User talk:John B. Mackenzie

Welcome

Tasks: start a new article • add basic, wanted or requested articles • add definitions • add metadata • edit new pages

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, our help system and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via Twitter. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forum is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any administrator for help, too. Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun!

A good place to find information about various collaborative groups is to follow this link to CZ:Workgroups. Of course, please feel free to ask myself (via my talk page) or others about how to proceed or if you have other questions.

Also, as a start, I have put a copy of the bio from your email on your "User" page.

Best regards,

Dan Nachbar 17:30, 19 May 2007 (CDT)

Free will

Hello John,

I saw that you were taking good care of the free will page. Let me present to you an interesting article; the title speaks by itself: 1: Psychol Sci. 2008 Jan;19(1):49-54.

   The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.
   Vohs KD, Schooler JW.

   Department of Marketing, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. kvohs@carlsonschool.umn.edu

   Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.

   PMID: 18181791 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Pierre-Alain Gouanvic 21:49, 31 May 2008 (CDT)