Understanding the bases of moral judgment has been a longstanding goal of social science. Factors undergirding morality are argued to be both globally uniform and regionally variable. The current study found evidence of both. For residents of countries with low levels of corruption and transparent systems of governance, free will beliefs predicted greater support for harsh criminal punishment and an intolerance of unethical behavior. For residents of countries beset with corruption and obfuscation, free will beliefs predicted greater support for criminal punishment but were decoupled from judgments of unethical behavior. These findings confirm causal conclusions from experimental research about the influence of free will beliefs on moral judgments and demonstrate variation by sociopolitical context.

Abstract

Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables.