Will notebook

I'd like to examine how free-will or just-world beliefs are related to people's opinions of whether an alcohol-intoxicated person who had sex was raped. If e.g. you believe that people have a sort of transcendental free will, does that make you less likely to see such sex as rape? You could see agreement as an expression of free will and hence be unconcerned whether that agreement occurs in an inebriated context, or you could feel that intoxication suppresses the spark of free will, making agreement empty of what's supposed to be behind it. As for just-world beliefs, it seems clearer that greater belief in a just world should reduce the likelihood of identifying this sex as rape, because people who drink heavily should get what they deserve (and, more to the point, deserve what they get).

Some concrete hypotheses:

• Belief in a just world for oneself should have little or no relationship with scenario judgments.
• Belief in a just world for others should positively relate to attributions of Alice's guilt.
• (No hypothesis for free will: I could see it going either way just as easily.)
• Belief in moral responsibility should positively relate to attributions of Alice's guilt, but also positively relate to punishment of Bob.
• Women, compared to men, should be more sympathetic to Alice and less to Bob.

• Elicit - https://elicit.com
• Free will in general
  • Feldman (2017): A review of free-will belief as a psychological construct.
• Free will (and belief in a just world) and blame
  • Genschow and Vehlow (2021): Greater free-will belief, controlling for just-world belief, was related to more victim-blaming. Three studies were conducted in which subjects made judgments about vignettes in which a victim was "knocked out by a burglar, involved in a car accident, caught HIV" or "had a skiing accident". Study 1 involved trying to experimentally manipulate free-will beliefs.
  • Clark et al. (2014): Studies that argue that free-will belief is motivated by the desire to punish.
  • Carey and Paulhus (2013): Free-will believers are generally more religious and conservative. They want more punishment for rape.
  • Hammond, Berry, and Rodriguez (2011): A failure to find a significant effect of just-world beliefs on the responsibility of rapist and victim in a date-rape scenario.
• Rape with a drunk victim
  • Gunby, Carline, and Beynon (2012): People in some focus groups said that drunken sex isn't quite rape.
  • Lynch, Wasarhaley, Golding, and Simcic (2013): When the victim was intoxicated, mock jurors were less likely to judge the perp as guilty of rape, especially if the victim bought the drinks
  • Stormo, Lang, and Stritzke (1997): When reading a hypothetical scenario, in some cases, subjects judged drunker raper victims as more blameworthy and responsible.
  • Henry, Perillo, Reitz-Krueger, and Perillo (2021): More intoxicated victims were perceived as less blameworthy (and the event as more definitely rape) in a hypothetical scenario.
  • Schuller and Wall (1998): When the victim was intoxicated, the event was perceived as less definitively rape in a mock-jury scenario
  • Osman and Davis (1999): Messy results that I think generally found that intoxication wasn't directly related to perceptions of rape.
  • Wertheimer (2003): Philosophy on consent to sex. Wertheimer generally accepts that sex with a heavily intoxicated but responsive person is moral, provided that the intoxication was voluntary and knowing.
  • Vaguely, my impression is that in American law, the decision of whether a voluntarily intoxicated person was too intoxicated to consent to sex won't hang on the letter of the law. Instead, juries have to make a holistic judgment
• Rape-judgment studies in which the subject was possibly drunk
  • Flowe, Stewart, Sleath, and Palmer (2011): Women's actual intoxication wasn't significantly related to their perception of being raped in a hypothetical scenario as consensual (maybe because of a ceiling effect whereby it was too obvious that they were raped).
  • Abbey, Buck, Zawacki, and Saenz (2003): Intoxicated subjects perceived sexual behavior in a vignette as more appropriate.
• Measuring free-will beliefs
  • Genschow and Vehlow (2021): "Free Will Inventory (FWI; [a mistaken citation that should probably be to Nadelhoffer, Shepard, Nahmias, Sripada, & Ross, 2014]) as part of the manipulation check of the free will manipulation. The FWI consists of three subscales (i.e., free will, determinism, and dualism) each measured with five items. On 7-point rating scales ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) participants indicated their agreement to five statements for each subscale." - Genschow and Vehlow (2021) only uses Part I. You're supposed to use Part I's three subscale scores separately.
  • Carey and Paulhus (2013): Uses the FAD-Plus measure of free-will beliefs, introduced in Paulhus and Carey (2011).
  • Paulhus and Carey (2011): a 27-item measure with 4 subscales: Free Will, Scientific Determinism, Fatalistic Determinism, and Unpredictability
  • Stinnett , Rodriguez , Littlefield , and Alquist (2024): Uses a subset of items from FAD-Plus to create a 2-subscale FWS-II (3 items each): free-will beliefs and moral-responsibility beliefs.
    • I think I'll go with this one. I like the focus on construct specificity, and brevity is a virtue.
• Measuring just-world beliefs
  • Genschow and Vehlow (2021): "we measured belief in a just world with the General and Personal Belief in a Just World Scale (Dalbert, 1999). While a general belief in a just world refers to the belief that the world in general is a just place, personal belief in a just world refers to the belief that one's own personal fate is just. Participants indicated their agreement to 13 statements on 6-point rating scales (1 = strongly disagree; 6 = strongly agree). Seven of these statements measured personal belief in a just world and 6 items measured general belief in a just world." - table I of Dalbert (1999)
  • Hammond et al. (2011) say they used 20 items rated on 6-point agreement scales. For the scale, they cite
    • Lerner (1980) - a 20-item scale described as "the most recent form of their [Rubin and Peplau's] 'Just World Scale'", rated on 6-point agreement scales
    • Rubin and Peplau (1973) shows 16 items (p. 79, out of 19 administered items), which were rated on 6-point agreement scales
    • Rubin & Peplau, 1975
  • Bègue and Bastounis (2003): Belief in a just world for oneself (BJW-S) had a 6-month retest correlation of .50, and belief in a just world for others (BJW-S) had .57. "Participants filled in a questionnaire that included the BJW-S and BJW-O scales (Lipkus et al., 1996) during an introductory course in psychology. The scale is a 6-point Likert-type instrument composed of 2 sets of 8 items rated from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree)."
    • Lipkus, Dalbert, and Siegler (1996) agrees with this: see Table 1, p. 669 for items
    • Let's go with this because it's the only one that has any evidence of retest reliability, and the self-others distinction is a little clearer than the self-general or self-world distinction used by other tests.

Abbey, A., Buck, P. O., Zawacki, T., & Saenz, C. (2003). Alcohol's effects on perceptions of a potential date rape. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 64(5), 669–677. doi:10.15288/jsa.2003.64.669

Bègue, L., & Bastounis, M. (2003). Two spheres of belief in justice: Extensive support for the bidimensional model of belief in a just world. Journal of Personality, 71(3), 435–463. doi:10.1111/1467-6494.7103007

Carey, J. M., & Paulhus, D. L. (2013). Worldview implications of believing in free will and/or determinism: Politics, morality, and punitiveness. Journal of Personality, 81(2), 130–141. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2012.00799.x

Clark, C. J., Luguri, J. B., Ditto, P. H., Knobe, J., Shariff, A. F., & Baumeister, R. F. (2014). Free to punish: A motivated account of free will belief. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(4), 501–513. doi:10.1037/a0035880

Dalbert, C. (1999). The world is more just for me than generally: About the personal belief in a just world scale's validity. Social Justice Research, 12(2), 79–98. doi:10.1023/A:1022091609047

Feldman, G. (2017). Making sense of agency: Belief in free will as a unique and important construct. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 11(1). doi:10.1111/spc3.12293

Flowe, H. D., Stewart, J., Sleath, E. R., & Palmer, F. T. (2011). Public house patrons' engagement in hypothetical sexual assault: A test of Alcohol Myopia Theory in a field setting. Aggressive Behavior, 37(6), 547–558. doi:10.1002/ab.20410

Genschow, O., & Vehlow, B. (2021). Free to blame? Belief in free will is related to victim blaming. Consciousness and Cognition, 88, 103074. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2020.103074

Gunby, C., Carline, A., & Beynon, C. (2012). Regretting it after? Focus group perspectives on alcohol consumption, nonconsensual sex and false allegations of rape. Social and Legal Studies, 22(1), 87–106. doi:10.1177/0964663912459293

Hammond, E. M., Berry, M. A., & Rodriguez, D. N. (2011). The influence of rape myth acceptance, sexual attitudes, and belief in a just world on attributions of responsibility in a date rape scenario. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 16(2), 242–252. doi:10.1348/135532510X499887

Henry, A. P., Perillo, A. D., Reitz-Krueger, C. L., & Perillo, J. T. (2021). Reflecting the times? Reexamining the effect of alcohol intoxication on perceptions of campus sexual assault. Violence Against Women, 28(1), 49–72. doi:10.1177/10778012211005559

Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York, NY: Springer. ISBN 978-1-4899-0450-8. doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-0448-5

Lipkus, I. M., Dalbert, C., & Siegler, I. C. (1996). The importance of distinguishing the belief in a just world for self versus for others: Implications for psychological well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(7), 666–677. doi:10.1177/0146167296227002

Lynch, K. R., Wasarhaley, N. E., Golding, J. M., & Simcic, T. (2013). Who bought the drinks? Juror perceptions of intoxication in a rape trial. J Interpers Violence, 28(16), 3205–3222. doi:10.1177/0886260513496900

Nadelhoffer, T., Shepard, J., Nahmias, E., Sripada, C., & Ross, L. T. (2014). The free will inventory: Measuring beliefs about agency and responsibility. Consciousness and Cognition, 25, 27–41. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.01.006

Osman, S. L., & Davis, C. M. (1999). Predicting perceptions of date rape based on individual beliefs and female alcohol consumption. Journal of College Student Development, 40(6), 701.

Paulhus, D. L., & Carey, J. M. (2011). The FAD-Plus: Measuring lay beliefs regarding free will and related constructs. Journal of Personality Assessment, 93(1), 96–104. doi:10.1080/00223891.2010.528483

Rubin, Z., & Peplau, A. (1973). Belief in a just world and reactions to another's lot: A study of participants in the national draft lottery. Journal of Social Issues, 29(4), 73–93. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.1973.tb00104.x

Schuller, R. A., & Wall, A.-M. (1998). The effects of defendant and complainant intoxication on mock jurors' judgments of sexual assault. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 22(4), 555–573. doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1998.tb00177.x

Stinnett , A. J., Rodriguez , J. E., Littlefield , A. K., & Alquist , J. L. (2024). Distinguishing free will from moral responsibility when measuring free will beliefs: The FWS-II. Philosophical Psychology, 37(8), 2285–2311. doi:10.1080/09515089.2022.2139232

Stormo, K. J., Lang, A. R., & Stritzke, W. G. K. (1997). Attributions about acquaintance rape: The role of alcohol and individual differences. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 27(4), 279–305. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1997.tb00633.x

Wertheimer, A. (2003). Consent to sexual relations. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-67502-7.