Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Free love? On the relation between belief in free will,
determinism, and passionate love
Jordane Boudesseul a,⇑,1, Anthony Lantian a,1,2, Florian Cova b, Laurent Bègue a
a
b
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, France
University of Geneva, Switzerland
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 27 December 2015
Revised 14 July 2016
Accepted 3 September 2016
Keywords:
Free will
Determinism
Passionate love
Romantic relationships
a b s t r a c t
Is love possible if we are not free? Some philosophers consider that true love is necessarily
free, while others think that the nature of love makes it incompatible with a certain type of
freedom. Here, we explored the relationship between feelings of passionate love, belief in
free will and determinism across three online studies. In Study 1 (N = 257), participants
who believed strongly in free will (or determinism) expressed stronger passionate love.
In Study 2 (N = 305), we again found a positive association between belief in free will (or
determinism) and passionate love, although the passionate love-determinism relationship
seems more conditional. Finally, Study 3 (N = 309) confirmed the relationship between
belief in free will and passionate love but not between belief in determinism and passionate love. These findings, along with a meta-analysis, suggest that both beliefs in free will
and determinism are compatible with passionate love.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
– To enter in these bonds, is to be free.
[John Donne, ‘‘Elegy XX: To his mistress going to bed”]
1. Introduction
The rapid progress in affective neuroscience and neurochemistry of human attachment have recently led philosophers
and bioethicists interested in neuro-enhancement to ask the following question: Would it be morally appropriate to use
‘‘love drugs” to ensure the stability of our marriage or to love our children in the way they deserve to be? (Feinberg &
Shafer-Landau, 2013; Liao, 2011; Naar, 2016; Nyholm, 2015; Savulescu & Sandberg, 2008). One concern that can be raised,
however, is the possibility that love induced by drugs is not ‘‘ours” but the product of external influences and would thus not
count as ‘‘authentic love”. This concern suggests that we might perceive an essential relationship between free will and love,
as true love would require some degree of freedom to be considered valuable. But does this connection really exist?
Whether we have free will and are morally responsible for our behaviors and actions is one of the most central and longlasting questions of philosophy, one that still raises substantial disagreement (Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, & Vargas, 2007).
⇑ Corresponding author at: LIP/PC2S, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, 1251, avenue Centrale, BP 47, 38400 Grenoble Cedex 9, France.
1
2
E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Boudesseul).
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Present address: Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.09.003
1053-8100/Ó 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
However, philosophers not only disagree about whether we have free will; they also disagree on what would happen and
what we should do if the widespread belief in human free will ever turned out to be false. Pessimistic philosophers consider
that, if philosophers and scientists discovered that we have no free will, this truth should be kept away from the public:
undermining people’s belief in free will would have catastrophic consequences, such as people no longer trying to exert control over their behavior and acting more immorally (Smilansky, 2000, 2002). Optimistic philosophers, on the contrary, consider that the disappearance of people’s belief in free will would lead to overall positive results, with people abandoning their
inadequate retribution-based morality and illusory belief in a just world (Caruso, 2014; Greene & Cohen, 2004; Nadelhoffer,
2011). Finally, a few remaining philosophers have argued for a middle ground according to which the effects of abandoning
belief in free will would be insignificant (Nichols, 2007).
Such philosophical questions can without doubt benefit from a psychological perspective, in which the function and role
of a certain class of beliefs are examined and assessed through the collection of empirical evidence. In the past decade, psychologists have begun investigating the cognitive and behavioral effects of belief in free will and moral responsibility, and
their results seem to confirm the pessimists’ bleak predictions (Baumeister, Masicampo, & DeWall, 2009; Vohs & Schooler,
2008). As far as behavior is concerned, undermining participants’ belief in free will (by having them read scientific writings
disparaging the existence of free will) has been shown to lead them to act less morally (Vohs & Schooler, 2008), more aggressively, and less pro-socially (Baumeister et al., 2009). This has been tied to the fact that diminishing participants’ belief in
free will reduced their self-control (Rigoni, Kühn, Gaudino, Sartori, & Brass, 2012). Furthermore, it has been shown that people with lower belief in free will tend to attribute less blame to criminals (Shariff et al., 2014) and people guilty of infidelity
(Diehl, 2014), as well as inflict lesser punishments on them (Shariff et al., 2014). Overall, it seems that diminishing people’s
belief in free will lead them to perceive themselves and others as exerting less control over their actions, and thus to judge
these actions more leniently and their authors less responsible for them.
This conclusion, though interesting, is far from surprising: after all, it is widely accepted that our notion of free will is
intimately tied to questions of self-control and grounds attributions of moral responsibility (Vohs & Baumeister, 2009). However, more surprising predictions have been made: it has indeed been suggested by some philosophers that belief in free will
is also essential for experiencing certain emotions such as resentment, gratitude, or guilt (Smilansky, 2000; Strawson, 1974).
Since those emotions are typically conceived as passive phenomena beyond our voluntary control, it might seem unlikely at
first glance that free will is somehow related to them. Still, recent studies have indeed shown that reducing belief in free will
reduces gratitude (MacKenzie, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2014) and makes people less likely to learn from past errors based on
guilt (Stillman & Baumeister, 2010).
Nevertheless, one of philosophers’ predictions has so far never been put to test: that belief in free will is necessary for
romantic love, and thus that reduced belief in free will would undermine romantic love for one’s partner (Anglin, 1990;
Strawson, 1974). Indeed, according to these philosophers, we would not think that we would really love someone if we
had in fact been forced to by being administered ‘‘love pills”, and this suggests that free will is a necessary condition for
a certain kind of love (Kane, 1998). Hence, true love is free love, and experiencing love requires believing in free will. But
is it really the case?
1.1. Free will and passionate love: The philosophical approach
Let us first note that love is a broad term that can be used to describe very different phenomena. For example, psychologists and philosophers typically distinguish romantic love from parental or compassionate love, and consider that they
evolved from distinct evolutionary processes (Buss, 2005; Frankfurt, 2004; Hatfield, Bensman, & Rapson, 2012). However,
when philosophers claim that love and belief in free will are closely intertwined, they do not speak about parental love,
but about the kind of love that can be reciprocated by the one we love, in a relationship between any two human beings
(Smilansky, 2008). The concept that shapes the best this multi-faceted phenomenon is based on one particular kind of
romantic love, namely ‘‘passionate love”, traditionally defined in the literature as ‘‘a state of intense longing for union with
another” (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986, p. 383). Although passionate love can be considered a kind of romantic love, romantic
love is not necessarily passionate (Hendrick & Hendrick, 2006).
Now, why think that lack of free will would undermine passionate love? To answer this question, it is important to note
that this claim comes into flavor. In certain occasions, it means that true passionate love could not exist if we did not have
free will. In others, it means that passionate love could still exist if we did not have free will, but would lose much of its value
and significance for us. For example, Kane writes that:
There is a kind of love we desire from others—parents, children (when they are old enough), spouses, lovers and friends—
whose significance is diminished . . . by the thought that they are determined to love us entirely by instinct or circumstances beyond their control or not entirely up to them.. . .To be loved by others in this desired sense requires that the
ultimate source of others’ love lies in their own wills.
[Kane, 1998, p. 88]
One argument for this view, which we already mentioned, is that we would not want people to love us only because they
are forced or determined to. Thus, Anglin claims that:
J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
49
If I learn that my spouse loves me only because this ‘love’ is the inevitable product of some childhood experience then the
whole relationship takes on a strange and dark color.
[Anglin, 1990, p. 20]
Of course, not all philosophers agree with such claims. For example, Pereboom (2001, 2009) and Sommers (2007, 2012)
both argue that passionate love does not require free will. After all, we would not appreciate that people can stop loving us at
will: true love is traditionally considered as something that is beyond one’s control. And one of the most iconic love story of
the Western tradition, the one of Tristan and Iseult, begins with both protagonists falling in love due to a love potion. Thus,
far from being a precondition for true passionate love, free will might even be its antithesis, which is why the philosopher
Lucretius advocated not to fall in love, for fear of losing freedom (Lucretius, 2012).
These paradoxes have even led certain philosophers to consider that there is an irreducible tension in the way we think
about love, free will, and determinism, and that this tension is characteristic of the very experience of love:
The man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on becoming the object of
passion which flows forth mechanically. He does not want to possess an automaton. . . On the other hand, the lover cannot
be satisfied with that superior form of freedom which is a free and voluntary engagement.
[Sartre, 1956, p. 367]
Whether passionate love’s existence or value depends on the existence of free will is a claim that is beyond empirical
investigation and requires the conceptual instruments of philosophy to assess. However, philosophical claims can sometimes
have empirical implications. Thus, one standard argument in favor of the claim that love’s value would be undermined by the
inexistence of free will is that love requires the personal conviction that the one we love is a free agent. And it would be
because the inexistence of free will renders this assumption false that it undermines love, making it rest on an illusion
(Coates, 2013). Kane’s claim already reflects this idea, by requiring that true love ‘‘requires that the ultimate source of others’
love lies in their own wills” (Kane, 1998, p.88), but he is not alone:
It is an essential part of our most intimate relationships that we view our love as a ‘freely given gift.’
[Anglin, 1990, p. 20]
To suppose that human beings are wholly without free will (of the sort required for moral responsibility) seems naturally
to require that we give up some of the satisfaction we derive from our relationships. . . One type of relationship especially
illustrative of this dependence of a sense of genuineness upon an assumption of free will is the romantic sort of personal
relationship.
[Ekstrom, 2000, p. 16]
A commitment to belief in free will may be integral to feelings that are extremely important to us independently of the
issue of moral responsibility: feelings of gratitude, for example, and perhaps of love.
[Strawson, 2004, para. 23]
Thus, several versions of the claim that passionate love’s existence and value requires the existence of free will rests on
the assumption that passionate love requires seeing its object as a free agent, in the same way as fear requires seeing its
object as dangerous or joy requires appraising its object as positive. This means that belief in free will is a prerequisite
for the experience of love. Thus, if this is the case, we should expect a positive relationship between belief in free will
and feelings of passionate love.
However, as we saw, this argument runs contrary to a long tradition according to which love is out of our control, and
cannot be the result of free choice, lest it loses its authenticity. This is why we should also expect a positive relationship
between belief in determinism and feelings of passionate love. Thus, we expect people’s attitudes to reflect the tension that
is at the heart of philosophy of love: that love is related both to free will and to determinism.
1.2. Relations between free will and passionate love
Thus, the question is: is there any psychological reason to think that there is a positive relationship between one’s belief
in free will and one’s passionate love for a given person? At first sight, such reasons can be found in a range of metaphors
tying freedom and love. Indeed, many popular expressions typically connect the concept of freedom (free will in our case) to
the concept of love. Love is supposed to ‘‘give wings”, making people ‘‘light as a feather”. While these metaphors are obviously to be taken as figures of speech, embodied cognition has recently emphasized what can be learned from the existence
and widespread use of such metaphors (Barsalou, Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003). According to this approach, metaphors
can map actual physical experiences into abstract concepts and the context triggers the cognitive domain relevant to the
metaphor, like in ‘‘that’s just not clear” where ‘‘clear” activates the visual system (Hellmann, Echterhoff, & Thoben, 2013;
Lakoff, 2014). Expressions like ‘‘give wings” could then indicate that love is experienced as opening new choices one previously did not have access to. As the availability of choices typically increases belief in free will (see Feldman, Baumeister, &
Wong, 2014), it is thus reasonable to think that passionate love could increase belief in free will. Alternatively, these metaphors might reflect the fact that thinking about a person one loves increases the glucose level in one’s body (Stanton,
Campbell, & Loving, 2014), which in turn increases self-control (Gailliot & Baumeister, 2007; but see also Kurzban, 2009;
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Vadillo, Gold, & Osman, 2016). Given that self-control is also strongly tied to belief in free will (Baumeister & Monroe, 2014;
Clarkson et al., 2015; Rigoni et al., 2012), this may constitute a plausible physiological and cognitive explanation of how feelings of passionate love could be positively related to belief in free will.
Another reason to assume a positive relationship between belief in free will and passionate love is that it can help to
explain a surprising paradox raised by recent studies on the effects of believing in free will. As mentioned earlier, increased
belief in free will tends to make people more severe and less forgiving. Still, a recent study has shown that increased belief in
free will is linked to higher commitment in relationships and, more surprisingly, to a greater willingness to forgive relationship partners for their faults (Crescioni, Baumeister, Ainsworth, Ent, & Lambert, 2015). One way to explain these results is to
suppose that, though higher belief in free will usually makes people more punitive, this trend is negated in the case of relationship partners, because higher belief in free will also intensifies passionate love for one’s partner.
1.3. Determinism and passionate love
As we just saw, there are good reasons to predict that belief in free will would be positively connected to passionate love.
However, there are also good reasons to make another prediction that belief in determinism might be positively connected to
passionate love, as suggested by a myriad of metaphors and figures of speech. For instance, ‘‘to fall in love” may trigger a
concept from the motor system to indicate that we were unable to predict the onset of this romantic feeling and had no control upon its occurrence. Indeed, it seems clear that love is a passive phenomenon: we do not decide to fall in love. ‘‘Falling in
love” seems involuntary, like ‘‘falling ill.” Strong biological constraints seem to be involved in the mechanism of romantic
love: for instance, people who looked at pictures of a beloved person rejecting them showed activations in brain areas typically involved in addiction (Fisher, Brown, Aron, Strong, & Mashek, 2010). Hence, metaphors such as ‘‘being addicted to
someone” illustrate intuitions about the deterministic nature of love. Moreover, some authors have recently highlighted that
oxytocin, the so-called ‘‘love hormone” (Colaianni, Sun, Zaidi, & Zallone, 2015), produces the same effects as alcohol on
sociocognitive functioning (Mitchell, Gillespie, & Abu-Akel, 2015). In these results may lie some plausible physiological
explanations of how feelings of passionate love could be positively related to belief in determinism.
Moreover, in the same way as we do not voluntarily fall in love, it also seems that we cannot stop loving a person at will.
Indeed, cognitive control is impaired in the early stages of passionate love (van Steenbergen, Langeslag, Band, & Hommel,
2014). In fact, as mentioned earlier, it is not even clear that such control would be desirable. Rather, people may prefer that
their partners love them because they are attracted to them, not because they are free to choose to. Imagine if your partner
told you that she/he can stop loving you at will: you would then consider that she/he does not really love you. Sometimes,
people do not even realize that they fall in love (Lasswell & Lasswell, 1976). Indeed, as we traditionally conceive it, true love
is beyond one’s control. It has a metaphorical illustration in Indian culture when people say that ‘‘someone has taken control
of my heart”, making explicit that a loss of control might trigger a link between belief in determinism and passionate love.
Finally, and in accordance with the idea that love is beyond one’s control, love is often seen as a factor undermining one’s
self-control. It could be illustrated by the fact that ‘‘crimes of passion”, in which the perpetrator acts in the ‘‘heat of passion”
without any prior intent to kill, tend to be judged more leniently, supposedly because of ‘‘extreme mental disturbance”
(Clavel, 2011).
Thus, there are many reasons to think that people mentally associate love (and, more particularly, passionate love) with
determinism, as something that had to happen and is beyond one’s control. This association is reflected in many everyday
platitudes about love: since Plato (385 B.C./2003), it is not unusual to talk about love as a thing that was meant to happen
and about the loved one as someone we were predestined to meet, as when we say: ‘‘I was made to love her/him.” Given
these facts, one could reasonably expect belief in determinism to positively correlate with passionate love.
1.4. Overview
As we see, despite the apparent contradiction between free will and determinism, we have both positive reasons to think
that belief in free will display a positive relationship to feelings of passionate love and that belief in determinism will also
show a positive relationship to feelings of passionate love.
Motivated by the aforementioned considerations, the three following online studies aim at identifying the existence of a
positive correlation between belief in free will and passionate love on the one hand, and belief in determinism and passionate love on the other hand. We collected most of our data from an American and an Indian sample, by using different scales
in each study to assess beliefs in free will and determinism.
2. Study 1
The aim of the first study was to determine whether beliefs in free will and determinism are indeed positively correlated
with passionate love. We predicted that both beliefs in free will and determinism would be positively correlated with passionate love.
J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
51
2.1. Participants
Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to participate in an online study. In total, 257 participants (M = 29.97, SD = 8.80, 39% women) participated. Most participants (82%) were located in India and a minority (12%)
were located in the United States. Workers were paid $0.10 for taking part.
2.2. Materials and procedure
To measure passionate love, we used the Passionate Love scale (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986), in which participants have to
think about a person they love or once loved and rate their agreement with 30 statements on a 9-point scale (1 = ‘‘Not at all
true”, 9 = ‘‘Definitely true”). Having demonstrated inter-cultural reliability, neurophysiological patterns, and high internal
consistency, it seemed the finest tool to evaluate the kind of love philosophers referred to (Hatfield et al., 2012). The scale
measures three components of passionate love: including a cognitive component (e.g., ‘‘No one else could [loved one’s name]
like I do”), an emotional component (e.g., ‘‘I possess a powerful attraction for [loved one’s name]”), and a behavioral component (e.g., ‘‘I take delight in studying the movements and angles of [loved one’s name]’s body”). We were interested in the
overall global score more than in the specific sub-dimensions; the global measure had excellent reliability (Cronbach
a = 0.97).
To measure beliefs in free will and determinism, we chose a scale that presented the advantage of treating these two
dimensions as independent, rather than opposite. The Free Will and Determinism scale (FAD-Plus; Paulhus & Carey, 2011)
is a 27-item scale in which participants had to rate their agreement with each statement on a 5-point scale (1 = ‘‘Strongly
disagree”, 5 = ‘‘Strongly agree”). The scale includes 4 dimensions: free will (e.g., ‘‘People have complete control over the decisions they make”), fatalistic determinism (e.g., ‘‘My future has already been determined by fate”), scientific determinism (e.g.,
‘‘Your genes determine your future”), and unpredictability (e.g., ‘‘Life is hard to predict because it is almost totally random”).
In this study, we only focused on the free will and scientific determinism dimensions, both of which had good reliability (free
will: a = 0.74; scientific determinism: a = 0.75).
Participants completed these two scales in a counterbalanced order. At the very end, people were asked to indicate their
country of residence, gender, age, relationship status (‘‘are you currently in a romantic relationship?”), native language, and
what they thought the goal of the study was. We also added an attention check under the form of the open question: ‘‘Two
plus two equals?”
2.3. Preliminary results
Three participants failed the attention check and were excluded. Thus, our final sample was composed of 254
participants. Belief in free will (M = 3.82, SD = 0.63) and belief in scientific determinism (M = 3.59, SD = 0.66) were
positively correlated, r(252) = 0.46, 95% CI [0.36, 0.55], p < 0.001, with an effect size between medium to large
(Cohen, 1992).3
As we could have expected, passionate love was higher in participants currently in a romantic relationship
(M = 7.07, SD = 1.34, n = 202) compared to participants who were single at the time of the study (M = 6.13, SD = 1.89,
n = 52), t(252) = 4.10, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.49, 1.39], g2 = 0.063.4 The order of measures (free will/determinism-love
vs. love-free will/determinism) did not significantly impact the mean level of free will, determinism, and love
(ps > 0.16).5,6
2.4. Results
We tested our two hypotheses with the same model by running a multiple regression with passionate love (M = 6.87,
SD = 1.51) as dependent variable, with belief in free will (as a continuous centered variable), belief in determinism (as a continuous centered variable), relationship status, and all their interactions as independent variables. We subsequently ran the
same model again with the interaction terms removed because none of them were significant (ps > 0.065).7
3
We systematically checked for the presence of potential statistical outliers in all the statistical tests presented in this paper. We considered all the
observations with a studentized deleted residual greater than 4 as outliers (see McClelland, 2014). When nothing is indicated, it means that results are the same
whether these potential outliers are removed or not.
4
We are aware of the unequal sample size between these two groups, but our results could not be only due to people currently involved in a romantic
relationship, as shown in the following analysis in which we statistically controlled for this variable.
5
When we removed the two outliers identified for the effect of order on the level of passionate love (studentized deleted residuals >4.07), we found that
passionate love is significantly higher in the love-free will order condition (M = 7.11, SD = 1.31, n = 121) than in the free will-love order condition (M = 6.74,
SD = 1.52, n = 131), t(250) = 2.04, p = 0.043, [0.02, 1.44], g2 = 0.016.
6
In our sample, we did not observe a significant difference of scientific determinism between men and women, as found by Paulhus and Carey (2011) in their
original paper. Indeed, men did not hold stronger belief in scientific determinism (M = 3.57, SD = 0.63, n = 155) than women (M = 3.60, SD = 0.72, n = 99), t(252)
= 0.36, p = 0.72.
7
When we removed the four outliers (studentized deleted residuals >4.04), an unexpected significant second order interaction involving belief in free will,
belief in determinism, and relationship status was found, t(242) = 2.05, p = 0.041, [ 1.41, 0.03], g2 = 0.017.
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J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
As predicted by our first hypothesis, belief in free will was positively related with the level of passionate love,
t(250) = 7.23, 95% CI [0.75, 1.31], p < 0.001, g2 = 0.173, above and beyond the level of belief in determinism and
relationship status. Moreover, as predicted by our second hypothesis, belief in determinism was also positively related
to passionate love, t(250) = 2.23, [0.03, 0.56], p = 0.027, g2 = 0.019, controlling for belief in free will and relationship
status.
2.5. Discussion
We thus confirmed our first hypothesis about the relationship between belief in free will and passionate love: belief in
free will was positively related to passionate love, meaning that the more participants tended to endorse belief in free will,
the more they felt passionate love for who they love (controlling for belief in determinism and relationship status). We also
found evidence in favor of our second hypothesis: belief in determinism was also positively related to level of passionate love
(controlling for belief in free will and relationship status).
One important limit of our findings is their cross-cultural validity, given the very large number of Indian people in our
sample (n = 208). We do not know if these results would generalize outside India, in the Western world for example. To overcome the cultural limitation of this present study and see if the relationships between free will and passionate love, and
between determinism and passionate love remain consistent across cultures, in the next study, we planned to recruit a comparable number of Indians and Americans. Moreover, to rule out the possibility that our results might have been due only to
the material used, we decided to replicate these findings using another measure of free will and determinism: the Free Will
Inventory (Nadelhoffer, Shepard, Nahmias, Sripada, & Ross, 2014).
3. Study 2
3.1. Participants
Participants were recruited through MTurk to participate in an online study. This time, as opposed to what we did in
Study 1, we added a location criteria and recruitment was restricted to people residing in India and in the United States.
To increase the reliability of our data, we restricted participation to workers with approval ratings above 95% on previous
tasks. Our final sample was composed of 305 participants (M = 31.80, SD = 10.92, 43% women) with 47% coming from India
and 52% coming from the United States. Each was paid $0.30 for their participation.
3.2. Materials and procedure
Beliefs in free will and determinism were measured using 10 items from a preliminary version of the Free Will Inventory
(Nadelhoffer et al., 2014). Participants had to rate their agreement with these items on 7-point scale (1 = ‘‘Strongly disagree”,
7 = ‘‘Strongly agree”). Five items measured belief in free will (e.g., ‘‘People always have the ability to do otherwise”, a = 0.73)
and five items measured belief in determinism (e.g., ‘‘The universe is a series of fixed events”, a = 0.81). We used this preliminary version because its items seemed to subtly distinguish free will components from determinism components. The
measure of passionate love was the same as in Study 1 (Hatfield & Sprecher, 1986). In this study, the reliability of the Passionate Love Scale was again very high (a = 0.97).
Participants completed these two scales in a counterbalanced order. Then, people completed a demographic questionnaire asking them about their country of residence, gender, age, relationship status (76% were in a relationship at the time
of the study), native language, level in English (beginner, intermediate, and fluent), and what they thought the goal of the
study was. Within the different scales, we included four attention checks to identify unreliable participants (e.g., ‘‘two plus
two makes four”, ‘‘the color of grass is blue”).
3.3. Preliminary results
We excluded people based on criteria set prior to the study; that is, participants who made more than two mistakes on
the four attentional checks (n = 27, including 24 from India), participants who reported themselves as beginner in English
(n = 4 Indians), and participants who unexpectedly did not pass through MTurk to participate in the study (n = 38). The final
sample contained 238 participants.
This time, belief in free will (M = 5.48, SD = 0.89) was not significantly correlated with belief in determinism (M = 4.20,
SD = 1.33), r(236) = 0.10, 95% CI [ 0.22, 0.03], p = 0.14. Similar to the last study, level of passionate love among participants
in relationship at the time of the study was higher (M = 7.24, SD = 1.15, n = 180) than among single participants (M = 6.04,
SD = 2.07, n = 58), t(236) = 5.56, p < 0.001, [0.78, 1.63], g2 = 0.116. As seen previously, the order of measures did not significantly impact the mean level of free will, determinism, and love (ps > 0.0698).
8
When we removed one outlier identified for the effect of order on the level of free will (studentized deleted residual = 4.20), the p value changes from 0.069
to 0.12.
J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
53
3.4. Results
We tested our two hypotheses with the same model, by running a multiple regression with passionate love as the dependent variable, and belief in free will (as a continuous centered variable), belief in determinism (as a continuous centered variable), relationship status, country of residence (India or the United States), and all their interactions as independent
variables. As none of the interaction terms were significant (ps > 0.15), we ran the same model again, removing the interaction terms. We removed the variable ‘‘country of residence” from the model because it was not significantly related to passionate love (p = 0.10).9
As expected, we found an effect of free will on passionate love: people with higher level of belief in free will had a higher
level of passionate love, t(234) = 3.22, p = 0.001, 95% CI [0.13, 0.53], g2 = 0.042 (controlling for belief in determinism and
relationship status). Regarding belief in determinism, when we controlled for belief in free will and relationship status,
we found a positive link between belief in determinism and passionate love, t(234) = 2.83, p = 0.005, [0.06, 0.33], g2 = 0.033.
3.5. Discussion
We successfully replicated the results of our first study: the more participants believed in free will, the more passionate
love they felt. We also replicated our findings about the relationship between belief in determinism and passionate love:
participants who believed more in determinism also reported a higher level of passionate love. Nevertheless, this latter relationship seems less robust (contrary to the relationship between belief in free will and passionate love) when the influence of
the country of residence is taken into account.
However, one limit of our study was that we only used a preliminary version of the Free Will Inventory (Nadelhoffer et al.,
2014). Indeed, some items in the preliminary free will subscale were metaphorical and probably lent themselves to diverse
interpretations (e.g. ‘‘People’s future are genuinely open – like a series of forking paths”), while others measured a quasitrivial sense of free will (e.g., ‘‘How people’s lives unfold is largely up to them”). In the final version of the Free Will Inventory,
however, some items have been modified to be sensitive to a stronger sense of free will (e.g., ‘‘People always have free will”
instead of ‘‘People have free will”). This is why we decided to run a new version of this study, this time using the definitive
version of the Free Will Inventory (Nadelhoffer et al., 2014).
4. Study 3
4.1. Participants
Participants were recruited through MTurk to participate in an online study. As in Study 2, we added a location
criteria and recruitment was restricted to people residing in India and in the United States and to workers with above
95% approval ratings on previous tasks. We recruited 309 participants (Mage = 33.13; SDage = 10.90, 45% women). In
total, 44% of our participants came from India and 56% from the United States. Workers were paid $0.30 for their
participation.
4.2. Material and procedure
We measured free will and determinism with the final version of the Free Will Inventory (Nadelhoffer et al.,
2014, see Appendix A). The scale usually contains 15 statements and participants have to rate their agreement with
each item on a 7-point scale (1 = ‘‘Strongly disagree”, 7 = ‘‘Strongly agree”). However, we did not include the items
corresponding to the subscale dualism/anti-reductionism, instead, we chose to include only items corresponding to
the free will subscale (five items, e.g., ‘‘People always have free will”, a = 0.73) and to the determinism subscale
(five items, e.g., ‘‘Everything that has ever happened had to happen precisely as it did, given what happened
before”, a = 0.86).
All other measures were identical to the ones used in Study 2 (the Passionate Love scale was still internally consistent,
a = 0.96), except that we replaced the relationship status question by questions about religiosity (‘‘What are your current
religious affiliations?”, ‘‘How often do you take part in religious practices?”) to get a better idea of religious and cultural difference between the Indian and American samples.
4.3. Preliminary results
We excluded participants who made more than two mistakes on the attention checks (n = 30 with 19 from India), participants who reported themselves to be beginners in English (3 Indians), and participants who did not pass through MTurk
to participate in the study (n = 49). The final sample was composed of 233 participants.
9
Note that if we include it in the model, the relationship between determinism and passionate love (controlling for the other variables) become nonsignificant, t(233) = 1.31, p = 0.19, 95% CI [ 0.06, 0.28], g2 = 0.007.
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J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
In contrast with what has been observed in Study 2 and previous studies (Nadelhoffer et al., 2014), belief in free will was
positively and significantly correlated with belief in determinism, r(231) = 0.14, 95% CI [0.02, 0.27], p = 0.028. Among Indian
participants, 98.1% described themselves as being religious (Hindu, Catholic, Muslim, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelist, Jains,
Christian) while 1.9% described themselves as atheists or agnostics. Among Indian religious participants, 43.8% reported taking part in religious practices on a daily basis or a couple of times a week. Among American participants, 51.6% reported
being religious, 24.6% described themselves as atheist or agnostic, and 23% said not having religion. Among American religious participants, 27.7% reported taking part in religious practices on a daily basis or a couple of times a week. Finally, as in
the two previous studies, the order of presentation of the measures did not significantly impact the mean level of free will,
determinism, and love (ps > 0.50).
4.4. Results
Like our two previous studies, we tested our two hypotheses with the same model, running a multiple regression with
passionate love as the dependent variable, and belief in free will (as a continuous centered variable), belief in determinism
(as a continuous centered variable), country of residence (India or the United States), and all their interactions as independent variables. We found an unexpected interaction effect of country of residence and free will on the level of passionate
love, t(225) = 2.27, 95% CI [0.08, 1.13], p = 0.024, g2 = 0.022. This suggests that the relationship between free will and love
is stronger among Indians (simple effect, t(225) = 3.72, p < 0.001, g2 = 0.058) than among Americans (simple effect, t
(225) = 1.91, p = 0.058, g2 = 0.016,10) considering for all other variables in the model. There were no other significant interactions terms (other ps > 0.56). Thus, we reran the same model, removing all the interaction terms except the interaction between
country of residence and free will.
In accordance with our first hypothesis, people with a higher level of belief in free will displayed a higher level of
passionate love, t(228) = 5.27, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.37, 0.81], g2 = 0.109, controlling for all other variables in the model
(i.e., belief in determinism, country of residence, and the interaction between belief in free will and country of
residence). Nevertheless, contrary to our second hypothesis and the results of Studies 1 and 2, even though the
hypothesized positive relationship was observed between belief in determinism and passionate love, it failed to reach
statistical significance in a statistical model controlling for all other variables, t(228) = 0.75, p = 0.45, [ 0.08, 0.19],
g2 = 0.002.
4.5. Discussion
Once again, our results revealed a positive relationship between belief in free will and passionate love: people who experienced higher feelings of passionate love also reported stronger belief in free will. Thus, we were able to find this relationship in three different studies, suggesting that it is robust and reliable.
However, the same is not true for the relationship between belief in determinism and passionate love. One possible explanation for these inconsistencies might come from the use of different scales across different studies, and the possibility that
those scales have different ways of conceptualizing free will and determinism. However, the scales we used in Study 2 and 3
were very similar, being different versions (an early and a definitive version) of the same scale. It is also possible that the
absence of a significant relationship between belief in determinism and feelings of passionate love in Study 3 is due to
the fact that we did not measure (and hence, control for) the relationship status.
5. Meta-analysis
To establish the robustness of the effects found above, a meta-analysis was conducted with three main objectives:
(1) to demonstrate the existence of a consistent positive relation between belief in free will and passionate love
across our three studies, (2) to prove the existence of a positive relation between belief in determinism and
passionate love across our three studies, (3) and finally, to test the orthogonality of belief in free will and
determinism. Using a random-effects model on partial correlations (Borenstein, Hedges, Higgins, & Rothstein, 2009;
Furuya-Kanamori & Doi, 2016), we found an overall positive and significant association (medium effect size) between
belief in free will and passionate love (r = 0.30, 95% CI [0.21, 0.40], SE = 0.05, p < 0.001), an overall positive and
significant association (with a descriptively smaller effect size) between belief in determinism and passionate love
(r = 0.16, [0.09, 0.23], SE = 0.04, p < 0.001),11 and a non-significant association between belief in free will and belief
in determinism (r = 0.18, [ 0.16, 0.52], SE = 0.17, p = 0.29). This last result suggests the independence of these two
constructs in our samples.
10
When we removed five outliers identified (studentized deleted residuals >4.11) for the simple effect of belief in free will on passionate love for the
Americans, the p value changed from 0.058 to 0.035.
11
These two previous overall estimates of the effect size have been computed by using the partial correlations corresponding to the correlations between
belief in free will and passionate love, controlling for belief in determinism, and vice versa, for the three studies. Please note that the conclusions remain the
same if we compute the bivariate correlations between belief in free will (or determinism) and passionate love, without controlling for belief in determinism (or
free will).
J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
55
6. General discussion
6.1. Results, limitations, and directions for future research
Across three different online studies we were able to confirm our first hypothesis, namely, the existence of a relatively
robust relationship between belief in free will and passionate love. We found that people who believe in free will reported
higher feelings of passionate love towards someone they love, even when controlling for the level of belief in determinism,
relationship status, and cultural background. Our meta-analysis showed a positive association between belief in free will and
passionate love, and also a positive one between belief in determinism and passionate love (albeit descriptively weaker in
terms of size).
Moreover, despite an unexpected cultural difference that we observed in Study 3 (i.e., the link between free will and love
is stronger among Indians than among Americans),12 the relationship between belief in free will (and determinism) and passionate love goes in the same direction in those two very different nations, thus suggesting it runs deeper than a mere cultural
association, and could have evolutionary roots.
What does this mean for the philosophical claim that passionate love requires seeing its object as a free agent, and
thereby presupposes a belief in the existence of free will? It is clear that our results lend support to this hypothesis by confirming one prediction, namely: the existence of a link between the feeling of love (or, at least, passionate love) and belief in
free will. However, our results do not go as far as showing that passionate love is grounded in belief in free will, because it
says nothing about the nature of this link. Indeed, one limitation of our studies is their correlational nature, which leaves
door open to other interpretations of the positive correlations obtained. For instance, the positive relationship between belief
in free will and passionate love could also be due to a third factor, such as self-esteem, known to be positively related to
belief in free will (Rakos, Steyer, Skala, & Slane, 2008) and passionate love (Campbell, Foster, & Finkel, 2002). In parallel, a
reason that might explain those overall positive correlations is the acquiescence bias that leads participants to agree with
every question presented. However, we believe that this alternative explanation cannot explain our result. Indeed, if such
were the case, we would not observe non-significant results (for example, the relationship between determinism and passionate love in Study 3).
More generally, the correlational nature of our results implies that it is impossible to determine in which causal direction
the relationship between belief in free will (determinism) and love goes (if any): is it belief in free will (determinism) that
makes love possible (as some philosophers claim), or is it rather the experience of love that increases one’s belief in free will
(determinism)? It should be noted that any order effects (e.g., effect due to the completion of the passionate love scale before
the free will scale, or vice versa) would have been informative regarding the causality. Although we did not find clear and
replicable order effects in our three studies, post hoc analysis revealed that in the last two studies, people with a high level
of passionate love were more sensitive to order effect. More precisely, participants with high level of passionate love tended
to score higher on the free will scale when they completed the passionate love scale first than when they completed the
belief in free will scale first.13 Consequently, we can speculate that when people think of the beloved person, some cognitive
and emotional components of love can increase people’s belief in free will. Of course, these considerations might be dependent
of the quality of the relationship with the partner, variables that we did not control for (e.g., conflictual romantic relationships
might not lead to a higher belief in free will).
One might also try to determine the nature of the relationship on a priori considerations and argue that the idea that belief
in free will is necessary for passionate love is at odds with a developmental perspective. Because beliefs in free will and
determinism are higher mental process than emotions, it is likely that the feeling of love (or at least some of its components)
emerged at an earlier stage than beliefs in free will and determinism. Thus, it is reasonable to consider that passionate love
should causally precede beliefs in free will and determinism. However, one might answer that an early precursor of belief in
free will is the concepts of agents (in opposition to mere physical objects) and the ability to distinguish between intentional
and accidental actions. Both of these abilities appear early in development, potentially earlier than any forms of passionate
love (Johnson, Booth, & O’Hearn, 2001; Meltzoff, 1995). For example, one-year-old infants already interpret the movement of
shapes on a screen in terms of intentional action, distinguishing between the agent’s goals and the environmental constraints on their actions (Gergely & Csibra, 2003). Thus, the relationship between belief in free will and passionate love
among adults could also simply be the mature form of a more basic phenomenon already present in children: that love—
as well as emotions such as gratitude—can only be directed at entities that are identified as ‘‘agents” by our cognitive
machinery.
One way or the other, further research is needed to determine the causal direction of the relationship between feelings of
passionate love and belief in free will (determinism). For example, it would be possible to increase temporarily passionate
love by inducing a mating mindset, asking participants to watch a romantic video (Li, Kenrick, Griskevicius, & Neuberg,
2012), allowing us to evaluate whether watching it strengthens participants’ beliefs in free will and determinism. Not only
would it allow evaluation of the impact of passionate love on beliefs in free will and determinism, but it would allow us to
12
As this effect was unexpected and was not observable in the previous study, it would be unreasonable to extrapolate on it.
In Studies 2 and 3, the interaction effect of order (free will-love vs. love-free will) and passionate love (as a continuous centered variable) on belief in free
will is significant, respectively t(234) = 2.43, p = 0.016, g2 = 0.025 and t(229) = 3.81, p < 0.001, g2 = 0.060.
13
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J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
get a better grasp on the nature of the relationship between passionate love and beliefs in determinism and free will
respectively.
6.2. Free will and determinism
Another problem for the philosophical claim that passionate love requires and rests on belief in free will are our results
about the relationship between passionate love and belief in determinism. In line with our second hypothesis, results from
Studies 1 and 2 also showed a positive relation between belief in determinism and passionate love (albeit more conditional
in Study 2), even when controlling for the level of belief in free will and relationship status. Although this association did not
reach significance in Study 3, our meta-analysis revealed that the positive relationship between determinism and passionate
love seems robust across the three studies (though the effect size was about two times lower than the correlation between
free will and passionate love).
If we consider that free will is incompatible with determinism, it is puzzling to observe this positive relationship between
belief in determinism and passionate love in the same time we observe a positive relationship between belief in free will and
passionate love. Moreover, it also seems to pose a challenge to those who claim that passionate love requires belief in free
will. One way to explain this tension might be that feelings of passionate love trigger different conceptual associations
depending on the contexts or the aspects of the experience participants focus on at the moment of their answer. For example,
certain participants might focus on the aspects of passionate love that make them feel free (e.g., the fact that they feel happy,
that they are precisely where they want to be, and that anything is possible). On the contrary, other participants might focus
on the aspects of passionate love that make them feel coerced and deprived of control (e.g., the fact that they cannot stop
thinking about and loving the object of their love, or that they feel forced by their passion to do things they would not
do otherwise). Thus, the fact that passionate love is positively associated with both beliefs free will and determinism would
only show that passionate love is dynamically associated to seemingly incompatible constructs. Others type of studies design
such as longitudinal one, could help to address this issue.
Another possibility to explain those results, though, is to abandon the idea that participants see free will and determinism
as incompatible. Of course, the idea that free will and determinism are incompatible has been defended by many so-called
‘‘incompatibilist” philosophers (Van Inwagen, 1975) and has recently gained traction among scientists interested in the
debate. However, there is also a long ‘‘compatibilist” philosophical tradition dating back to the Stoics according to which free
will is compatible with determinism (Frankfurt, 1969). Moreover, recent empirical evidence suggests that laypeople are also
compatibilist, in the sense that they do not consider determinism to preclude free will (Cova & Kitano, 2014; Monroe &
Malle, 2010; Paulhus & Carey, 2011). In fact, people might even consider that free will is compatible with fatalism, a stronger
version of determinism, as long as fatalism does not preclude an agent’s actions to derive from their desires and values
(Andow & Cova, 2016).
Let us take an example. According to the ‘‘true self” approach to free will, one acts freely when one’s actions emanate
from one’s ‘‘true self”, that is: one’s deeply held values and objectives (Watson, 1987). In this framework, it does not
matter that one’s values and true self are shaped by factors beyond one’s control (such as one’s genes and education);
all that matters is that one acts according to these values. Thus, it is possible that one’s love for one’s partner is both
free (because love comes from the true self) and determined (because the true self has been shaped by factors beyond
one’s control). Interestingly, recent researches on the topic have suggested that such considerations about the true self
shape people’s intuitions about both love (Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014) and free intentional actions (Cova & Naar,
2012; Sripada, 2010).
However, even though some evidence suggests that people can have compatibilist intuitions about the relationship of free
will with determinism (Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2006; Nahmias & Murray, 2010), there are also evidence that
points to different conclusions. Some claim that previous studies suffer from methodological defects, and that people have in
fact incompatibilist intuitions (Bear & Knobe, 2015; Rose & Nichols, 2013). Others claim that things are more complex, and
that people have inconsistent intuitions, offering compatibilist answers in some contexts, and incompatibilist answers in
others (May, 2014; Weigel, 2013).
6.3. Conclusion
To conclude, across three different studies, we found that people with higher belief in free will experience stronger passionate love. We also found that people with higher belief in determinism are, as well, more likely to experience stronger
passionate love, although this relationship seems less robust than the one between belief in free will and passionate love.
However, the nature of the relationship between freedom and love is still unknown, and made even more mysterious
because the lover simultaneously believes in the deterministic nature of the world.
Author note
We thank Josh Chotiner, Alexander Danvers, Dominique Muller, Jean-Charles Quinton, and the Marguerite research group
for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
J. Boudesseul et al. / Consciousness and Cognition 46 (2016) 47–59
57
Appendix A
Final version of the Free Will Inventory used in Study 3 (Nadelhoffer et al., 2014).
The Free Will Subscale (FW):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
People always have the ability to do otherwise.
People always have free will.
How people’s lives unfold is completely up to them.
People ultimately have complete control over their decisions and their actions.
People have free will even when their choices are completely limited by external circumstances.
The Determinism Subscale (DE):
1. Everything that has ever happened had to happen precisely as it did, given what happened before.
2. Every event that has ever occurred, including human decisions and actions, was completely determined by prior events.
3. People’s choices and actions must happen precisely the way they do because of the laws of nature and the way things
were in the distant past.
4. A supercomputer that could know everything about the way the universe is now could know everything about the way
the universe will be in the future.
5. Given the way things were at the Big Bang, there is only one way for everything to happen in the universe after that.
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