The scale you completed was the "Free Will and Determinism Scale," developed by Delroy Paulhus and Jasmine Carey at the University of British Columbia.
Liberals and conservatives seem to disagree in their basic understandings of the causes of human action, particularly of immoral action. Liberals are more likely to believe that social forces, poverty, childhood trauma, or mental illness can serve as valid excuses. Conservatives are more likely to reject such excuses and want to hold people accountable for their actions, including a preference for harsher punishments. At least, that is the way things play out in many disputes in the legal world. We want to see if we can look at this stereotypical difference in more detail. We want to find out WHICH kinds of free will and determinism show a correlation with politics, and with other psychological variables.
The Paulhus scale measures people's attitudes about four constructs related to freedom vs. determinism, which we have graphed for you in the four green bars below.
The first graph shows your score on two measures of belief in determinism:
- Fate: the belief that individuals cannot control their own destinies
- Scientific causation: the belief that people's actions are fully explained by a combination of biological and environmental forces
The second graph shows your score on two subscales about belief in NON-determinism, or freedom:
- Randomness: the belief that some events are truly random, that chance plays a role in human affairs
- Free Will: the degree to which people can truly decide upon their behaviors and are personally responsible for their outcomes.
In the graphs below, your score is shown in green (the first bar in each cluster). The scores of all people who have taken the scale on our site and who described themselves during registration as politically liberal are shown in the blue bars. The scores of people who described themselves as politically conservative are in red. Scores run from 1 (the lowest possible score, least belief in that construct) to 5 (the highest possible score).