So excited that this piece, joint first-authored with @ImHardcory, under the tutelage of @azimshariff has been published at JPSP:PPID. I started working on this in 2011 when I was an undergrad! It ended with 14 studies + 300,000 participants. THREAD (1/19)

In line with conservative focus on personal responsibility + accountability, previous work has suggested conservatives believe more in free will. How robust is this, and why? (2/19)

Nietzsche suggested that free will is fundamentally a motivated concept to justify blame, and @ImHardcory et al’s work supports this. (3/19) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24660989 

In this paper we tested whether political conservatives’ stronger free will beliefs are linked to stronger and broader tendencies to moralize, and thus a greater motivation to assign blame. (4/19)

In Study 1 (meta-analysis of five studies, n=308,499) we show that conservatives have stronger tendencies to moralize than liberals, even for moralization measures containing zero political content (e.g., moral badness ratings of faces and personality traits) (5/19)

In Study 2 (n=14,707) we show that conservatives report higher free will belief, and this is statistically mediated by the belief that people should be held morally responsible for their bad behaviour. (6/19)

In Study 3 we show that we show that conservatives do attribute more free will for specific events, not just abstractly, but this seems stronger for negative events. Maybe blame > praise? (7/19)

In the next 3 studies, we look to see if we can “break” the conservative-free will link. (8/19)

In Study 4 we show that when conservatives and liberals see an action as equally wrong there is no difference in free will attributions. No moral wrongness, no free will difference. (9/19)

In Study 5 we show that when liberals see an action as more wrong, it’s liberals that attribute more free will than conservatives. (10/19)

And in Study 6ab (including pre-registration), we show conservatives only attribute more free will for events they see as more wrong, and specific perceptions of wrongness account for the relation between ideology and free will. (11/19)

Finally, in Studies 7a-d we look at whether political conservatives and liberals even differentially attribute free will for the same action depending on who performed it. (12/19)

We show that political conservatives will attribute more free will for a moral violation when it’s a liberal doing it, and vice versa. (13/19)

Together, it seems free will beliefs are linked to a desire to hold others accountable for transgressions, and not just reflective of a generalized and abstract metaphysical belief concerning the nature of human agency. (14/19)

We don’t need to post some weird kind of “Republican Brain” to understand the conservatism-free will link, we can instead look at more basic social psychological processes shared regardless of which party you vote for. (15/19)

Our work suggests reason political debates about responsibility been an enduring feature of discourse in history is likely to stem, in part, from the powerful & often conflicting moral intuitions driving these judgments. (16/19)

The post-print is here https://psyarxiv.com/ms8pg/ , and data, materials, pre-registrations, and analysis code are at the OSF: https://osf.io/ny82c/  Email me for official PDF print. (17/19)

Thank to you all the amazing collaborators inc @briandavidearp, Jesse Graham, Pete Ditto, & Pete Meindl, but especially @azimshariff and @ImHardcory . I have learnt so much doing this over the years, and it’s been a joy learning from you all.

Oh, and the official link is here: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-23351-001