The Folk as Compatibilists and Incompatibilists

Edward Cokely (a graduate student in the psychology department here at Florida State) and I have run a set of experiments about folk intuitions of free will. We build off both Nahmias et al. and Nichols and Knobe's previous work. Our main finding is that there seem to be groups of people who express compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions--hence, the folk are not compatibilists or incompatibilists. Moreover, contrary to Nahmias et al's tentative position, our data suggest the biggest group of folk are incompatibilists. Section 3 reports these new findings (sections 1 and 2 are background).

At the end of the paper we hint at being able to predict these groups with individual differences. We have data about this, and we are currently conducting a study to replicate. Our hope is that by defining groups we can use more fine-grained techniques to understand what accounts for the differences (e.g., with protocol analysis).

We'd greatly appreciate any feedback!

Link to paper: “Most Folks Are Incompatibilists, But Not All”

Comments

[tnadelhoffer]

Kip Werking has started a comment thread about Adam and Edward's paper at The Garden of Forking Paths. Perhaps it would be best if the people from this blog participated in the thread at GFP. If nothing else, it will keep the repitition of criticisms and responses to a minimum.