ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
The Influence of (Dis)belief in Free Will on Immoral Behavior.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Free will and trolley dilemmas: evidence for moral inertia in a Venezuelan sample.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Agency, justice, and morality: exploring the intersection of belief in free will, the just world hypothesis, and health behavior.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- A cross-cultural EEG study of how obedience and conformity influence reconciliation intentions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Free Will as Defined by the Constrained Disorder Principle: a Restricted, Mandatory, Personalized, Regulated Process for Decision-Making.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Review
- Assessing the measurement invariance of Free Will and Determinism Plus scale across four languages: a registered report.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Threat-induced prosocial behavior: enhanced exogenous attention to protect others from harm.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- When the brain says "No!": An MRI study on the neural correlates of resistance to immoral orders.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Does belief in free will influence biological motion perception?Psychological research · 2023Article
- Does the cowl make the monk? The effect of military and Red Cross uniforms on empathy for pain, sense of agency and moral behaviors.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Influence of voluntary action and outcome valence on the sense of agency.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- The Weakness of Will: The Role of Free Will in Treatment Adherence.Patient preference and adherence · 2022Article
- A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Freedom to act enhances the sense of agency, while movement and goal-related prediction errors reduce it.Psychological research · 2021Article
- The obedient mind and the volitional brain: A neural basis for preserved sense of agency and sense of responsibility under coercion.PloS one · 2021Article
- Neural Responses to Mandatory and Voluntary Donation Impact Charitable Giving Decisions: An Event-Related Potentials Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The effect of military training on the sense of agency and outcome processing.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Are Free Will Believers Nicer People? (Four Studies Suggest Not).Social psychological and personality science · 2019Article
- A plea for minimally biased naturalistic philosophy.Synthese · 2019Article
- Agency Beliefs Over Time and Across Cultures: Free Will Beliefs Predict Higher Job Satisfaction.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2018Article
- TheFrontiers in psychology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
One of the hallmarks of human existence is that we all hold beliefs that determine how we act. Amongst such beliefs, the idea that we are endowed with free will appears to be linked to prosocial behaviors, probably by enhancing the feeling of responsibility of individuals over their own actions. However, such effects appear to be more complex that one might have initially thought. Here, we aimed at exploring how induced disbeliefs in free will impact the sense of agency over the consequences of one's own actions in a paradigm that engages morality. To do so, we asked participants to choose to inflict or to refrain from inflicting an electric choc to another participant in exchange of a small financial benefit. Our results show that participants who were primed with a text defending neural determinism - the idea that humans are a mere bunch of neurons guided by their biology - administered fewer shocks and were less vindictive toward the other participant. Importantly, this finding only held for female participants. These results show the complex interaction between gender, (dis)beliefs in free will and moral behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.