Absolutely. It can play out in the seconds before. Studies show that if you’re sitting in a room with a terrible smell, people become more socially conservative. Some of that has to do with genetics: What’s the makeup of their olfactory receptors? With childhood: What conditioning did they have to particular smells? All of that affects the outcome.
And what of those of us who have lost all or most of our sense of smell? Is this random affliction making me liberal?
Asked "Do we lose love, too, if we lose free will?" he says:
Yeah. Like: “Wow! Why? Why did this person turn out to love me? Where did that come from? And how much of that has to do with how my parents raised me, or what sort of olfactory receptor genes I have in my nose and how much I like their scent?”
Lacking a sense of smell, am I more free? I know, he'd say I'm not free at all. I lack this factor that affects other people's decision-making, but that just leaves me disproportionately affected by the remaining factors.
It seems clear, based on the whole article, that believing there is no free will makes people more liberal. You won't think people deserve the rewards and punishments that come their way. But you don't have free will to decide not to believe in free will. First, comes the desire to justify the status quo and to punish wrongdoers, and then comes the belief in free will. Take that away, and you'll run into the arms of Sapolsky.
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