Political differences in free will belief are driven by differences in moralization

Abstract

Five studies tested whether political conservatives' stronger free will beliefs are driven by their broader view of morality, and thus a broader motivation to assign responsibility. On an individual difference level, Study 1 found that political conservatives' higher moral wrongness judgments accounted for their higher belief in free will. In Study 2, conservatives ascribed more free will for negative events than liberals, while no differences emerged for positive events. For actions ideologically equivalent in perceived moral wrongness, free will judgments also did not differ (Study 3), and actions that liberals perceived as more wrong, liberals judged as more free (Study 4). Finally, higher wrongness judgments mediated the effect of conservatism on free will beliefs (Study 5). Higher free will beliefs among conservatives may be explained by conservatives' tendency to moralize, which strengthens motivation to justify blame with stronger belief in free will and personal accountability.

Are morally good actions ever free?

“…Regarding responsibility-related judgments for morally relevant behavior, myriad studies have demonstrated that people attribute more responsibility to bad actions and actions with bad outcomes than to closely matched 1) good actions and actions with good outcomes (e.g., Alicke, 1992;Knobe, 2003;Reeder & Spores, 1983), 2) neutral actions and actions with neutral outcomes (e.g., Cushman, Knobe, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008;Knobe & Fraser, 2008), and 3) less bad actions and actions with less bad outcomes (e.g., Walster, 1966). Most relevant to the present work, people attribute more free will to morally bad actions and outcomes than to morally good (e.g., Everett et al, 2017) and morally neutral ones (Clark et al, 2014). This body of work seems to suggest that people do not attribute responsibility to morally good actions, but very little work has compared responsibility judgments for morally positive actions to morally neutral ones.…”

“…Furthermore, people bolster their own belief in free will so as to justify holding others morally responsible (Clark et al, 2014;. Another analysis suggests that there may be individual differences such that people who are particularly inclined to see a variety of negative actions and outcomes (e.g., homelessness, drug addiction) as having moral significance are also more inclined to believe that people have freedom and control over those actions and outcomes (Everett et al, 2017). Relatedly, people tend to downplay their own free will when considering the morally negative consequences of their own behavior (Vonasch, Clark, Lau, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2017).…”

Forget the Folk: Moral Responsibility Preservation Motives and Other Conditions for Compatibilism

“…Most problematic for compatibilism research, people attribute more free will to performers of morally bad actions than morally good actions and morally neutral actions (Clark et al, 2018; Everett et al, 2018; Feldman et al, 2016), and pondering morally bad actions leads people to increase their belief in the free will of all humankind (Clark et al, 2014). Thus, not only are people motivated to maintain the possibility of free will because they generally believe in free will, but they are particularly likely to assert free will when their judgment has moral significance, as compatibilism judgments do.…”