Direct and indirect freedom in addiction: Folk free will and blame judgments are sensitive to the choice history of drug users

• People judge addicted others as having less free will and as less blameworthy. • But prior work does not distinguish indirect and direct freedom. • We examine judgments of people who did or did not choose freely to try drugs. • We replicate past work and find laypeople are sensitive to histories of drug use. • Judgments of blame are amplified for persons who freely chose to try drugs in the past. People view addiction as a source of diminished free will and moral responsibility. Yet, people are also sensitive to the personal histories of moral actors, including, perhaps, the way by which people became addicted. Across two studies (N = 806), we compare people’s moral intuitions about cases in which the actor becomes addicted by force or by choice. We find that perceptions of reduced free will partially mediate an association between choice (vs. no choice) in addiction and moral blame for a bad act (Study 1). We replicate this pattern and show that blame judgments are stronger when the bad act is related (vs. unrelated) to obtaining the addictive substance (Study 2). Our work is novel in demonstrating that lay people evince relatively nuanced intuitions about the role of free will in addiction and morality—they track direct and indirect paths to choices when making free will and blame judgments.