Aim

1. To find out whether weakening a person's belief in free will makes them more likely to cheat.

Procedure

1. Thirty undergraduates took part, 13 of them female and 17 male, and each was randomly assigned to one of two conditions.
2. Those in the first condition read a passage arguing that free will is an illusion.
3. Those in the second condition read a passage about consciousness that did not mention free will at all, which made this the control condition.
4. Everyone then completed a free will and determinism scale and a mood questionnaire.
5. Participants next worked through mental-arithmetic problems on a computer.
6. They were told the program was faulty and would display the answer unless they pressed the space bar, and the computer secretly counted those presses.

Results

1. The manipulation worked, because those who read the anti-free-will passage held weaker free will beliefs, scoring 13.6 against 16.8 for the control condition.
2. That same group cheated more, with a cheating score of 14.00 against 9.97 for the control condition.
3. Mood did not differ between the two conditions.

Conclusions

1. Weakening belief in free will increases cheating, so what a person believes about the causes of their behaviour affects how they behave.
2. Belief in free will therefore appears to support moral behaviour and self-control.

Strengths

1. A strength is that it was a true experiment with a control condition, so the difference in cheating can be put down to the passage that was read.
2. A second strength is that cheating was measured covertly through behaviour rather than by asking, so participants had no reason to answer in a socially desirable way.

Weaknesses

1. A weakness is that participants were deliberately misled about the faulty program, so the study involved deception.
2. A second weakness is that the sample was thirty undergraduates, which is small and narrow, so the findings may not describe how people in general respond.

Turning this into marks

1. Name Vohs and Schooler, then give the two passages, the arithmetic task and the hidden count of space bar presses.
2. Quote the cheating scores of 14.00 against 9.97, and the belief scores of 13.6 against 16.8.
3. The mark most often lost is stopping at what was found without saying what it means about belief in free will.