Free Will and Cheating

In 2008, a paper in Psychological Science found that people were more likely to cheat on a test after they had read an essay arguing that behavior was predetermined by environmental factors. The authors suggested from their findings that belief in free will had societal implications.

The redone study found an effect pointing in the same direction as the original, but far weaker. One possible reason, the authors suggest, had to do with how subjects' opinions about free will were manipulated. Participants read an essay, and it's plausible that they were not as engaged in reading and thinking about it as were those in the first study.



The study was cited 341 times in other journals, the most of any of the 100 studies that the Reproducibility Project tried to replicate. There are 24 citations listed in the PubMed database.

In popular news media at the time, the study was covered with a focus on what it meant for societal belief in free will. A Scientific American report in August 2008 called the study clever and added, "The results were clear: Those who read the anti-free-will text cheated more often!" In Psychology Today in March 2008, a reporter wrote, "Reducing belief in free will might also make people exercise less and drink more." A New York Times story in February of the same year said that the researchers interpreted their findings to raise, "questions about how human behavior might change if the belief in free will continued to decrease." However, it added that the researchers, "cautioned against reading too much into the results."