Fri vilja, determinism, religiositet och oro

: Svenska gymnasieelevers attityder till några existentiella begrepp

Abstract

The objective was to examine students’ attitudes versus the concepts of free will and determinism, and to juxtapose these to anxiety and religiosity.An online survey was filled in by 162 Swedish students aged between 18 and 20 in an upper secondary high school. To measure the concepts of free will and determinism the Paulhus & Carey FAD-Plus scale (2011) has been used. Anxiety was measured with two types of the short STAI-index.The factor analysis did not support the idea of an extra division of the original FAD-plus index into the factors ‘free will without moral responsibility’ and the fac-tor ‘moral responsibility’. Some minor sex differences were notices in that females scored higher on fatalistic determinism as well as anxiety. The correlation be-tween free will and scientific determinism were very small negative and not sig-nificant, implying that the two concepts are compatible to at least some respond-ents. The same week correspondence were noticed between scientific determin-ism and moral, showing that the dichotomy between the concepts having low support among students.The traditionally seen opposite concepts of fatalistic and scientific determin-ism were surprisingly positively and significant corresponding.Conclusion of the survey results support the view that the question on free will and determinism is more complex than a simple two way street as shown by Paulhus & Carey (2011) and Nichols & Knobe (2007). Moral responsibility is strongly connected to free will, but is not negatively correlated to determinism showing an interesting paradox in the traditional view of these concepts.