Davide Rigoni

Inducing Disbelief in Free Will Alters Brain Correlates of Preconscious Motor Preparation The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not

The feeling of being in control of one’s own actions is a strong subjective experience. However, discoveries in psychology and neuroscience challenge the validity of this experience and suggest that free will is just an illusion. This raises a question: What would happen if people started to disbelieve in free will? Previous research has shown that low control beliefs affect performance and motivation. Recently, it has been shown that undermining free-will beliefs influences social behavior. In the study reported here, we investigated whether undermining beliefs in free will affects brain correlates of voluntary motor preparation. Our results showed that the readiness potential was reduced in individuals induced to disbelieve in free will. This effect was evident more than 1 s before participants consciously decided to move, a finding that suggests that the manipulation influenced intentional actions at preconscious stages. Our findings indicate that abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental effect than previously thought.

Imaging volition: what the brain can tell us about the will

The question of how we can voluntarily control our behaviour dates back to the beginnings of scientific psychology. Currently, there are two empirical research disciplines tackling human volition: cognitive neuroscience and social psychology. To date, there is little interaction between the two disciplines in terms of the investigation of human volition. The aim of the current article is to highlight recent brain imaging work on human volition and to relate social psychological concepts of volition to the functional neuroanatomy of intentional action. A host of studies indicate that the medial prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in voluntary action. Accordingly, we postulate that social psychological concepts of volition can be investigated using neuroimaging techniques, and propose that by developing a social cognitive neuroscience of human volition, we may gain a deeper understanding of this fascinating and complex aspect of the human mind.

‘Why should I care?’ Challenging free will attenuates neural reaction to errors

Whether human beings have free will has been a philosophical question for centuries. The debate about free will has recently entered the public arena through mass media and newspaper articles commenting on scientific findings that leave little to no room for free will. Previous research has shown that encouraging such a deterministic perspective influences behavior, namely by promoting cursory and antisocial behavior. Here we propose that such behavioral changes may, at least partly, stem from a more basic neurocognitive process related to response monitoring, namely a reduced error detection mechanism. Our results show that the error-related negativity, a neural marker of error detection, was reduced in individuals led to disbelieve in free will. This finding shows that reducing the belief in free will has a specific impact on error detection mechanisms. More generally, it suggests that abstract beliefs about intentional control can influence basic and automatic processes related to action control.

Automatic imitation: A meta-analysis.

Automatic imitation is the finding that movement execution is facilitated by compatible and impeded by incompatible observed movements. In the past 15 years, automatic imitation has been studied to understand the relation between perception and action in social interaction. Although research on this topic started in cognitive science, interest quickly spread to related disciplines such as social psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience. However, important theoretical questions have remained unanswered. Therefore, in the present meta-analysis, we evaluated seven key questions on automatic imitation. The results, based on 161 studies containing 226 experiments, revealed an overall effect size of gz = 0.95, 95% CI [0.88, 1.02]. Moderator analyses identified automatic imitation as a flexible, largely automatic process that is driven by movement and effector compatibility, but is also influenced by spatial compatibility. Automatic imitation was found to be stronger for forced choice tasks than for simple response tasks, for human agents than for nonhuman agents, and for goalless actions than for goal-directed actions. However, it was not modulated by more subtle factors such as animacy beliefs, motion profiles, or visual perspective. Finally, there was no evidence for a relation between automatic imitation and either empathy or autism. Among other things, these findings point toward actor–imitator similarity as a crucial modulator of automatic imitation and challenge the view that imitative tendencies are an indicator of social functioning. The current meta-analysis has important theoretical implications and sheds light on longstanding controversies in the literature on automatic imitation and related domains.

Free will beliefs predict attitudes toward unethical behavior and criminal punishment

Significance Understanding the bases of moral judgment has been a longstanding goal of social science. Factors undergirding morality are argued to be both globally uniform and regionally variable. The current study found evidence of both. For residents of countries with low levels of corruption and transparent systems of governance, free will beliefs predicted greater support for harsh criminal punishment and an intolerance of unethical behavior. For residents of countries beset with corruption and obfuscation, free will beliefs predicted greater support for criminal punishment but were decoupled from judgments of unethical behavior. These findings confirm causal conclusions from experimental research about the influence of free will beliefs on moral judgments and demonstrate variation by sociopolitical context. Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables.

Mimicry and automatic imitation are not correlated

It is widely known that individuals have a tendency to imitate each other. However, different psychological disciplines assess imitation in different manners. While social psychologists assess mimicry by means of action observation, cognitive psychologists assess automatic imitation with reaction time based measures on a trial-by-trial basis. Although these methods differ in crucial methodological aspects, both phenomena are assumed to rely on similar underlying mechanisms. This raises the fundamental question whether mimicry and automatic imitation are actually correlated. In the present research we assessed both phenomena and did not find a meaningful correlation. Moreover, personality traits such as empathy, autism traits, and traits related to self- versus other-focus did not correlate with mimicry or automatic imitation either. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Fake feedback on pain tolerance impacts proactive versus reactive control strategies

It is well-known that beliefs about ones own ability to execute a task influence task performance. Here, we tested the hypothesis that beliefs about a specific self-control capacity, namely pain tolerance, modulate basic cognitive control processes. Participants received fake comparative social feedback that their ability to tolerate painful stimulations was either very poor or outstanding after which they performed an unrelated go/no-go task. Participants receiving low-tolerance feedback, relative to high-tolerance feedback, were less successful at inhibiting their responses and more influenced by previous trial conditions, as indicated by an increased slowdown following errors and more failed inhibitions following go-trials. These observations demonstrate a shift from a more proactive to a more reactive control mode. This study shows that providing feedback about ones own capacity to control impulsive reactions to painful stimulations directly influences low-level cognitive control dynamics.

What Do You Believe In? French Translation of the FAD-Plus to Assess Beliefs in Free Will and Determinism and Their Relationship with Religious Practices and Personality Traits

The influence of (dis)belief in free will on prosocial behaviors and sense of control has attracted considerable interest over the last few years. The provision of relevant research tools to assess beliefs in free will and determinism for the community thus becomes a central endeavour. However, no relevant validated questionnaires are currently available to the French language community. Therefore, the present study was aimed at providing a valid French translation of the FAD-plus (Paulhus & Carey, 2011), a questionnaire built to assess people’s beliefs in Free will and Determinism. Exploratory factor analysis of the data obtained in Sample 1 revealed a four factor model. Confirmatory factor analyses on the basis of Sample 2 data were conducted to compare the theoretical model advanced by Paulhus and Carey’s versus the model obtained in Sample 1. With only but a few modifications as compared to the original questionnaire, the questionnaire that we here propose appears to constitute a reliable tool for the French language community. We also examined the relationship between beliefs in free will, determinism and religious practices. We found that the more people are engaged in religious practices, the more they believe in determinism and in the inevitability of their future.

Belief in free will affects causal attributions when judging others’ behavior

Significance The question whether free will exists or not has been a matter of debate in philosophy for centuries. Recently, researchers claimed that free will is nothing more than a myth. Although the validity of this claim is debatable, it attracted much attention in the general public. This raises the crucial question whether it matters if people believe in free will or not. In six studies, we tested whether believing in free will is related to the correspondence bias—that is, people’s automatic tendency to overestimate the influence of internal as compared to external factors when interpreting others’ behavior. Overall, we demonstrate that believing in free will increases the correspondence bias and predicts prescribed punishment and reward behavior. Free will is a cornerstone of our society, and psychological research demonstrates that questioning its existence impacts social behavior. In six studies, we tested whether believing in free will is related to the correspondence bias, which reflects people’s automatic tendency to overestimate the influence of internal as compared to external factors when interpreting others’ behavior. All studies demonstrate a positive relationship between the strength of the belief in free will and the correspondence bias. Moreover, in two experimental studies, we showed that weakening participants’ belief in free will leads to a reduction of the correspondence bias. Finally, the last study demonstrates that believing in free will predicts prescribed punishment and reward behavior, and that this relation is mediated by the correspondence bias. Overall, these studies show that believing in free will impacts fundamental social-cognitive processes that are involved in the understanding of others’ behavior.

Intentional inhibition: From motor suppression to self-control

Healthy adult humans are widely held to have a capacity for “self-control”. Perhaps the most obvious form that self-control takes is the inhibition of behaviours that are prepotent, but at the same time somehow maladaptive or inappropriate. Such inhibition is crucial in the context of cognitive and motor control in several ways. Firstly, it is essential for successful coordination with other agents in order to live in a complex social world that requires the regulation of our impulses. Secondly, since many prepotent actions may also be harmful, inhibition can also be essential for individual well-being: drug-taking, and excessive eating are topical examples. Inhibitory control has been investigated in different psychological disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience (Logan and Cowan, 1984), social (Baumeister et al., 2007), clinical (Lubman et al., 2004) and developmental (Diamond, 2013) psychology. Despite these intensive research efforts, attempts to provide an overarching framework that integrates inhibition research from different disciplines have hardly been made. In fact, reviewing the literature suggests that inhibitory control does not refer to a single wellspecified cognitive function, but is rather a multi-dimensional construct, with inhibition taking different forms according to the specific function that is inhibited, the source and timescale of inhibition etc. The only fully general feature of all inhibition appears to be its sign: i.e., behaviour, processing, activity are decreased or suppressed, rather than facilitated or enhanced. This special issue focuses on one crucial dimension of inhibitory control that has been widely neglected in the literature, namely the source of inhibition. Inhibition can be either highly intentional and self-determined or externally-triggered and reflexive. The classical experimental approaches to investigate inhibition involve stop-signal or no-go signals. Here, desisting from action is effectively a response to an external cue. In contrast, intentional forms of inhibition refer to situations where no external cue indicates to inhibit behaviour. Instead, an internal decision leads to an ongoing action being decreased or delayed, or to a plan for action being cancelled. Intentional inhibition A few years ago the concept of intentional inhibition was introduced to explicitly investigate intentional involvement in inhibitory control (Brass and Haggard, 2007, 2008). The idea of an inhibitory aspect of self-control has a long history in studies of willed action (Filevich et al., 2012). The voluntary component brings this concept closer to self-control in everyday life: in critical situations such as turn-taking, resource-conservation, or drugtaking, explicit external stop signals are rare. Rather, individuals are assumed to have an internal capacity to inhibit, or at least regulate, actions that are inappropriate. The concept of intentional inhibition has generated a number of interesting empirical studies over the last few years. At the same time, it has also turned out to be difficult to investigate experimentally. While several features of experimental design for intentional inhibition can draw on the classical neuro-cognitive research methods for inhibitory control, an underlying difficulty has been the absence of a specific external trigger signal for inhibition. Three articles in this special issue directly deal with the concept of intentional inhibition (Lynn et al., 2014; Schel et al., 2014; Ridderinkhof et al., 2014). In the article by Schel and colleagues developmental research on intentional and cued inhibition is reviewed. They conclude that intentional inhibition in a ‘cold’ context has a different developmental trajectory than intentional inhibition in a motivational context. The article by Lynn and colleagues reflects on the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in intentional inhibition. While the functional-neuroanatomical distinction of brain regions involved in intentional inhibition and brain regions involved in cued inhibition is a constituting component of the intentional inhibition concept (Brass and Haggard, 2007; 2008; Filevich et al., 2012), the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in intentional inhibition is still a matter of debate. Lynn and colleagues attribute a disengagement function to this brain region. Finally, the article by Ridderinkhof and colleagues places the concept of intentional inhibition in the broader context of intentional motor control and reflects on the functional mechanisms that might define the intentional nature of the inhibition process. Beyond classical approaches to cued-inhibition While the previous articles explicitly deal with the concept of intentional inhibition, four articles in this special issue investigate the role of intentional processes in more classical forms of motor inhibition (Verbruggen et al., 2014; Moraitis and Ghosh, 2014; Duque et al., 2014; Ganos et al., 2014). Two articles investigate the automaticity of the inhibition process and two articles deal with the automaticity of the to-inhibited action. The article by Verbruggen and colleagues investigates how cued inhibition can become a prepared reflex. Here the cue automatically triggers the inhibitory control process. This form of reflexive inhibition represents an extreme form of externally guided inhibition. The article by Duque and colleagues deals with inhibition in the context of response selection. It is investigated how different preparatory states influence the inhibition of the non-responding hand in a response selection paradigm. The articles by Moraitis and Ghosh, and by Ganos and colleagues investigate the inhibition of more reflexive behaviour. In the case of Moraitis and Ghosh, the reflexive action is the eye blink reflex, which is a naturally occurring reflex. Ganos and colleagues