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Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes

Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused...

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Autores principales: Cracco, Emiel, González-García, Carlos, Hussey, Ian, Braem, Senne, Wisniewski, David
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7481697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32968494
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.191824
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author Cracco, Emiel
González-García, Carlos
Hussey, Ian
Braem, Senne
Wisniewski, David
author_facet Cracco, Emiel
González-García, Carlos
Hussey, Ian
Braem, Senne
Wisniewski, David
author_sort Cracco, Emiel
collection PubMed
description Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs (FWB, ‘Do you think free will exists?’), but largely ignored a second key aspect: free will attitudes (FWA, ‘Do you like/value will?’). Attitudes are often independently predictive of behaviour, relative to beliefs, yet we currently know very little about FWAs in the general public. One key issue is whether such attitudes are subject to biased, socially desirable responding. The vast majority of the general public strongly believes in the existence of free will, which might create cultural pressure to value free will positively as well. In this registered report, we used a very large (N = 1100), open available dataset measuring implicit and explicit attitudes towards free will and determinism to address this issue. Our results indicate that both explicit and implicit attitudes towards free will are more positive than attitudes towards determinism. We also show that people experience cultural pressure to value free will, and to devalue determinism. Yet, we found no strong evidence that this cultural pressure affected either implicit or explicit attitudes in this dataset.
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spelling pubmed-74816972020-09-22 Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes Cracco, Emiel González-García, Carlos Hussey, Ian Braem, Senne Wisniewski, David R Soc Open Sci Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs (FWB, ‘Do you think free will exists?’), but largely ignored a second key aspect: free will attitudes (FWA, ‘Do you like/value will?’). Attitudes are often independently predictive of behaviour, relative to beliefs, yet we currently know very little about FWAs in the general public. One key issue is whether such attitudes are subject to biased, socially desirable responding. The vast majority of the general public strongly believes in the existence of free will, which might create cultural pressure to value free will positively as well. In this registered report, we used a very large (N = 1100), open available dataset measuring implicit and explicit attitudes towards free will and determinism to address this issue. Our results indicate that both explicit and implicit attitudes towards free will are more positive than attitudes towards determinism. We also show that people experience cultural pressure to value free will, and to devalue determinism. Yet, we found no strong evidence that this cultural pressure affected either implicit or explicit attitudes in this dataset. The Royal Society 2020-08-26 /pmc/articles/PMC7481697/ /pubmed/32968494 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.191824 Text en © 2020 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
Cracco, Emiel
González-García, Carlos
Hussey, Ian
Braem, Senne
Wisniewski, David
Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes
title Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes
title_full Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes
title_fullStr Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes
title_full_unstemmed Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes
title_short Cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes
title_sort cultural pressure and biased responding in free will attitudes
topic Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7481697/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32968494
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.191824
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