ArticleSocial psychological and personality science2019
Are Free Will Believers Nicer People? (Four Studies Suggest Not).
Article in Social psychological and personality science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Free to be Healthy? Free Will Beliefs are Positively Associated With Health Behavior.Psychological reports · 2026Article
- Measuring beliefs about free will: a critical review of the Free Will Inventory.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Does belief in free will influence biological motion perception?Psychological research · 2023Article
- Automatic or controlled: How does disbelief in free will influence cognitive functioning?British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2022Article
- Comparing the Psychometric Properties of Two Japanese-Translated Scales of the Free Will and Determinism-Plus Scale.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Free will beliefs are better predicted by dualism than determinism beliefs across different cultures.PloS one · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Free will is widely considered a foundational component of Western moral and legal codes, and yet current conceptions of free will are widely thought to fit uncomfortably with much research in psychology and neuroscience. Recent research investigating the consequences of laypeople's free will beliefs (FWBs) for everyday moral behavior suggests that stronger FWBs are associated with various desirable moral characteristics (e.g., greater helpfulness, less dishonesty). These findings have sparked concern regarding the potential for moral degeneration throughout society as science promotes a view of human behavior that is widely perceived to undermine the notion of free will. We report four studies (combined
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.