Most important, the bulk of studies have failed to replicate the basic finding that people become less ethical in their behavior when their free-will belief is weakened. Importantly, some of these studies had much larger sample sizes than the original ones that generated the “we’ll all run amok” conclusions. A 2022 meta-analysis of the entire literature (consisting of 145 experiments, with 95 unpublished) shows that Crickian manipulations do indeed mildly lessen free-will belief and increase belief in determinism…without any consistent effects on ethical behavior.[*5]
