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The Value of Believing in Determinism: A Critique of Vohs and Schooler (2008)

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A paper critiquing the idea that believing in determinism is detrimental to the human condition
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    Running head: VALUE OF DETERMINISM 1

    The Value of Believing in Determinism: A Critique of Vohs and Schooler (2008)

    Ishtiaq Mawla

    Connecticut College

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    VALUE OF DETERMINISM 2

    The Value of Believing in Determinism: A Critique of Vohs and Schooler (2008)

    You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and

    your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free

    will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly

    of nerve cells and their associated molecules.Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.

    Francis Crick,The Astonishing Hypothesis

    In a rather famous study conducted by Vohs and Schooler (2008), participants

    read the above excerpt before engaging in a task where they were given the opportunity

    to unfairly cheat with money. Participants who read this passage, which emphasized the

    truth of determinism, cheated more often than participants who read different excerpts

    emphasizing free will or neutrality. The implications of this study lie at the crux of the

    tension between free will and moral responsibility. It supports the view that people

    should not believe in determinism, otherwise people will become demotivated and lead

    lazy lives; it will disrupt societys moral framework and crime rates will go up.

    However, there is plenty of scientific evidence which indicates that causal free

    will is just an illusion created by the mind (Wegner, 2002). Human behavior cannot fall

    outside the causal chain of events produced by the universe, otherwise basic laws of

    physics would be defied. It couldnt be clearer that we live in a deterministic world

    without real causal action. The question of free will, however, remains to be a delicate

    issue with no definite answer.

    In this paper, I have attempted to make a case that the results of Vohs and

    Schooler (2008) do not have any long-term effects on moral character, and therefore,

    these results cannot be concretely used against a belief in determinism. People cannot

    simply become immoral as a result of priming by determinism because a belief in

    determinism can never be fully internalized. I have incorporated evidence from

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    established psychological theories and findings to support my arguments. Moreover, I

    have argued that in some respects, a belief in determinism is necessary for society to

    function. And finally, without endorsing a traditionally compatibilist viewpoint, I have

    argued that people are allowed to enjoy their sense of freedom while maintaining a

    strong belief in determinism.

    Layperson views of free will

    Scientists and philosophers can talk, experiment, and write about free will all day

    long, but such scholarly discussion constitutes only a minority of the human population.

    In order to discuss how people are generally affected in their day to day lives by

    thoughts about free will, it is useful to gauge into what the general thinking about free

    will is like. Nichols and Knobe (2007) gave participants brief descriptions of two

    universes; Universe A was deterministic where the beginnings of the universe caused a

    domino effect of events which led up to the present, and in this universe, John buys

    french fries for lunch. On the other hand, Universe B was similar to Universe A, except

    for human decision-making processes, which remains outside of the causal chain; Mary,

    in this universe, did not necessarily have to choose french fries for lunch. In the

    questionnaires that followed, over 90% of participants stated that Universe B was more

    like the current world humans live in.

    Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005) explored the same issue to

    argue against natural incompatibilism - an armchair philosophy idea which proposes

    that humans are naturally able to recognize the discrepancy between determinism and

    free will and make moral judgments accordingly. One of their studies involved

    participants reading a description of a world where a supercomputer is able to predict

    future outcomes with perfect accuracy. The supercomputer predicts that Jeremy Hall

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    will rob a bank on a particular day, and when that time approaches, he ends up robbing

    the bank. The participants were asked if this action was caused out of freely choosing to

    do so, and about 76% said yes. Furthermore, Sarkissian, Chatterjee, Brigard, Knobe,

    Nichols, and Sirker (2010) asked people across several cultures about their views on free

    will, and found that people in the United States, India, Hong Kong, and Colombia, all

    believe the freedom of human action.

    The studies described in this section show that, 1. it is not typical for ordinary

    people to conceive of a deterministic world, 2. ordinary people justify moral

    responsibility in a deterministic world, and 3. this phenomenon is cross-cultural. It is

    also evident that peoples responses do not follow logic or laws of Physics. The default

    mode of peoples thoughts about freedom and morality is indeterministic, therefore it is

    questionable as to what extent Vohs and Schooler (2008) changed the beliefsof their

    participants by simple priming. An extremely high proportion of people naturally

    believe in free will and the strength with which the excerpt by Crick makes people

    immoral can be doubted. Can the findings of Vohs and Schooler (2008) be a real case

    against belief in determinism? Why do people believe in free will by default? The

    following sections will attempt to unpack this issue further.

    The Inevitability of Illusions

    The picture on the next page is one of the many widely-known examples of

    optical/visual illusions. The table on the left obviously seems longer in length than the

    one on the left. But perception is mistaken and doesnt match reality in that if someone

    brings a measuring tape and measures the individual lengths, the two tables turn out to

    have exactly the same length. But once the measuring tape is removed from the scene,

    the newly gained knowledge that the tables are of the same length does not apply

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    anymore. One cannot help but see the table on the left to be longer than the table on the

    right, regardless of the truth that they are of equal length. It is as if visual illusions are

    unaffected by the belief that it is just an illusion.

    The experience of conscious will follows the same principle as visual illusions. As

    I mentioned in the previous section, freedom is the default mode of thinking, because

    voluntarily willing an action is so spellbindingly real. We regularly claim agency and

    claim to cause our own actions, with full freedom. Just like visual illusions, under

    normal circumstances, the experience of free will cannot be simply ignored or lost. Even

    if free will is just an illusion, the illusion is real most of the time. So even if people learn

    the truth of determinism, that there are no real choices or no direct causality, people will

    still continue to experience free will, because it is a strong and compelling illusion. Just

    as I can place a measuring tape on the tables above to show that they are of equal length,

    I can show scientific evidence from genetics or neuroscience which strongly speaks

    about the fact that there can be no alternative to deterministic explanations of our

    behavior and this will not, under normal circumstances, influence my conscious self to

    lose the sense of freedom I enjoy. Vohs and Schooler (2008) may have demonstrated

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    that participants behaved less morally when being reminded about determinism, but

    these people did not lose their day-to-day sense of freedom or morality. The participants

    may have gone to bed that evening and woken up again feeling free and acting morally.

    Therefore, if determinism doesnt affect whether the self feels free or not in the long run,

    there should not be a case against learning the truth about determinism.

    Freedom as a positive emotion

    Rodin and Langer (1976) conducted a study at a nursing home for the elderly in

    Connecticut where two groups of people were given different messages at a group

    meeting. One condition was the responsibility-induced group, where the emphasis of

    the speech was on the residents responsibility for their own actions and freedom of

    choice, including being able to choose their own plant and being given the choice of

    what movie they are able to watch. People in the control condition were instead told that

    it was the staffs responsibility to help the residents. Results showed that the

    experimental group was more active and felt happier and were more involved in the

    activities at the nursing home compared to the control group, indicating that feeling free

    is valuable, especially in the context of a nursing home. Such positive effects of feeling

    free has been shown in several contexts and situations.

    Wegner (2002) proposed that the experience of free will serves as a positive

    emotion, one that acts as a guidance, a compass, and provides authorship to human

    actions. According to him, it serves as a marker for actions; for instance, if I lift a box

    and put it in a different location, the act of will throughout the process of transfer acted

    as a marker that I engaged in the effortful task of lifting and relocating a box. In most

    normal instances, the experience of will aligns with actual outcomes of causality, giving

    an indication to the agent that an event has occurred. It helps action to be served into

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    memory by organizing and tracking when and what I am doing and by planning future

    events. It aids our consciousness by helping us navigate through events in our lives.

    Having a feeling of perceived control also enhances feelings of competence,

    confidence, and achievement (Wegner, 2002). Winning a lottery or graduating with a

    4.0 GPA would not seem fruitful if the sense of control was not present, and such

    activities would not be important to us. Perceived control is a basic need, and as Wegner

    (2002) said it, The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is - but that is as it

    should be. All is well because the illusion makes us human.

    If the feeling of freedom is an innate human quality, one that is a positive

    emotion and cannot be simply ignored because of its powerful illusory characteristic, a

    belief in determinism will not be very threatening to this experience of free will. This

    may sound contradictory, since determinism, by nature, claims that actual agency and

    causality does not exist. But the experience of free will is a default mode of positive

    emotion, so any deterministic belief will not be very influential. People will not feel

    deterministic as a result, they will continue to exercise their freedom, because it is a

    desirable emotion. The positive feeling of freedom cannot be easily broken down with

    deterministic beliefs. Therefore, there is absolutely no problem in holding deterministic

    beliefs while feeling free, every day, at every moment. One can easily criticize this

    argument by asking for evidence where deterministic beliefs do not undermine feelings

    of freedom. Although there is no direct research on this topic, the following sections will

    aim to enhance this argument, using theories of loss aversion and the psychological

    immune system.

    Loss Aversion and the Endowment effect

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    Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman revolutionized Economics with Prospect

    Theory. According to this theory, people use heuristics, also known as basic mental

    shortcuts, in their decision-making process by setting neutral reference points. Anything

    above this reference point is a gain and anything below this is a loss. But the aspect of

    this theory that we care most about in the current discussion is loss aversion, which

    suggests that people are asymmetrically affected by losses and gain. A unit of loss may

    be numerically equivalent to a unit of gain, but psychologically, a unit of loss hurts

    significantly more than a unit of gain feels good. People therefore avoid choices where

    losses are involved. For instance, when people are given the following gamble

    (Kahneman, 2011): 50% chance to lose $100 and 50% chance to win $200, they will

    reject it. Although a calculation of how much people can expect to win/lose based on

    probability shows that people may actually end up gaining $100, people will reject it

    because the prospect of gaining $100 is not the same as losing $100.

    Loss aversion has been demonstrated through the endowment effect - ownership

    of an object makes people demand a higher value for the object in order to give it up. In

    a classic study (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler, 1990), participants on a university

    campus were given coffee mugs, which were usually sold at the campus bookstore for a

    price of $6 each. Half of the participants were assigned as buyers and the other half were

    sellers in a trading situation (A trading situation is a standard method in experimental

    economics where a market is created with tokens and after multiple rounds of trading,

    participants can redeem their tokens for cash at the end of the experiment). Sellers kept

    their mugs in front of them and buyers were asked to look at them and both parties

    indicated trading prices. The results were dramatic and showed that sellers asked for

    prices double the amount that buyers placed.

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    Such results from loss aversion show that people are very inclined to remain at

    the status quo (Kahneman, 2011) of general default options, and are resistant to change,

    as they think that the disadvantages are greater than the possible advantages.

    Experiencing the freedom of will and agency is the default positive mode of human

    thought. People will therefore be generally resistant to change their experience of free

    will. It has been established earlier that not feeling free is a negative emotion and

    according to prospect theory, people will be generally averse to this kind of negative

    emotion. So the concern about reduced moral responsibility of the self that Vohs and

    Schooler (2008) has brought up is not a very serious one. It is very unlikely that

    participants committed crimes, petty or heinous, after having left Vohs and Schoolers

    study. The passage from The Astonishing Hypothesiswas averse to participants and

    they probably did not consciously think or act on the outcome of the study. If

    determinism doesnt significantly affect peoples moral character, there cannott be a

    strong reason against believing in determinism.

    Psychological Immune System

    It is obvious that people are averse to negative outcomes and events, but the

    human mind has a strong defense mechanism, which attenuates the processing of

    negative information. Of course, the illusion of control is one of the many mechanisms

    through which the mind is protected and guided to gain the feeling of agency. The

    presence of such a system is crucial for mental well-being, making recuperation from an

    aversive state of mind quick and easy. The evolutionary benefit of such a system is

    immense, helping to cope with bad or negative emotions quickly.

    In a very well known study conducted by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman

    (1978), accident victims, specifically those suffering from paraplegia and quadraplegia,

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    major lottery winners (ranging from $50,000 to $1 million), and control participants

    were interviewed regarding their general happiness and everyday pleasures. These

    interviews did not happen immediately after Although accident victims reported

    significantly lower happiness ratings compared to control and lottery-winners, when

    asked to what extent they enjoy everyday activities, such as eating breakfast, talking

    with a friend, and buying clothes, lottery-winners and accident victims did not

    significantly differ from each other. Additionally, on the general happiness question,

    whichwas on a scale of 0 (not at all happy) to 5 (very much happy), accident victims

    reported their happiness at 2.96, which was significantly higher than the midpoint of the

    scale, 2.5, supporting the case that the psychological immune system helped them get

    better.

    If the human mind is so good at protecting itself from negative affect, the

    conclusions made by Vohs and Schooler (2008) against believing in determinism fall

    apart. The mind should be able to quickly recover from any negative feelings as a result

    of priming. A person therefore cannot truly internalize the negative effects of

    determinism and long-term immoral acts cannot result from something that is innately

    aversive. People who have immoral tendencies as a result of some deterministic belief

    will always be nudged towards feeling moral through the perception of freedom and

    agency.

    There are several other issues with Vohs and Schooler (2008) which I will just

    point out, but not go into any greater depth. For instance, the margin by which people in

    the determinism condition cheated was just around $1 to $2 compared to the free will

    and neutral conditions, which turns out to be a low effect size. No baseline measures

    were taken on the free will measure, so it is unclear whether priming people with

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    determinism actually changed their beliefs or if it just made a previously available belief

    more salient. Cricks statement from The Astonishing Hypothesis may have actually

    threatened participants core beliefs about freedom, resulting in them going into an

    evolutionary survival mode, turning on peoples basic System 1 processes, and making

    them only worry about maximizing money and not caring about other antisocial

    consequences.

    So far, I have shown that Vohs and Schoolers (2008) evidence that people

    become immoral as a result of determinism has limited practical consequences. In other

    words, people will not significantly change in moral character. One may pose the

    question at this point whether a belief in the truth of determinism can coexist with

    experiencing conscious will. In other words, without an endorsement of traditionally

    compatibilist views of moral responsibility, is it possible for one to believe in

    determinism and feel free.

    Parallels between free will and death

    However hard one tries, the feeling of freedom cannot be simply avoided or

    removed under normal circumstances. However, free will seriously conflicts with

    scientific thinking. Laws of nature, basic laws of Physics, Genetics, Neuroscience, and

    many other sciences dictate that actual causality and freedom of will does not exist. A

    person cannot cause behavior solely by her/himself - it is a result of the environment,

    mental states, and brain chemistry.

    There are two truths that people have to deal with here. One is the truth of the

    feeling of will, a positive feeling, which exists regardless of the fact that humans are not

    actually causing anything. The other is the truth of determinism, that humans dont

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    have actual causal agency, and this a negative feeling, which people are averse to and

    dont want to generally think about.

    We think about death in the very same way. Death is an inevitable truth which we

    all acknowledge but thinking about this fact is upsetting and undesirable. Everyone

    agrees on the truth of death, the end of all ends, but generally, people do not want to

    ponder about this issue. At the same time, the life that we are constantly experiencing

    gives us a positive feeling that cannot be ignored. Unlike free will, life is not an illusion,

    but it eludes us from the inescapable truth of death. Most of us want to live longer than

    it is possible and we overestimate when actual death will occur to keep us away from

    thinking about death, but, no one can ever deny that death is a fact and will happen to

    all of us.

    Peoplesbeliefs about determinism and free will should operate in the same way.

    One can believe in the truth that human actions are not external to the forces of the

    universe and that everything falls in the causal chain, even though it is an undesirable

    thought, much like death. At the same time, it is possible to relish the feelings of

    freedom, just as one is allowed to enjoy life. It is therefore possible for people to hold a

    belief of determinism and not be affected by it simultaneously.

    It seems unnecessary to believe in determinism. Is there any benefit at all to

    believing in determinism? The next section will address this issue by demonstrating

    some newly developed empirical evidence supporting a belief in determinism.

    The Benefits of Believing in Determinism

    Out of popular public demand, researchers in psychology have been mostly

    involved in showing detriments of believing in determinism and few have focused on the

    possible benefits of such a belief (Brewer, 2011). One recent study, conducted by Sharriff

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    et al. (under review) showed that people ease up on their attributions of moral

    responsibility when primed by determinism. Participants read the same excerpt from

    The Astonishing Hypothesis as the one at the beginning of this paper, followed by

    reading a fictional scenario of a person who committed a crime by beating up a man to

    death. Participants were then asked to provide the offender a punishment sentence and

    results showed that on average, participants in the neutral condition (those who were

    not primed by determinism) gave a sentence of approximately 10 years, while those

    primed by determinism gave a sentence of approximately 5 years. They replicated this

    finding in further studies, one in which participants were primed by lesser opinionated,

    pop Neuroscience articles from everyday magazines, and another study, in which

    students in a Neuroscience class gave punishments to the same crime at the beginning

    and at the end of the semester. Both of these studies demonstrated that with a more

    mechanistic understanding of human behavior, people become more compassionate in

    judging moral behavior.

    In similar unpublished work, Brewer (2011) examined peoples willingness to

    forgive others based on manipulations of free will and determinism. Just as some of the

    other works we have encountered, participants read an excerpt from The Astonishing

    Hypothesis, which was either deterministic or indeterministic, followed by filling a

    modified version of the forgiveness likelihood scale with 10 vignettes. These situations

    were different from Sharriff et al. (under review) in that, participants were asked to

    imagine being wronged by another person. In addition, instead of having length of years

    of punishment as an indirect dependent measure, Brewer (2011) asked direct questions

    of How responsible is this person for? and What is the likelihood that you would

    choose to forgive your friend? The situations given were more representative of

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    everyday moral transgressions: family member humiliating you in front of others, your

    significant other having a one night stand, stranger breaking into your house, your

    friend spreading incorrect nasty rumors about you, etc. As hypothesized, participants

    primed by determinism were more forgiving that participants primed by free will.

    These results show that determinism makes us more understanding and

    compassionate. Psychology has extensively shown the mental benefits of compassion.

    Being compassionate to others does not just reward people on a personal level, but also

    makes us prosocial. These results are also important in regards to the legal system and

    punishment of individuals. The current justice system, in special cases, such as the

    insanity defense, takes into account deterministic underpinnings of crime. Of course, it

    does not make sense to harshly punish a battered woman who murdered her husband

    because she did it out of self-defense; or even to sentence a teenager to life in prison who

    does not have a fully developed brain system for reasoning. A notion that these

    individuals freely and consciously committed their actions breaks down under this

    circumstance, giving us a refined sense of moral responsibility which is able to include

    determinism. Ordinary people tend to agree with such a system of justice, which takes

    into account any determinist explanations, to be fair and reasonable. In a study

    conducted by Pizarro, Uhlmann, and Salovey (2003), participants in one condition read

    the following vignette:

    Because of his overwhelming and uncontrollable anger, Jack impulsively smashed the

    window of the car parked in front of him because it was parked too close to his.

    Participants in the another condition read the following vignette:

    Jack calmly and deliberately smashed the window of the car parked in front him,

    because it was parked too close to his.

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    Participants were then asked to rate the morality of the action and the level of praise or

    blame the person should receive. Specifically, participants judged the agents by rating

    how moral or immoral the behavior was, how much praise or blame the agent should

    receive for his action, and how positively or negatively the agent should be judged.

    Results showed that participants blamed Jack lesser when he impulsively did the act

    compared to when he consciously thought about doing the act. This is consistent with a

    deterministic account, which shows that people are able to take deterministic causes

    into their evaluations of criminal behavior.

    We generally prefer to be free in making our decisions and this is a part of our

    current political, economic, and individualist societal framework. However, research in

    choice and consumer behavior indicates circumstances where such openness of freedom

    of choice does not lead to happiness. Sometimes, people are happier when their choice is

    taken away, indicating that deterministically affecting someones decision-making can

    sometimes be beneficial to the self. Gilbert and Ebert (2002) conducted a study

    examining choice, advertised as one aimed to teach people about darkroom

    photography. Participants were extensively taught darkroom procedures and were asked

    to take 12 photographs around Harvard campus and come back a couple of days later for

    a darkroom session, where they could print two negatives of their choice. Participants

    first reported a baseline preference measure to examine the extent to which they

    preferred one photograph over the other. Next, they were randomly assigned to either

    the changeable condition, where they had the ability to change their mind on which

    print they chose to take home and which one they wanted to relinquish, after they left

    the experiment; or the unchangeable condition, where participants did not have any

    choice to be able to change their mind later. Results showed that participants who are

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    given the choice to be able to change their outcome were less happy with their choice

    compared to those who had their outcome fixed. Adding extra choice diminishes the

    actual utility and enjoyment received from the product whereas a fixed outcome makes

    people enjoy their outcome further.

    Similar research done by Schwartz, Ward, Monterosso, Lyubomirsky, White, and

    Lehman (2002) showed that people are better off when they satisfice with regards to

    their own choice, i.e. they are happy with whatever they have, versus when they

    maximize, i.e. when they try to make their decision based on a lot of choices to achieve

    the best possible outcome. Although it makes sense to have expanded opportunities of

    choice to evaluate the best possible outcome, it usually leads to negative undesirable

    effects on well-being. It is clear that in many domains of life, having a deterministic

    belief (in moral responsibility) or having constrained freedom (in decision-making and

    choice) can be advantageous, to both the self and the society.

    Conclusions

    My arguments in this paper have aimed to criticize the hasty generalizations

    made by Vohs and Schooler (2008) by showing that the feeling of will is a robust

    positive illusion and that it is hard for negative emotions about determinism to cause

    immoral behavior, because thoughts about determinism are intrinsically aversive. That

    being said, people can still maintain their beliefs in determinism while continuing to

    experience free will, just in the way people think about death. And finally, I showed that

    people should believe in some form of determinism because of its potential benefits in

    how we think about ourselves and others.

    This paper is not claiming to solve the problem of free will. Neither is it claiming

    that believing in free will is completely bad. It should be obvious by now that the free

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    will argument has asymmetric consequences for humans such that in certain domains

    the effects in believing in determinism is different from believing in free will in other

    domains.

    I want to concludeby throwing out some thoughts about improving peoples

    understanding of determinism. As we have seen earlier in this paper, ordinary people

    have a demotivating and fatalist view of determinism, whereby they think that if actions

    and behavior is predetermined, they dont have to do anything, everything will happen

    by itself. It is futile to make any effort in treating a disease or studying for an exam,

    because the events are bound to unfold by itself. But this is an incorrect view of

    determinism. People often forget the aspect of determinism which says that every effect

    has a cause, so if I dont study for an exam or write this paper, it will not write itself.

    Determinism does not exclude contingency.

    Another concern is that people generally see determinism as an excuse to relieve

    them completely from moral responsibility by claiming things like, My genes/brain

    made me do it. In the words of Pinker (2008), it is the confusion of explanation with

    exculpation. Just because we are able to understand the deterministic origins of

    behavior should not mean that we are excused to commit immoral actions (Pinker,

    2008). A scientific understanding of determinism should not destroy responsibility of

    actions. We deter immoral behavior so that it acts as an example to society, in order to

    prevent future crimes. Determinism aids this process - for instance, people who clearly

    commit crimes out of mental illness are not punished as harshly. Deterrence is not a

    complete solution to the problem of punishment (Pinker, 2008), but a scientific

    understanding of determinism is helpful for a sound system of moral responsibility.

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    References

    Brewer, L. E. (2011).Forging freely: Perceptions of moral responsibility mediate the

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    victims: Is happiness relative?.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

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    Gilbert, D. T., & Ebert, J. E. (2002). Decisions and revisions: the affective forecasting of

    changeable outcomes.Journal of personality and social psychology, 82(4), 503.

    Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1990). Experimental tests of the

    endowment effect and the Coase theorem.Journal of Political Economy, 1325-

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    Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan.

    Nahmias, E., Morris, S., Nadelhoffer, T., & Turner, J. (2005). Surveying freedom: Folk

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    Nichols, S., & Knobe, J. (2007). Moral responsibility and determinism: The cognitive

    science of folk intuitions.Nous, 41, 663-685.

    Pinker, S. (2008). The fear of determinism. In Baer, J. E., Kaufman, J. C., & Baumeister,

    R. F. (2008).Are we free? Psychology and free will. Oxford University Press.

    Pizarro, D., Uhlmann, E., & Salovey, P. (2003). Asymmetry in judgments of moral

    blame and praise: The role of perceived metadesires.Psychological Science,

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    Rodin, J., & Langer, E. (1976). The effect of choice and enhanced personal responsibility

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    Sarkissian, H., Chatterjee, A., De Brigard, F., Knobe, J., Nichols, S., & Sirker, S. (2010).

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    Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R.

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    personality and social psychology, 83(5), 1178.

    Shariff, A., Greene, J., Karremans, J., Luguri, J., Clark, C., Schooler, J., Baumeister, R.,

    Vohs, K. (under review). Free will and punishment: A mechanistic view of human

    nature reduces retribution,Psychological Science.

    Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. MIT press.


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