Judgments about Free Will and Determinism in patients with emotional deficits...

...is now available online. Since the last version, we added new participants, but failed to find any significant difference between control participants and patients with behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia. We argue that these results spell troubles for the idea that emotional reactions drive compatibilist responses.

Comments

[Joshua Knobe]

This is a really great paper, and I thought it might be helpful to put up a quick note explaining the basic finding, just in case other readers might be interested.

One commonly held theory of people's intuitions about free will says that these intuitions can be affected by people's emotional responses. Florian and colleagues put this theory to the test by taking the kinds of stimuli developed by experimental philosophers and giving them to people who had emotional deficits due to frontotemporal dementia. But guess what: participants with emotional deficits still show all the usual effects! So Florian and colleagues conclude that those effects might not actually be due to emotion after all.