Just wanted to put up a quick note about an exciting new study on the relationship between people's emotions and their intuitions about free will.
It has often been suggested that people's belief in free will is affected in some way by their emotions. (For example, it might be that people are drawn to believe in free will because they are angered by certain wrong-doers and therefore motivated to believe that these wrong-doers are blameworthy.) Florian Cova and colleagues set out to test this hypothesis using a surprising new method. They found participants who suffered from a blunting in emotional response due to frontotemporal dementia and then checked to see how those participants thought about free will. The results were quite surprising...
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