On the subject of "excuses":
I'd be interested to know if the subjects studied were actually asked to offer any "explanation" or "excuse" for their behaviour. Do we know if they consciously entertain thoughts about determinism or free will at all during the study?
We know very well, from psychological tests, from stage magicians, from the saner practioners of NLP, that people's choices are very malleable at an unconscious level.

It also would be useful to know how long-acting this "intervention" was. Was the subject's behaviour modified for an hour, a day, a life-time? A change in philosophical outlook might be expected to last quite a while; a bit of stage-magic-type suggestion would be shorter in its duration. We know from clever studies relating to hypnosis that behaviour can be unconsciously modified in the context of an experiment, while the subject behaves as usual outside the experimental setting.

Grant Hutchison

I would say the nature of consciousness is whatever we define it to be. So the real question is, what definitions are most useful for giving us testable insights into how we perceive our own existence? When we apply science to the question, we are like early man deciding on a language-- we must be clever to coax reality into better informing our labels, but our labels never become the reality.

This is my concern also-- it is so easy to accidentally test something other than what you thought you were testing, one must be very clever about applying controls and not just leaping to the knee-jerk conclusion. The problem is that when a study gives a result that makes sense to people, they tend to be more willing to believe the study is authoritative, but that can be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy when conducting such a study. I want to see the study that shows how the world views of the researchers, not the participants, affect the results of the study.

Yes, that would be another interesting control to apply.

Sure. I'm just suggesting that there is a field rich in pre-tested insights out there in cognitive science. So folks who come up with definitions of consciousness need to address an existing body of evidence.
I'm sure you feel a little weary when someone with no training in physics floats a "radical" new idea which simply fails to meet the current observational evidence. There's a similar sensation in cognitive science when people talk about consciousness; except, of course, it seems like almost everyone thinks they know everything they need to know about consciousness, by simple introspection.

Grant Hutchison

Yes, the language suffers from a lack of connection with concrete results, both existing and potential.
That bloody self-referential character to the beast-- hard to escape. Everyone that has it is an expert in it, but we learn nothing about consciousness until we can connect it to something else.

I'm aware that we've moved away from free will and determinism, so I'll just remark that one way to shake up the (perfectly reasonable) impression of being an expert in one's own consciousness is to participate in a cog-sci experiment that involves fooling consciousness. You quickly realise what a tenuous and intermittent entity you're actually inhabiting, despite the vivid internal sensation of solid continuity.

Grant Hutchison

From the article quoted in the OP:

Do students of their age need to be "taught" such things?! Don't they already have their own beliefs about the matter? And, if the second group was not taught anything, how do we know what they believed in?

And because you read a statement from a piece of paper that makes you believe it?! I must be missing something here.

On a more philosophical point, is determinism really the opposite of free will? Didn't that use to be predestination, not too long ago?

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Absolutely not. If determinism were the opposite of free will, then indeterminism would be the equivalent of free will. As compatibilist philosophers point out, it's pretty obvious that mere randomness can't be a generator for free will, by any of the usual definitions.
(Apologies if your question was rhetorical. )

Grant Hutchison

In that case, isn't the opposite of determinism really indeterminism, and not free will?

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

No argument here.

Grant Hutchison

Yes, the study is mixed up about what free will is on a lot of levels. First they think that the successful application of determinism to some aspects of science means that science concludes the universe is deterministic (I realize they didn't actually say that, but by using it as a strawman, they seem to feel that it is a reasonable thing to imagine), then they imagine that science disproves free will on that basis, rather than recognizing that science will actually provide one way to try to figure out what free will is. Then they imagine that people's core philosophies can be altered by a weak indoctrination effort, and finally they think they are testing people's normal behavior using highly contrived circumstances. I think Grant hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that people can act one way within the confines of an experiment, and differently when outside those confines.

To me, the most likely explanation is that the participants got a sense of how they were "expected to" behave. It was clear that those who got the free will spiel were expected to act as if they didn't have any, and unconsciously "played ball" with the experiment when their behavior was tested. The real question is, how can an experiment be controlled for that effect? I think they should have just asked people their opinion about free will, embedded in some other questions, rather than assuming that they could determine people's opinions on that score without interfering with the result.

Well, the researchers could have done a double-blind trial. Maybe they did. But, even if that was the case, the weak indoctrination techniques they used seem questionable on the surface, though I must add that I have not read the study.

Another possible weak point (though this could just be the way the study was interpreted by the journalist who wrote the story) is, as you and Grant have said, that it seems to conflate notions which are not quite the same, like indeterminism and free will.

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

That wouldn't help, because the participants could not be blind in this experiment-- they know if they got the indoctrination or not. They would need a "placebo indoctrination" to control against-- say a description of determinism that was wholly unconvincing and did not invoke anything as authoritative as "science". That might be interesting to see-- would people led to expect that the researchers wanted them to exhibit a lack of free will still do so, even if the rationale they were given was wholly unconvincing? Now there would be an interesting study.

I think it's fair to say the study tried to make the participants conflate those notions-- I suspect they did think that was a logical connection, but it doesn't matter to the study. So at the very least, if the study was indeed valid (doubtful), all they could conclude is that an incorrect interpretation of the conclusions of science can lead to bad behaviors.

Yes, you're really interested in controlling cointervention, here: the idea that people in one limb of the study are treated differently, in some way other than the intervention of interest.
So you need to provide an intervention for the control group which is similar in theme, structure and intensity to the intervention in the study group. (This may well have been done; it's difficult to tell from the journalist's report.)
One might, for instance, "indoctrinate" the controls in some different aspect of philosophy, or indoctrinate them to the effect that science had proved free will was a real entity in our lives. The option of "unconvincing indoctrination" is an interesting one, but I think runs the risk of obscuring any real difference: people are notoriously easy to influence with any old flummery, particularly within the power structure set up by the roles "experimenter" and "experimental subject".

Grant Hutchison

I would agree with the argument that the group indoctrinated with an Determinist worldview may have felt they were kind of excused for cheating. It would be difficult to brainwash subjects in a subtle manner so some at least probably knew what was happening when the "cheat bug" materialised.

It would be interesting to do another experiment which was conducted over a long period of time and both groups get indoctrinated with a few different ideas, determinism just being one of them. Or perhaps get their views beforehand on a bunch of subjects including Determinism.

Then give them a similar test, and expose all of them to the capacity to cheat. Then a more accurate analysis could be done about who cheated and how it correlates to previously held views on free-will or Determinism.

Brainwashed?
Indoctrinated?

How about educated?!

"Indoctrination" was Ken's term, I believe, and I used it thereafter. I don't think it's a bad designator for what went on, since it implies the teaching of a single interpretation, rather than the offering of multiple, competing viewpoints (which is, I think, what a proper education gives you).
The indoctrination in such studies generally seems to consist of a relatively small amount of material (a few pages, a brief video, an interactive program) presented to the experimental subjects as "necessary background material" for the study. Sometimes there's a test to check how much material has been retained. Then the experiment begins.
So one is, at best, measuring the behaviour of the participants after recent exposure to a small amount of information which they suspect will be relevant to what happens next.

Grant Hutchison

Yes, but I was referring to Jetlack's post in which he suggests a new study be done- Why not educate the study participants instead of indoctrinating them?