In this very interesting post by Roy Baumeister, he notes several apparent misunderstandings I have about free will and about the underlying message of research showing some negative consequences of telling people that free will does not exist. Naturally, I don't think these misunderstandings are entirely my doing, a point some others have already made in replies over at Roy's "Cultural Animal" blog. I have already posted a reply there concerning the shifting definitions of free will in Roy's post and also the possibility that he and I are both right but are operating at different levels of analysis. Here I respond specifically to Baumeister's charge that researchers are being irresponsible when they draw conclusions against the existence of free will, and that expression of such conclusions to the public will promulgate anarchy and antisocial behavior.
"NOBODY WANTS RESEARCH TO STOP"
This is good to hear. Here are the reasons I had thought otherwise: At Tampa I noted the Vohs & Schooler paper and the more recent Baumeister paper in which telling research participants about purported scientific findings that free will was an illusion and did not exist increased the participants' subsequent negative social behavior -- cheating, stealing, and aggression. I noted the particular choice of dependent measures in these studies -- all negative social behaviors -- and wondered aloud what the point of these studies really was. I also noted that at least one of these studies was funded by a philanthropic foundation promoting spirituality and the reconciliation of religion and science. 
This was in the context of a discussion of the roots of the free will concept in early Christian theology, in particular St Augustine's use of the concept of free-will to solve the 'problem of evil' -- how an all-good and all-powerful God could permit the existence of evil in the world. (Answer: because people must be free to do good or evil as they choose for there to be a basis for the Final Judgment upon each of us.) Again, in this context, I noted how people in the 19th century worried that a widespread belief that there is no God would result in anarchy and negative social behavior (mainly because of the removal of the threat of eternal punishment in the afterlife), and how similar this worry was to that of Vohs-Schooler-Baumeister that telling people there is no free will would produce the same outcomes. And I noted other research showing that conservatives have the same worries about what would happen if it were proven that there is no God as they do about what would happen if it were proven there is no free will -- that the social order would break down -- and that liberals too have the same worries in both cases, though different than that of conservatives -- that there would then be no meaning to life. I raised all of this to the Tampa audience because of the remarkable conflations I was discovering between religion and free will. I brought all of this up to provide a broader context to the recent conduct and publication of research specifically designed to show that without a belief in free will, social order will break down. As an example, I noted that in designing these studies, the researchers chose only to look for negative social behaviors as consequences of being told free will did not exist.
Now, you can and should draw your own conclusions as to why these studies were (and continue to be) conducted -- at the Tampa debate I left matters hanging at this point and did not explicitly attribute any such motivations. However, I was of course suggesting that there might be deeper motivations, even historical ones, behind these studies, of which perhaps even the researchers themselves are unaware. For example, philosophers of science long have noted the operation of the Zeitgeist, or the 'spirit of the times' as a kind of unseen hand that helps drive ideas for studies as well as what topics are seen as important for publication by reviewers and editors. (Psychology researchers, myself included, are of course not immune from the operation of such unconscious forces and motives.) But this implication or suggestion of an unstated, underlying motive for the research is what I think brought some heat to the debate, especially during the question period following the debate. No one likes to have their motivations questioned. And although I had meant to suggest that there might be deeper, implicit or unconscious motivations driving the design and conduct of these studies, and not necessarily explicit ones on the part of the investigators, in retrospect I don't think I made that distinction as clearly as I could and should have to the Tampa audience.
Now, I mentioned above that in the published studies on the consequences of being informed that science had shown free will did not exist, the researchers chose to look only for negative social behaviors. Why not positive ones as well? After all, among the last words of Jesus Christ on the cross were: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." In other words, perhaps knowledge that free will did not exist would cause us to be more understanding and forgiving towards the faults and misbehaviors of others. And there may be other benefits as well. As I learned after the debate, Jonathan Schooler and colleagues had already thought of and conducted such a study. They indeed found that telling experimental participants that free will did not exist caused those participants to be more forgiving towards the transgressions of others.
This is a very important finding. After all, one key premise behind Baumeister's admonition to researchers to not to tell the public that free will is an illusion, is that this expression of opinion (as if it is merely a matter of personal opinion, regardless of how informed this opinion might be of the theory and empirical evidence bearing on the issue) "has additional and damaging consequences, insofar as the unfounded opinion they advocate will promote antisocial behavior." I believe Roy's conclusion is premature, because this general line of research has only just started, and as further data come in we will have a more complete and balanced picture of the social and behavioral consequences of a disbelief in free will.
To my mind, one potential benefit to getting people to not believe so strongly in the power of their own personal agency or free will is that they might then be more concerned about external influences or even explicit attempts by advertisers, government, etc. to control what they do (eat, drink, buy, vote). Research by Tim Wilson and Nancy Brekke (Psychological Bulletin, 1994) has shown that people do not worry very much about these influence attempts because they believe they are the captains of their minds and in near-complete control over their judgments and behaviors. For example, people do not believe negative campaign advertising affects them, and so do not attempt to counteract or defend themselves from the effects of such ads, yet that variety of campaign advertising is in actuality so effective that it became nearly the exclusive form of campaign ads during the recent 2008 US presidential election. And Jennifer Harris and colleagues in our ACME lab have recently shown unconscious effects of television ads on snack food and cigarette consumption, such that these ads contribute to societal health problems of obesity and smoking (see www.yale.edu/acmelab/publications.html). Thus I can see significant positive benefits in informing people of their (at least relative) lack of free will in the behavioral impulses triggered by the ads, both in their own health outcomes and in their ability to counteract presumed unwanted influences on their important decisions, such as who they want to lead their country. Indeed, given that Baumeister has expressed his belief that telling people that free will may not exist is 'irresponsible', I can make the case that not telling them is perhaps even more irresponsible, because it leaves them at the mercy of corporations and governments who are not quite so naive.
