Elsevier

Consciousness and Cognition

Volume 94, September 2021, 103170
Consciousness and Cognition

Direct and indirect freedom in addiction: Folk free will and blame judgments are sensitive to the choice history of drug users

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2021.103170Get rights and content

Highlights

  • People judge addicted others as having less free will and as less blameworthy.

  • But prior work does not distinguish indirect and direct freedom.

  • We examine judgments of people who did or did not choose freely to try drugs.

  • We replicate past work and find laypeople are sensitive to histories of drug use.

  • Judgments of blame are amplified for persons who freely chose to try drugs in the past.

Abstract

People view addiction as a source of diminished free will and moral responsibility. Yet, people are also sensitive to the personal histories of moral actors, including, perhaps, the way by which people became addicted. Across two studies (N = 806), we compare people’s moral intuitions about cases in which the actor becomes addicted by force or by choice. We find that perceptions of reduced free will partially mediate an association between choice (vs. no choice) in addiction and moral blame for a bad act (Study 1). We replicate this pattern and show that blame judgments are stronger when the bad act is related (vs. unrelated) to obtaining the addictive substance (Study 2). Our work is novel in demonstrating that lay people evince relatively nuanced intuitions about the role of free will in addiction and morality—they track direct and indirect paths to choices when making free will and blame judgments.

Section snippets

Lay thinking about addiction and free will

Lay people associate addiction with diminished free will (Racine et al., 2017, Rise and Halkjelsvik, 2019, Vonasch et al., 2017, Vonasch et al., 2018)—an ability to exercise choice or control over behaviors or actions (Feldman et al., 2014, Monroe and Malle, 2010, Shepard and Reuter, 2012). People think addiction diminishes that kind of control. Because perceptions of moral responsibility correspond with perceptions of free will (e.g., Clark et al, 2014; Stillman, Baumeister, & Mele, 2011),

Present research

Despite the overwhelming philosophical interest in tracing moral responsibility and accounts of indirect freedom, there have not been significant systematic investigations into whether these concepts are active in ordinary thinking about agency. To investigate whether ordinary people distinguish between direct and indirect freedom (and responsibility) in addictive behaviors, we conducted two experiments. Study 1 was a replication and extension of Vonasch et al. (2017). Participants read a

Study 1

We tested whether laypeople’s perceptions of an actor’s free will and blameworthiness depend on the actor’s addiction history—addicted by choice, addicted by force, or not addicted. We preregistered this study (https://aspredicted.org/32ip6.pdf).

Study 2

Study 2 was a conceptual replication of Study 1 that addressed limitations of that study and also explored a novel aspect of the addicted person’s act. First, we used a new set of vignettes to ensure generalizability of results. Second, we chose a substance more widely believed to be strongly addictive, i.e., heroin, to avoid ambiguities with respect to whether addiction played a role in the causal chain leading to the agent’s bad act. Third, to reduce blame motivation and avoid ceiling effects

General discussion

Essential to a well-functioning society is the universal tendency to hold others morally responsible for their bad acts (Tomasello & Vaish, 2013), and this inclination depends on and also feeds into attributions of free will of bad actors (Clark et al., 2014). Addiction is one case where such a strong inclination to perceive free will and dole out blame is dampened. Indeed, prior work demonstrates that people view addiction as precluding an addicted person’s free will and moral responsibility

Limitations and future directions

Although sufficient power, preregistration, and replication increase our confidence in results reported here, there are a few limitations worth noting. First, our samples were drawn from American and largely WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations, which limits the generalizability of our results (Henrich et al., 2010).

Second, in Study 2, we manipulated whether the bad act was performed in pursuing the addictive drug or some other goal (i.e., buying

Conclusion

Folk conceptions of free will and moral responsibility are not exhausted by narrow considerations of choice and control during the moment of action. If people are provided with historical details relevant to explaining why an agent lacks control in the moment, people shift focus away from direct control—especially when the agent in question has freely put themselves in their present addicted condition. People blame others for bad actions, even when their addiction reduces their control in the

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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