Previous research suggests that belief in free will correlates with intentionality attribution. However, whether belief in free will is also related to more basic social processes is unknown. Based on evidence that biological motion contains intentionality cues that observers spontaneously extract, we investigate whether people who believe more in free will, or in related constructs, such as dualism and determinism, would be better at picking up such cues and therefore at detecting biological agents hidden in noise, or would be more inclined to detect intentionality cues and therefore to detect biological agents even when there are none. Signal detection theory was used to measure participants’ ability to detect biological motion from scrambled background noise (d′) and their response bias (c) in doing so. In two experiments, we found that belief in determinism and belief in dualism, but not belief in free will, were associated with biological motion perception. However, no causal effect was found when experimentally manipulating free will-related beliefs. In sum, our results show that biological motion perception, a low-level social process, is related to high-level beliefs about dualism and determinism.

先前的研究表明，对自由意志的信念与意向性归因相关。然而，对自由意志的信仰是否也与更基本的社会过程有关还不得而知。基于生物运动包含观察者自发提取的意向性线索的证据，我们调查了更多相信自由意志或相关结构（例如二元论和决定论）的人是否会更好地拾取此类线索，从而更好地检测生物制剂隐藏在噪音中，或者更倾向于检测意向性线索，因此即使没有生物制剂也能检测到。信号检测理论用于测量参与者从加扰的背景噪声 ( d ') 中检测生物运动的能力及其反应偏差 ( c） 在这样做。在两个实验中，我们发现对决定论和二元论的信仰，而不是对自由意志的信仰，与生物运动感知有关。然而，当通过实验操纵与自由意志相关的信念时，没有发现因果关系。总之，我们的结果表明，生物运动感知是一种低层次的社会过程，与二元论和决定论的高级信念有关。