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Not What I Expected! Feeling of Surprise Differentially Mediates Effect of Personal Control on Attributions of Free will and Responsibility

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Abstract

Some have argued that advances in the science of human decision-making, particularly research on automaticity and unconscious priming, would ultimately thwart our commonsense understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Do people interpret this research as a threat to their self-understanding as free and responsible agents? We approached this question by seeing how feelings of surprise mediate the relationship between personal sense of control and third-personal attributions of free will and responsibility. Across three studies (N = 1,516) we found that people with a greater sense of personal control were more surprised at the results of experiments showing effects of unconscious priming on moral behavior. Surprise differentially mediated the relationship between personal control and attributions of free will and responsibility: people attributed less free will and more responsibility as they were more surprised. This suggests that people exhibit defensive thinking with respect to responsibility, but not free will.

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Notes

  1. Sellars thought that the two images were ultimately reconcilable despite this clash (see his 1956 and 1963-b), although his argument lies outside the scope of our paper.

  2. This distinction assumes that the empirical evidence in question is relevant to some aspect of one’s self-conception. When we consider how people update their judgments of free will and responsibility after incorporating information about research on automaticity and unconscious priming, it is possible that people do not see this evidence as relevant to their self-conception (see Mudrik et al. 2022). In this case, we would predict no change in how people think of themselves, but not because of defensive thinking.

  3. This scenario is based on Bargh et al. 2001.

  4. This scenario is based on Isen and Levin (1972).

  5. In the low probability condition for the helping behavior vignette, the vignette read: “Surprisingly, people who found the dime were more likely to help the woman than those who did not.”.

  6. There were two exceptions. In this experiment, participants rated the degree to which the individual seems aware of the situational cue and the degree to which the participant’s behavior counterfactually depended on the presence of the subconscious prime using 9-pt. sliders anchored at the midpoint (1 = Strongly disagree, 5 = Unsure/Not a clear case; 9 = Strongly agree). For example, in one condition, participants responded to the following item:

    Aware: John was aware of the experimental manipulation.

    Dependence: If John had been in the control condition (where there was no experimental manipulation), then he wouldn’t have helped the woman.

    These variables are not included in the mediation analyses reported below. They were included based on the pre-registered analyses described in the “Data analysis approach”.

  7. This scenario is based on Lin and Suárez (2020).

  8. In some cases, we found evidence for an interaction between vignette and condition, but after correcting for multiple comparisons, most of these results became insignificant. In one case, the significant effect was the result of measurement error. We supplemented these tests with Bayesian analyses to quantify the evidence for null effects. We found moderate or anecdotal evidence in favor of the null hypothesis in each case. Thus, we can infer that there was no evidence for a difference across conditions for either judgment type in each vignette, although this does not constitute strong evidence for the null hypothesis in any case (see Supplementary materials §4 for results).

  9. Relatedly, there was no evidence for an effect of vignette (p = .07), condition (p = .89), or their interaction (p = .88) on judgments of personal control.

  10. We discuss experiments related to this pilot study in [omitted].

  11. Other important limitations that should be addressed in future work concern our sample characteristics. We relied on online samples, which tend to over-represent individuals with left-leaning political ideologies and draw predominantly from WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). The latter is especially important given cultural variability in attitudes about free will (Chernyak et al. 2019; Berniunas et al., 2021) and responsibility (Miller & Bersoff 1998). These represent important limits on generalizability.

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  1. Laboratorio de Emociones y Juicios Morales, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

    Samuel Murray

  2. Philosophy Department, Providence College, 105 Siena Hall, 1 Cunningham Sq, Providence, RI, 02918, USA

    Samuel Murray

  3. Department of Philosophy, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA

    Thomas Nadelhoffer

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Murray, S., Nadelhoffer, T. Not What I Expected! Feeling of Surprise Differentially Mediates Effect of Personal Control on Attributions of Free will and Responsibility. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00682-0

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