Here are some interesting findings, but probably not for the reasons you might expect. The power of behaviorism is a driving force in the world of psychology. One of the consequences of the idea which started with B.F. Skinner is that the idea…what we civilians call free will is not free at all. In most ways, people are seen (from a behaviorist perspective) as generally describable input/output units.
If you consider this point of view, the details of Davide Rigoni’s experiment take on a subtly different character. If you presume that we, as humans, don’t possess free will, the results of this experiment are extraordinary.
In essence, if you believe that you have free will…you just might…
Debunking people’s belief in free will takes the intention out of their movements
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2011/05/debunking-peoples-belief-in-free-will.html
Undermining a person’s belief in free will alters the way their brain prepares for a voluntary movement. Davide Rigoni and his colleagues, who made the finding, aren’t sure what the precise mechanism for this effect is, but they speculated that bursting the free will bubble somehow causes people to put less intentional effort into their movements.
Rigoni’s team tested thirty participants on a version of Benjamin Libet’s classic task from the 1980s. This requires that participants watch a dot proceed round a clock face, that they make a voluntary finger movement at a time of their choosing (the current study had participants press a button), and then make a mental note of the position of the clock at the time they made their decision to move. Libet’s controversial discovery, replicated here, was that the brain begins preparing for the finger movement several hundred milliseconds prior to the conscious decision to move, as revealed by electrical activity recorded via electrodes on the scalp. The finding implies that free will is illusory.
For Rigoni’s task, an additional detail was that half the participants read a passage debunking our sense of free will (see comments for the text) before they completed the Libet task. The other half acted as controls and read a passage about consciousness that didn’t mention free will.
The new finding was that the earliest phase of preparatory brain activity known as "the readiness potential" differed between the two groups. This early component (around 1300 to 400 ms prior to the voluntary movement) was weaker in the brains of the participants who’d had their belief in free will diminished. Moreover, a questionnaire administered afterwards showed that this effect on brain activity was greater among the participants who reported having less belief in free will. In contrast, later phases of the brain’s preparatory brain activity were not correlated with belief in free will.
Disbelieving Free Will Makes Brain Less Free
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/free-will
If people are told that free will doesn’t exist, their brains might follow suit.
A test of people who read passages discrediting the notion of free will found an immediate decrease in brain activity related to voluntary action. The findings are just one data point in ongoing scientific investigation of a millennia-old philosophical conundrum, but they raise an intriguing possibility.
“Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,” wrote researchers led by psychologist Davide Rigoni of Italy’s University of Padova in a study published in May’s Psychological Science.
‘Abstract belief systems might have a much more fundamental effect than previously thought.’
Rigoni’s team asked 30 people to read passages from Francis Crick’s 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Half read a passage that didn’t mention free will, while the others read a passage describing it as illusory. All were hooked to electroencephalograph machines that monitored electric activity known as “readiness potential,” which is linked to the neurological computations that occur in the milliseconds before voluntary movement.
Do You Believe In Free Will? Maybe You Should, Even If You Don’t
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38486
Free Will is In the Brain
http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2011/05/free-will-is-in-brain.html
