If one of your co-workers is swamped with work and you have some free time, you’re likely to give them a hand right?
Now, what if your supervisor orders you to assist someone – would you be more likely to avoid helping?
According to a new study in the journal Cognition, you probably would.
Led by a team of scientists from the University of California Santa Barbara, the study found that people tend to be naturally helpful, but it challenges the idea of free will by saying having a choice in the matter corrupts our natural helpfulness and results in impulsive selfishness. However, when given time to think about a situation, volunteers are able to bypass the observed tendency toward self-interest.
“Challenging a person’s belief in free will corrupts the more automatic and intuitive mental processes,” study author John Protzko, a postdoctoral psychology scholar at UCSB, said in a press release. “Our study suggests that a challenge to an individual’s belief in free will can shift this default mechanism — at least temporarily — to become intuitively uncooperative and cause an individual to act in their own self-interest.”
How did they study this?
In the study, researchers recruited more than 140 people to participate in an economic contribution game known as Public Goods. In the game, participants decided how much of their own “money” to put into a common pot. Their contributions were doubled and the communal pot was evenly split among the players. Players also kept the money they didn’t add to the pool.
At one point, researchers placed time limitations around volunteer contributions to the public pot, to impact the players’ feeling of free will. Some volunteers were informed they must read instructions and choose how much to give within 10 seconds; others were informed to wait 10 seconds before deciding.
At another point in the study, volunteers were told to read a passage that said neuroscience had just shown our decisions are created by intricate brain interactions before we have conscious access to them. A control group of volunteers read an article on nuclear energy.
The participants were then given a questionnaire on whether or not they felt like they had free will. Those who read the neuroscience passage agreed considerably less that they had free will than those who read the article on nuclear power.
“Challenging a person’s belief in free will did not seem to provide them with a conscious justification for uncooperative behavior,” Protzko said. “If it did, we should have observed fewer contributions when people were given adequate time to think about their decision on the amount to contribute.
“It’s very damaging to hear that we don’t have free will,” said Protzko. “Discounting free will changes the way we see things. Yet given time, we recover and go about our lives as though nothing were different.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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