitly require such sourcehood for FW or MR."

I am less interested in (2) than I am in (1) and (3). As you know, this is partly because I think most people in this country--including most of your participants--believe in what I take to be a very spooky metaphysical force/entity known as the immaterial soul. Indeed, having grown up in the church myself, I remember conversations that suggested others thought that we have a radical freedom that is inline with precisely the kind of "ultimacy" that Strawson and others thinks determinism precludes. That you think this kind of ultimacy or sourcehood is impossible or on the verge of being incoherent is irrelevant to (a) whether people (indeed, the majority of people) think we have it, and (b) whether people think determinism is incompatible with it.

I think it would be helpful at this stage for experimental philosophers interested in folk intuitions concerning free will to start exploring people's views about the soul as it relates to free will, moral responsibility, and determinism. After all, by not asking about the very thing that I believe the majority of Americans thinks undergirds both free will and responsibility, we are inviting confusion in our interpretations of the data. Consider, for instance, our earlier study rewind/replay study:

"Imagine there is a universe that is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions and with all the same laws of nature. In this universe the same conditions and the same laws of nature produce the exact same outcomes, so that every single time the universe is re-created, everything must happen the exact same way. For instance, in this universe a person named Jill decides to steal a necklace at a particular time, and every time the universe is re-created, Jill decides to steal the necklace at that time."

At the time we ran this study, our group was divided on how to interpret the fact that 66% of the participants thought that Jill "decided to steal the necklace of her own free will" and that 77% judged that it would be fair to hold her morally responsible. Your own compatibilist interpretation carried the day. However, I nevertheless still think the other "free will no matter what interpretation" merits reconsideration. In short, the idea was that people are so convinced that we have free will--since to deny it would be to deny their most foundational beliefs about God, the nature of the universe, human agency, and moral responsibility--that they simply don't accept or internalize the determinism in the scenario. In short, they don't judge that Jill is free in a deterministic universe, they judge that because Jill is free, either (a) it is not really a deterministic universe, or (b) even if the universe is deterministic, because the soul is immaterial is it unaffected by the determinism. Here is my hunch: Had we asked whether Jill could have done otherwise in this universe even if all of the background conditions, etc. had remained constant, most people would have said "yes"--which suggests that they believe in precisely the kind of ultimacy that you find implausible/impossible.

Here is another way of putting my worry: There are two kinds of compatibilists. First, there are compatibilists such as yourself who believe that free will is a natural phenomenon that is compatible with the truth of determinism. Let's call these folks naturalistic compatibilists. Second, there are folks who believe that free will is an immaterial supernatural phenomenon that operates outside space/time in such a way that the truth of determinism about the physical universe does not and could not undermine our free will. Let’s call them supernaturalistic compatibilists.

Here is how I attempted to address this issue in my earlier M & L paper with Adam Feltz and Edward Cokely:

“Perhaps what these results show is that the belief in free will and moral responsibility is so deeply entrenched in the minds of some individuals that nothing—not even the apparent truth of fatalism—could dislodge their view. Our suspicion is that at least some of the participants who appear to give compatibilist answers in the studies that have been run so far believe that humans have a God-given immaterial soul that allows us to stand above the causal fray—a soul that is free and responsible no matter what. On this view, we can always do otherwise than we actually do. Just as you can prove anything so long as you’re granted a contradiction, you always could have done otherwise so long as the possibility of miracles and divine intervention are in play. If this were correct, it would explain why so many participants often fail the manipulation checks in these kinds of studies.

Given that some participants likely have a 'free will not matter what' mentality, they may be unable to do the conditional reasoning necessary for imagining that their world operates deterministically (or fatalistically). Insofar as they are convinced that they posses an immaterial soul and the kind of robust free will that is required for moral responsibility, they may simply be unable to get their minds around the possibility of a deterministic world since the existence of such a world would undermine their entire world-view. So, even if they may be perfectly willing to say that creatures a lot like humans are not free and responsible in a deterministic world, it is only because these creatures—unlike humans—do not have a soul. Perhaps if the vignettes specified that God explicitly gave these creatures free will, then the 'free will not matter what' participants would no longer think that determinism poses a threat. The worry here is that a deeply entrenched belief in God-given free will may prevent some participants from imagining a deterministic world.

But if some participants are unable to do the conditional reasoning necessary for comprehending the nature of determinism, then why shouldn’t we simply discard their answers? After all, that’s what manipulation checks are for in the first place—viz., to identify people who do not understand the thrust of the study. The main reason not to simply discard these participants’ answers is that in doing so, we may be discarding the answers of a sizeable number of people whose belief in free will is so strong they simply cannot imagine living in a deterministic world. To live in such a world, on this view, is tantamount to living in a world without God! If such people exist—and it is clearly reasonable to assume that they do—by simply ignoring their answers, we may be thereby artificially inflating the rate of compatibilism among the folk.

More importantly, the possibility of the 'free will no matter what' mentality creates problems for all of the experimental designs that have been used so far given that both compatibilists and those who believe in God-given free will be inclined to give the same answers to many of the vignettes that have been used so far. Whereas participants with compatibilist intuitions will say that an agent can be free and responsible even if the universe is determined, those participants who believe we are free and responsible no matter what will also say that the agent is free and responsible—but only because they are theoretically blinded to the determinism at play in the scenario. Some of these latter participants may get the manipulation correct—and hence, be counted as compatibilists—while some will miss the manipulation check and have their answers discarded altogether. Either way, we could end up with some incompatibilists masquerading as compatibilists while others end up having their answers left off the ledger. But this is a hypothesis that can only be tested with future research.”

I apologize for quoting my previous work at such length, but since (a) this is directly relevant to the worry I have raised in this thread, and (b) to my knowledge, no one has addressed the point we were trying to make, I thought I would float it here in the comment threads to see what you and others think.

In short, I think that we have to decide on how to classify the "free will no matter what" folks. We could judge that because they believe that we can be free in a deterministic universe, they are compatibilists. If we go this route, however, we need to acknowledge how radically different their version of compatibilism is than the one you and other naturalistic thinkers prefer. On the other hand, we could judge that because they ultimately reject determinism in light of their beliefs about God and free will, they are supernatural incompatibilists whose answer merely give the appearance of compatibilism. Either way, given how many people hold the sorts of supernatural beliefs about God and free will I have discussed in this thread, it is clear to me that the time has finally come for experimental philosophers to examine them directly.

After all, if I am right, we have been examining them indirectly all along--which has surely confounded our results. Or so methinks...

[Eddy Nahmias]

Thomas, I agree with much of what you say, certainly that we should be exploring (a) the nature of people's beliefs about the mind-body problem and their commitment to substance dualism or property dualism and (b) the relations of those beliefs to their beliefs about FW and MR. Let's figure out how to do this!

I need to think more about some of the points you raise, but first a question for you. Do you think the "free will no matter what" interpretation is so strong that these people would also say we have free will if we did not have souls--i.e., if they came to believe that what they thought our souls do (i.e., house our (conscious) mental life, including our deliberations and decisions) is really done by our brains (and in accord with natural laws that may be deterministic or indeterministic)? If so, should we count them as compatibilists?

Remember that our studies have been designed to see if people think FW/MR is *compatible* with (*possible* given) determinism, not whether people think our universe (our FW) *actually* works in a deterministic way. So, it might be that some (many?) people think we have something like a soul with causal powers to influence the physical world, but if they came to believe that those causal powers were actually powers of their incredibly complex brains, they'd (readily?) accept that *that's* what gives them free will. Perhaps this is a radical revisionism, but I'm inclined to think it's not that radical a revision of their understanding of *free will* so much as of their vaguely formed *theory* of what the mind is.

Finally, I don't put too much stock in these responses to some straight-up survey questions I've run, but here they are:
In Nahmias et al. (2007) and Nahmias & Murray (forthcoming), a (surprisingly?) low proportion of participants:
(1) agreed with the statement “Humans have free will only because they have non-physical souls” (15-25% across different sets of participants);
(2) agreed with the statement “Our power of free will is something that is not a part of our brain” (18%); or
(3) disagreed with the statement “It is because our minds are the products of our brains that we have free will” (only 13% disagreed when the statement followed a description of our brains as complex and unique, and still only 25% disagreed when the statement followed a description of the brain as mechanistic, governed by physical laws, and soon to be understood scientifically).
A plurality of participants accepted the ‘naturalistic’ alternatives, though quite a few also answered ‘I don’t know’ or neutral, which might suggest that people do not have a ‘metaphysically rich’ theory of how free will works.

[Dylan]

Thomas,

When we take out the "No Control" question from our Bypassing composite score, the correlations between Bypassing and MR/FW are:

N&K abstract: r(75) = -0.695, p < .001;
N&K concrete: r(54) = -0.569, p < .001;
NMNT abstract: r(54) = -0.803, p < .001;
NMNT concrete: r(58) = -0.708, p < .001;
Collapsed across all four surveys: r(247) = -0.734, p < .001.

(With "No Control" included in the composite, as reported in the paper:
N&K abstract: r(75) = -0.610, p < .001;
N&K concrete: r(54) = -0.358, p = .007;
NMNT abstract: r(54) = -0.767, p < .001;
NMNT concrete: r(58) = -0.585, p < .001;
Collapsed across all four surveys: r(247) = -0.628, p < .001.)

The most major changes when we drop the "No Control" question are that the following two results are no longer significant at the .05 level, but are still marginally significant:

1. The Bypassing ANOVA no longer shows a (marginally) significant main effect for survey (N&K vs NMNT): F(1, 245) = 1.677, p = . 197, but the pre-planned t-test comparing mean Bypassing responses to N&K abstract vs. NMNT abstract is marginally significant: t(1, 131) = 1.856, p = .066. (With the "No Control" question, t(1, 131) = 2.319, p = .022.)

2. The Mediation Analysis is only marginally significant: Sobel test = 1.833, p < .067 (compared to 2.286, p < .022 when the "No Control" question is included), because the regression of the Bypassing score using survey only yields a marginally significant effect: t(132) = -1.856, p = .066.

[Fritz Warfield]

Eddy,

Why are FW and MR grouped together in so much of this? (as your "FW/MR)

They aren't the same thing are they?

And you get different answers even from students who don't really know what you're talking about to related questions about, on the one hand, FW and on the other hand MR don't you?

[Eddy Nahmias]

Fritz, of course, we don't think FW and MR are the same thing nor that questions about them are probing the exact same intuitions. However, we think people's intuitions about each (esp. as they relate to determinism) are closely related, as are responses to the question about deserving blame. Hence, we chose to create a composite score from responses to the FW, MR, and Blame questions, but only after we confirmed that participants tended to answer them in very similar ways (i.e., they "hung" together well--see note 17). Psychologists often use such composite scores to examine statistical relations between groups of questions meant to get at similar things (in our case, people's judgments about bypassing, on the one hand, and about FW and MR on the other), because it offers more robust statistical information about these relations.

Here and in previous studies, people's judgments about FW (e.g., in relation to determinism) generally track their judgments about MR (e.g., in relation to determinism), though in most cases, judgments of MR tend to be slightly higher than FW, yet consistent within subjects, which kinda gets at your second question, if I'm understanding it.

Most philosophers in the debate think FW and MR track each other too, don't you think? For instance, is there anyone who thinks FW is compatible with determinism but MR is not, or MR is but FW isn't? (I don't think Fischer really counts as thinking the latter, since as we've discussed at the Garden before, he doesn't really define "free will" as the "freedom to do otherwise" which he thinks is incompatible with determinism.

[Fritz Warfield]

Eddy,
About whether there is anyone who thinks exactly one of FW or MR is compatible with determinism....I'm not sure. But my guess is that a fair number really think that moral responsible is compatible with determinism but freedom is not. This is more complicated than it should be because of the "kinds of freedom" talk that has become common in the past decade or so.

A further guess is that when these sorts of questions are put to undergraduate experimental subjects, more of them have (or think they have) a grip on the questions about issues like "blame" or "praise" than about "freedom" or "free".

[Oisin Deery]

I hope no one minds my jumping in here, but I'm pretty sure that Mark Balaguer (for instance) -- and I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong -- thinks that MR is, or very probably is, compatible with determinism, while FW -- or at least his L-freedom -- is not (the latter is clearly the case, since L-freedom requires indeterminism). Of course, Balaguer concedes that many other sorts of freedom are compatible with determinism, and he thinks it's a semantic question which if any of these is what we mean by FW, or whether instead we mean by FW his L-freedom. And it's a further question for him whether whatever we mean by FW is required for MR.

[Ramesh Raghuvanshi]

I donot believe that we have free will, we are always dancing on tune of our unconscious.How unconsciousness developed that is not clear up till now,but my thought experiment tell me,from our birth what kind of experiences we went through on that basis our subconscious create a invisible software [ we may called it mind] in our brain that govern whole of our life.I suggest another thought experiment,my observation tell me that signs and mounts of our palms indicate our subconscious mind, expert Palmist Can read the signs and mounts and can tell us what kind of events will happen in our life.World famous Palmist Ciro wrote in his palmistry book this thought experiment.Science now tell us that every individual`s signs and mounts of palms different and unique even twin have also different signs and mounts on their palms.