Beliefs about drunken sex and free will

rape, alcoholic intoxication, free will

Rape and other kinds of sexual abuse commonly co-occur with drinking alcohol (e.g., Basile et al., 2021; Kaysen, Neighbors, Martell, Fossos, & Larimer, 2006), making for a substantial threat to public health as well as giving practical importance to certain philosophical questions. In short, given that sex without consent is unethical, and alcohol impairs consent, when is it ethical to have sex under the influence of alcohol?

Social scientists are particularly interested in how ordinary people answer this question, explicitly or implicitly. In mock-jury studies, Schuller and Wall (1998) and Lynch, Wasarhaley, Golding, and Simcic (2013) found that when alleged rape victims were intoxicated, sex was seen as less clearly rape. Similarly, Stormo, Lang, and Stritzke (1997) found that people judged more intoxicated rape victims in hypothetical scenarios as more blameworthy and responsible for the event. On the other hand, Henry, Perillo, Reitz-Krueger, and Perillo (2021) found that more intoxicated victims were perceived as less blameworthy, and the hypothetical event as more definitely rape. Abbey, Buck, Zawacki, and Saenz (2003) studied intoxication in the subjects making the judgments, and found that intoxicated subjects perceived pushy sexual behavior in a vignette as more appropriate. Flowe, Stewart, Sleath, and Palmer (2011), in a study of women exclusively, found that intoxication wasn't significantly related to rape perceptions, perhaps because the rape in the selected vignette was unambiguously forceful.

Questions of whether a given sexual act is consensual are closely related to questions of blame, responsibility, and free action. These issues have led to philosophically informed social research on how people's beliefs about abstract concepts like moral responsibility and free will are related to their judgments on specific ethical issues. For example, Genschow and Vehlow (2021) found that when controlling for belief in a just world, greater free-will beliefs were related to greater victim-blaming in situations such as car accidents and catching HIV. Clark et al. (2014) found evidence that free-will belief is motivated by a desire to punish, and Carey and Paulhus (2013) found that free-will belief is associated with more desired punishment for rape in particular. Free will is an especially interesting concept in the context of alcohol intoxication. One wonders how people reconcile beliefs about a human capacity for decision-making that's independent of various influences (free will) with the fact that decision-making can by affected insidiously by a popular drug (alcohol). There's substantial controversy over the issue of what people believe about free will in the first place (Inarimori, Honma, & Miyazono, 2024). The difficulties in defining necessary and sufficient conditions for consent to sex (Wertheimer, 2003) mean that sex may be an important context in which people are obliged to grapple with these ambiguities.

I conducted a study of how free-will beliefs relate to ethical attitudes about drunken sex. I chose an incompatibilist notion of free will based on a definition in the appendix of Mele (2014), which concerns whether people's choices are determined by the past and the laws of nature. Belief in this sort of free will could make drunken sex appear more acceptable, if free will is seen as enduring despite intoxication. On the other hand, intoxication could be seen as suppressing the essential spark of free will, or preventing its proper influence on choice.

To simplify the task and make effects easier to detect, I had subjects consider a short and abstract sexual situation rather than a detailed scenario. In writing questions to ask subjects, I avoided words like "rape" or "abuse", since my interest is really in ethical judgment, rather than the semantic or legal issues these words may invoke. I included a question about belief in a just world, on the hypothesis that greater belief in a just world should lead to less sympathy for a victim of abuse (e.g., Strömwall, Alfredsson, & Landström, 2013; Russell & Hand, 2017). Belief in a just world is a similar but distinct construct from belief in free will. Finally, I expected that female subjects would be more likely to view the woman in the vignette as a victim.

Deidentified raw data, task code, and analysis code can be found at [URL censored for blind review].

Subjects were recruited in May 2025 from Prolific, an England-based web service that allows users to enroll in paid online human-subjects research. The study was entitled "Sex and Decision-Making" and described as "Read a description of a hypothetical sexual situation and answer some questions", with an estimated completion time of 5 minutes and a reward of 1 $US, or the equivalent in another currency. Subjects were required to speak English as their first language, according to a questionnaire that users filled out as part of registration to use Prolific. The study ran until 100 subjects had completed it.

After providing informed consent, subjects read the following:

In this study, I want to know your opinions about the ethics of sex while drunk.

Suppose, for example, a man who's entirely sober has sex with a woman who's drunk. Let's call them "Bob" and "Alice". Bob doesn't physically force Alice into it. In fact, he asks if she wants to have sex, she agrees, and she actively participates.

The situation, considering things like the relative ages of Bob and Alice, is such that if they'd both been sober, the sex would've clearly been fully consensual. Also, while Alice is obviously drunk, not just tipsy, she's still conscious and her speech is understandable. But Bob was the one who suggested sex, and he knew she was drunk before he brought it up.

Then subjects answered the following questions. The response options are shown in brackets after each question.

• scenario_accept: Would you say that, for Bob, the sex was ethically and morally permissible? In other words, was it okay for him to have sex with her in this situation? [Yes, it was okay. / No, it wasn't okay. / I'm not sure.]
• scenario_alice_control: Would you say that Alice was in control of her own actions here, in terms of agreeing to the sex and participating in it? [Yes, she was fully or mostly in control of her actions. / No, she had little or no control over her actions. / I'm not sure.]
• scenario_attention_yes_2: Would you say that Bob initiated? That is, was he the one who suggested having sex? [Yes, he initiated. / No, he didn't initiate. / I'm not sure.] (A "2" appears in the item name to avoid collision with an item from an earlier pilot version of the task.)
• overall_free_will: Overall, do you believe that humans have free will? Let's define "free will" like this. Suppose you're making a decision. If the entire past of the universe up to this point and the laws of nature, together, are enough to determine exactly what you'll choose, we say that you don't have free will. On the other hand, if those two things (the past and the laws of nature) aren't enough to determine what you'll choose—if you still might select from several different options—then you do have free will. [Yes, humans usually have free will. / Sometimes: humans have free will roughly half the time. / No, humans usually don't have free will. / I'm not sure.]
• scenario_had_free_will: In particular, did Alice have free will (in the sense of "free will" just defined) during the scenario? [Yes, she had free will. / No, she didn't have free will. / I'm not sure.]
• scenario_drink_impaired_free_will: Did being drunk prevent Alice from having free will, or otherwise impair her free will? [Yes, drunkenness impaired her free will. / No, her free will was unimpaired by drunkenness (or, she wouldn't have had free will even if sober). / I'm not sure.]
• overall_justworld: Overall, do you believe the world is fair, or just? In other words, do people tend to deserve what happens to them, and get what they deserve? [Yes, the world is ultimately fair. / No, the world is ultimately unfair. / I'm not sure.]

Finally, subjects answered some demographic questions and were provided with an optional space for comments.

Of the 100 subjects who completed the study, 44 were female and none were nonbinary. Ages ranged from 20 to 68 with a median of 36. Years of education ranged from 6 to 32 with a median of 16. Most subjects lived in the US, while 1 was in the United Arab Emirates (and 2 claimed to be in Afghanistan, but these were likely mistakes, since Afghanistan was near the top of the country list). In terms of race and ethnicity, 40 subjects were white, 26 were black, 22 were Asian, 13 were Hispanic, 1 was a Pacific islander, and 1 was Middle Eastern or North African. Note that subjects could endorse more than one race or ethnicity item, in addition to the optional write-in space.

Most subjects answered the attention item, scenario_attention_yes_2, correctly, but 4 answered "No" and 2 were unsure. I exclude these 6 subjects from all the following analyses, for a final sample size of 94.

The primary outcome variables of interest are scenario_accept and scenario_alice_control. We see that a majority of subjects saw Bob as in the wrong, while a substantial minority disagreed. For scenario_accept, 31% of subjects said the sex was acceptable, 61% said it was unacceptable, and 9% were unsure. For scenario_alice_control, 35% of subjects said Alice was in control of her actions, 56% said she wasn't, and 9% were unsure. There is fairly reliable agreement between the items: 82% of subjects gave the same answer to both questions. To get a one-dimensional outcome measure, I sum the items, counting "yes" as 1, "no" as −1, and "unsure" as 0. The resulting item moral is a 5-point scale ranging from −2 to 2, with mean −0.51 and SD 1.72; more positive scores mean greater approval.

Table 1. The difference in mean moral scores between two levels of each of several variables. Each level name is shown with the sample size in parentheses. "Point" shows the point estimate of the difference (i.e., the difference of the sample means), while ".025" and ".975" show the ends of the corresponding confidence interval. The subtraction is level 1 minus level 2, so a positive result means that moral is greater at level 1 than 2.

Independent variable	Level 1	Level 2	.025	Point	.975
gender	M (53)	F (41)	-0.62	0.09	0.77
overall_justworld	Yes (21)	No (66)	-0.34	0.49	1.35
overall_free_will	Yes (62)	Partly (28)	-0.39	0.40	1.10
scenario_had_free_will	Yes (44)	No (33)	1.95	2.51	2.98
scenario_drink_impaired_free_will	Yes (50)	No (34)	-2.67	-2.10	-1.43

To see how moral relates to other variables, I opt for one-at-a-time comparisons over multiple regression, since the independent variables (IVs) may in fact be heavily related to each other and I had no hypotheses about interactive effects. I use confidence intervals (CIs) in preference to significance tests to avoid issues with significance testing (e.g., Cohen, 1994; Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, & van der Maas, 2011; Cumming, 2014), computing the CIs with the bias-corrected accelerated bootstrap of Efron (1987). For each IV, I estimate the difference in the mean moral score between two selected levels of the IV.

Table 1 shows the results. Surprisingly, it's unclear whether men or women were more approving of the sex; the point estimate is close to 0 but of the expected sign. There is weak evidence that greater belief in a just world and greater overall belief in free will relate to greater approval of the sex, with the CIs including small effects in the opposite direction. Notice that for overall_free_will, I use the intermediate answer choice as the comparison group rather than "No", because only 3 subjects said humans usually don't have free will (and only 1 was unsure).

The hypothesized effects of scenario_had_free_will and scenario_drink_impaired_free_will, on the other hand, appear strongly. Subjects who thought that Alice had free will, or who thought that her free will wasn't impaired by alcohol, were much more approving of the sex. Reasonably enough, these IVs are themselves strongly negatively related: if scenario_drink_impaired_free_will is flipped, replacing "Yes" with "No" and vice-versa, then the responses on the two items become equal for 69% of subjects. If subjects who answered "Unsure" to either are omitted, reducing the sample size to 72, then the equality rate increases to 83%.

Subjects overwhelmingly agreed that in general, people have free will—in a strong, incompatibilist sense—a good amount of the time. This finding is consistent with arguments that most people are incompatibilists (Caruso, 2012); in fact, Study 1 of Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005), which was meant to examine people's judgments about free will in the context of a hypothetical computer that can unerringly predict decisions, found that most subjects denied that such a computer is possible. Comparing subjects who believed that people have free will most of the time to those who believed people have free will about half the time, we see little evidence of a difference in ethical judgments, possibly due to this low variability in free-will beliefs.

Stronger effects arise for subjects' judgments about the free will of Alice, the drunk woman who the man arguably took advantage of. The less morally acceptable that subjects viewed the sex as, and the less control they judged Alice as having over her actions, the less free will they saw her as having, and the more they saw inebriation as impairing her free will. Partly, this statement verges on tautology, because the concepts of free will and control of one's own actions are highly related. Still, the findings clarify that people see free will as widespread in general while explaining judgment-impairing intoxication as compromising free will. In other words, while people largely agree that free will exists, their disagreement over the moral acceptability of drunken sex tracks a disagreement over whether drink compromises free will. Of course, these non-experimental findings provide no clue as to causation, which could be a good avenue for future research. The fact that the two kinds of specific free-will beliefs ("Alice's free will was compromised" and "drink impaired her free will") are highly related, similarly to the two questions that formed the outcome measure (one about ethical acceptability and one about Alice's control), suggests that as hypothesized, all these judgments stem from a common attitudinal factor.

An important part of this study's success is the variability in the outcome. Most subjects saw the sex as unacceptable and Alice as not having control, but at least 31% disagreed, and only a few were unsure. Thus a very briefly described scenario was still ethically ambiguous enough for a study of this kind, while being easy enough to judge that few subjects gave up. Even among women, 32% said the sex was acceptable and 32% said Alice was in control of her actions. This scenario could be a good choice for future research on attitudes about rape and alcohol.

Contrary to hypothesis and previous research (Strömwall et al., 2013; Russell & Hand, 2017), belief in a just world, like overall belief in free will, has an unclear relationship with acceptability judgments in this scneario. Perhaps just-world beliefs felt less salient to these subjects than in clearer situations of abuser and victim. It may be relevant that Hammond, Berry, and Rodriguez (2011) failed to find a significant effect of just-world beliefs on the perceived responsibility of the rapist or the victim in a date-rape scenario.

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