How like herrings and onions

The article "Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It's the Only Choice" in Monday's The New York Times discusses results of recent and previous surveys on free will and determinism. Responses showed an acceptance of both concepts, depending on circumstance. While addressing this apparent conflict in opinion, the article quotes a Florida State Professor as saying,

It’s two different kinds of mechanisms in the brain ... If you give people an abstract story and a hypothetical question, you’re priming the theory machine in their head. But their theory might be out of line with their intuitive reaction to a detailed story about someone doing something nasty. As experimenters have shown, the default assumption for people is that we do have free will.

Here, he speculates. But while the author and the surveyors hope to identify majority opinion in this debate, the real story lies in the answer to the following questions: Why and How did respondents develop this binary concept? And why is free will the default?

The article does not address these questions directly, but does mention a correlation between a belief in free will and better job performance and honesty. If the correlation is also causation--if believing in free will leads to better job performance--then consider this: One who believes in free will self-disciplines and self-censors, thereby reducing the will, attacking the will, and deferring to the will of authority. (This civil behavior is not unlike the civil code of conduct proposed by Kant in his answer to What is Enlightenment?) This is mind control.

Later the author, with support from academia, suggests that we're all compatibalists. Then the piece concludes,

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion—a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.

Odd conclusion. Neither the research discussed nor the author offer any "good" reasons". If we follow a few leads, we may conclude that believing in free will benefits power; but that is not a good reason. It seems to me the only people "deluding themselves" are the ones who claim to have free will as they wake to their alarm clocks, go to work and login to their machines.

The article discussed above is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/science/22tier.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1