EthosVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 1-4 Toward an Anthropology of the Will. Keith M. Murphy and C. Jason Throop, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2010. vi+227 pp. Jeffrey P. Ebert, Jeffrey P. Ebert Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology, Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Jeffrey P. Ebert, Jeffrey P. Ebert Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology, Harvard UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 14 February 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2011.01176.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume39, Issue1March 2011Pages 1-4 RelatedInformation

Belief in free will is widespread. The present research considered one reason why people may believe that actions are freely chosen rather than determined: they attribute randomness in behavior to free will. Experiment 1 found that participants who were prompted to perform a random sequence of actions experienced their behavior as more freely chosen than those who were prompted to perform a deterministic sequence. Likewise, Experiment 2 found that, all else equal, the behavior of animated agents was perceived to be more freely chosen if it consisted of a random sequence of actions than if it consisted of a deterministic sequence; this was true even when the degree of randomness in agents' behavior was largely a product of their environments. Together, these findings suggest that randomness in behavior--one's own or another's--can be mistaken for free will.

It has been proposed that inferring personal authorship for an event gives rise to intentional binding, a perceptual illusion in which one’s action and inferred effect seem closer in time than they otherwise would (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). Using a novel, naturalistic paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis and examine the relationship between binding and self-reported authorship. In both experiments, an important authorship indicator – consistency between one’s action and a subsequent event – was manipulated, and its effects on binding and self-reported authorship were measured. Results showed that action-event consistency enhanced both binding and self-reported authorship, supporting the hypothesis that binding arises from an inference of authorship. At the same time, evidence for a dissociation emerged, with consistency having a more robust effect on self-reports than on binding. Taken together, these results suggest that binding and self-reports reveal different aspects of the sense of authorship.

The attentional myopia model of behavioral control [Mann and Ward, 2007] was tested in an experiment investigating the relationship between physiological arousal and aggression. Drawing on previous work linking arousal and narrowed attentional focus, the model predicts that arousal will lead to behavior that is relatively disinhibited in situations in which promoting pressures to aggress are highly salient. In situations in which inhibitory pressures are more salient, the model predicts behavior that is relatively restrained. In the experiment, 81 male undergraduates delivered noise-blasts against a provoking confederate while experiencing either high or low levels of physiological arousal and, at the same time, being exposed to cues that served either to promote or inhibit aggression. In addition to supporting the predictions of the model, this experiment provided some of the first evidence for enhanced control of aggression under conditions of heightened physiological arousal. Implications for interventions designed to reduce aggression are discussed.

Classical fear conditioning investigates how animals learn to associate environmental stimuli with an aversive event. We examined how the mechanisms of fear conditioning apply when humans learn to associate social ingroup and outgroup members with a fearful event, with the goal of advancing our understanding of basic learning theory and social group interaction. Primates more readily associate stimuli from certain fear-relevant natural categories, such as snakes, with a negative outcome relative to stimuli from fear-irrelevant categories, such as birds. We assessed whether this bias in fear conditioning extends to social groups defined by race. Our results indicate that individuals from a racial group other than one's own are more readily associated with an aversive stimulus than individuals of one's own race, among both white and black Americans. This prepared fear response might be reduced by close, positive interracial contact.