Free will and consciousness: Experimental studies

The free will inventory: Measuring beliefs about agency and responsibility

“…The worry is not only theoretical-there is accumulating evidence that compatibilist intuitions are more widespread than philosophers and psychologists have traditionally assumed (e.g., Deery, Bedke, & Nichols, in preparation;Monroe & Malle, 2010;Murray & Nahmias, 2012;Nadelhoffer, in press;Nadelhoffer & Tocchetto, 2013, chap. 7;Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2006;Nichols, 2004;Nichols, 2006;Nichols & Knobe, 2007;Shepard & Reuter, 2012;Shepherd, 2012;Rose & Nichols, 2013). Shedding light on the scope and limits of these compatibilist beliefs and attitudes is at least one of the issues researchers ought to examine.…”

Does Watching a Play about the Teenage Brain Affect Attitudes toward Young Offenders?

“…This generates two implications: first, neuroscience may successfully cast doubt on the capacity of the offender to make a conscious, intentional and desired choice (hereon termed a rational choice), rather than to exercise an uncaused free will. Indeed, lay attributions of moral responsibility are highly sensitive to conscious intent (e.g., Alicke, 1992; Shepherd, 2012) and desire (Woolfolk et al, 2006; Monroe et al, 2017); people even tend to define free will as the capacity for rational choice (Monroe and Malle, 2010). …”

“…In the mock court scenarios, the neuroscience concerns only one particular offender with a rare form of severe mental illness; in this context, the applicability of the science is very narrow. Indeed, people are more likely to relinquish blame given evidence of causation when the evidence is applied to a hypothetical world (Nahmias et al, 2007; Roskies and Nichols, 2008) or when people judge complete causation to be inapplicable to the real world (Shepherd, 2012). Put simply, people may be more willing to accept implications of neuroscience that are restricted in scope.…”

Freedom Is as Freedom Does: Neuropragmatism, Neuroethics, and Free Will

“…From a public perspective, if a person consciously chooses from options of how to behave, however the factors to that choice may be unconsciously caused, responsibility gets attributed by the rest of us (Shepherd 2012). (Exceptions are few-medical excuses now have public acquiescence.)…”