Quantitative Vignette Studies: Correlations, Regressions, and Structural Equation Modeling—An Application to Experimental Philosophy of Free Will

Do people have the intuition that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism? To find out, experimental philosophers have presented participants with vignettes describing agents in deterministic universes and probed their intuitions about the free will and moral responsibility of these agents. However, these debates soon got embroiled around the difficulty of assessing whether participants correctly understood the vignettes and the concepts of determinism and free will and the extent to which different comprehension errors plagued participants’ answers. In this chapter, we clarify those debates by using the results of a brand new study (N = 772) on participants’ intuitions about free will. We introduce readers to correlations, regressions, multiple regressions, mediation analyses, and multiple mediation analyses through the use of structural equation modeling to show how different techniques may give different interpretations of folk intuitions on free will. We explain how to run these different analyses in R and provide detailed R code.