Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal? Forthcoming in Mind & Language
نویسنده
چکیده
Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. * We are most grateful to Arudra Burra and Rachana Kamtekar for comments on this paper.
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