Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Evaluating the Combined Effects of Misunderstanding of Determinism and Motivated Cognition

In this study, we conducted large-scale experiments with novel descriptions of determinism. Our goal was to investigate the effects of desires for punishment and comprehension errors on people’s intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in deterministic scenarios. Previous research has acknowledged the influence of these factors, but their total effect has not been revealed. Using a large-scale survey of Japanese participants, we found that the failure to understand causal determination (intrusion) has limited effects relative to other factors and that the conflation of determinism and epiphenomenalism (bypassing) has a significant influence, even when controlling for other variables. This leads to the increased prevalence of incompatibilist responses. Our results also suggest that the influence of comprehension errors is less pronounced than desires for punishment. This supports the claim of Cory Clark and colleagues (2019) that a definitive intuition about free will might be elusive.