Al Mele awarded Templeton Grant

Please join me in congratulating Al on receiving a very impressive grant from the John Templeton Foundation for the project: "Free Will: Human and Divine--Empirical and Philosophical Explorations."  For more information on the project please see this website.  This is very exciting for Al, as well as for future research on free will.

Comments

[Andrei Buckareff]

Congrats, Al!

[Tom Clark]

A press release announcing the grant is here. In it, concerns are raised about neuroscientific threats to the causal role of consciousness and the implications for free will. Al also raises the issue of what happens should it be discovered we don't have free will:

"'If we eventually discover that we don't have free will, the news will come out and we can predict that people's behavior will get worse as a consequence,' Mele said. 'We should have plans in place for how to deal with that news.'

"His prediction about the degeneration of people's behavior is based on experiments in which psychologists induced a disbelief in free will among study participants to find out how that disbelief would affect their behavior. It wasn't pretty: When participants believed they had no control over their actions — and therefore presumably felt they were not responsible for their behavior — they cheated and were more aggressive."

I think this prediction, based on limited and preliminary data, jumps the gun and could bias the direction of research. Psychologist John Bargh makes the same point in a Psychology Today blog about his debate with Roy Baumeister at the 2009 conference in Tampa of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, in which research on free will came up (I recommend reading the whole thing since I can't quote it all):

"At Tampa I noted the Vohs & Schooler paper and the more recent Baumeister paper in which telling research participants about purported scientific findings that free will was an illusion and did not exist increased the participants' subsequent negative social behavior -- cheating, stealing, and aggression. I noted the particular choice of dependent measures in these studies -- all negative social behaviors -- and wondered aloud what the point of these studies really was. I also noted that at least one of these studies was funded by a philanthropic foundation promoting spirituality and the reconciliation of religion and science...

"I mentioned above that in the published studies on the consequences of being informed that science had shown free will did not exist, the researchers chose to look only for negative social behaviors. Why not positive ones as well? After all, among the last words of Jesus Christ on the cross were: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." In other words, perhaps knowledge that free will did not exist would cause us to be more understanding and forgiving towards the faults and misbehaviors of others. And there may be other benefits as well. As I learned after the debate, Jonathan Schooler and colleagues had already thought of and conducted such a study. They indeed found that telling experimental participants that free will did not exist caused those participants to be more forgiving towards the transgressions of others." This is the Shariff, Greene and Schooler paper I mentioned in The Case of the Missing Articles thread.

Bargh goes on to say that informing people that they don't have (contra-causal) free will (if indeed they don't) might have the salutary effect of making them more wary of manipulations by corporations and politicians. So it's too early to say whether the death of libertarian free will, on balance, would be demoralizing or otherwise harmful. And after all, it might only be demoralizing because (many) people have been brought up to believe (falsely, imo) that we can't be morally responsible and effective agents without being causal exceptions to nature. My full response to such worries is here, FWIW.

All the above aside, congrats to Al for winning this fantastic opportunity to dig deeper into the free will question.

[Kip]

Congratulations, Al! And thanks for hosting an amazing conference in Tallahassee!

[John Fischer]

Congratulations, Al.
This is great news. Also, congratulations to FSU,
John

[Chris Franklin]

Congratulations, Al. I can't wait to see all the great work that comes from this.

[Neal Tognazzini]

This has got to be one of the coolest things I've heard in a long time. Congratulations. I'm already excited.

[patrick todd]

Congrats! This looks fantastic.

[Dan Speak]

Man, that stinks, Al. Sorry to hear your going to have to handle all that money; not to mention the responsibility for our sub-discipline. What a bummer.

Or, sincere congratulations!!

[Kevin Timpe]

Congrats, Al.

For those of you intereted, 'Finding Free Will' is one of Templeton's active funding priorities for 2010. More information here:

http://www.templeton.org/what_we_fund/2010_funding_priorities/finding_free_will/index.html?utm_source=JTF+E-Mail+List+Manager&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Finding+Free+Will&utm_content=Finding+Free+Will&utm_campaign=Templeton+Report%3A+Our+Grantmaking+Reinvented

[Tamler Sommers]

Congratulations Al!

And don't forget about the unfortunate skeptics out there. Our poor job performance makes successful grant applications that much more important.

[Meghan Griffith]

Congratulations! Very very cool....