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Christian Miller and Brian Hare raise some excellent points about our chapter on comparative work and free will. Miller argues that several of our claims overreach our data in some important ways and that we need to be careful in our definitions of some important concepts. On the other hand, Hare argues that our research provides important first steps in exploring the evolutionary foundations of free will but suggests that it’s possible the examples we provided may have evolved independently in humans and nonhumans. These are both important considerations, and we will address each of these points, starting first with Miller’s comments. First, we turn to Miller’s main critique—the idea that we overreach in our claims about the instability of desires, and the boundedness of evolved strategies. In the first section of his critique, Miller contends that our conclusion that preferences are “not stable, coherent features of the mind but rather are malleable, fragile, and in some cases may even be constructed on the fly” goes way too far. Indeed, he sees three distinct ways in which we have overreached here. First, Miller argues the effects we describe, rather than being evidence against stable preferences, actually provide evidence for stable preferences. He suggests that, for example, loss aversion itself is a product of stable desires to maintain the status quo. However, a preference for maintaining the status quo cannot, in fact, explain loss aversion. In the case of loss aversion, people (and monkeys) treat the exact same objective outcomes very differently depending on whether such outcomes are framed as a gain or as a loss—participants are risk averse when outcomes are framed as gains but are loss averse when outcomes are framed as a loss. If a stable desire for maintaining the status quo were in fact driving this behavior, it would suggest that the status quo itself has somehow changed along with the changing frame. If that were the case, participants should not change their 9.3 Response to Miller and Hare Ellen E. Furlong and Laurie R. Santos 376 Ellen E. Furlong and Laurie R. Santos preferences as a result of this irrelevant framing. It’s unclear how a stable desire to maintain the status quo alone could explain this behavior. Second, Miller contends that powerful evidence exists for stable desires in our day-to-day lives, citing as evidence his long-term stable preference to finish writing a book. In our article, we intended to point out that some preferences are more unstable than one might originally have assumed. We certainly did not intend to argue that all preferences are unstable, or that stable preferences cannot exist at all. We did, however, argue that lots of empirical evidence shows that preferences one may have assumed to be stable can be manipulated in very unexpected ways by factors that are often very subtle and quite outside of our conscious awareness. If we were completely free to consciously develop our own preferences and persist in them unwaveringly, such irrelevant factors would not be such effective manipulators of our preferences. It is this effect of these seemingly irrelevant factors on our decisions that undermines the idea that we are completely free to choose our own preferences and pursue them indefinitely, hence our claim that preferences are not always stable, coherent features of the mind. Third, Miller suggests that recent work in social psychology supports the roles of stable personality traits leading to stable desires, citing work by Mischel and others. We certainly never argued that there are no such things as stable personality traits that guide and shape our behavior and desires. There is strong evidence to support the claim that people (and animals) do have different personality traits, and that such traits are indeed stable anchors for an individual’s desires. That said, we did not intend to argue that every aspect of human nature is easily manipulated by framing effects or other irrelevant features. All this goes to say that we agree with Miller that there is surely a limit to the scope of how many and which preferences can be manipulated by subtle seemingly irrelevant factors. Nevertheless, many preferences are swayed by irrelevant cues, which thus supports our claim that our preferences are not entirely stable and free from situational influences. Miller’s second main critique involves our conclusion that evidence from nonhuman primate work suggests we may be even more strongly bound to situational influences than the human work alone originally...

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