Free will is about choosing: The link between choice and the belief in free will ☆ Gilad Feldman a , Roy F. Baumeister b , Kin Fai Ellick Wong a a Department of Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clearwater Bay, Kowloon, HKSAR 999077 b Department of Psychology; Florida State University; Tallahassee, FL, USA HIGHLIGHTS • Laypersons cognitively associate free will with the concept of choice • Free will beliefs linked to positive choice attitudes and ability, perceiving actions as choices • Free will beliefs linked to cognitively associating choice with freedom • Choice activation strengthens free will beliefs and weakens determinism beliefs • More choice leads to a stronger activation of the belief in free will in self abstract article info Article history: Received 4 April 2013 Revised 30 April 2014 Accepted 22 July 2014 Available online 30 July 2014 Keywords: Free will Choice Freedom Expert opinions have yielded a wide and controversial assortment of conceptions of free will, but laypersons seem to associate free will more simply with making choices. We found that the more strongly people believed in free will, the more they liked making choices, the higher they rated their ability to make decisions (Study 1), the less difficult they perceived making decisions, and the more satisfied they were with their decisions (Study 2). High free will belief was also associated with more spontaneous associating of choice with freedom, and with the perception of actions as choices. Recalling choices (Study 3) and making choices (Study 4) led to a stronger endorsement of the belief in free will, with an additional effect for the level of choice involved. These findings suggest that the everyday social reality of beliefs about free will is a matter of how people think and feel about choice. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Whether human beings have free will has been discussed and debat- ed for centuries. Free will has been challenged on conceptual grounds from multiple arguments that supposedly render it impossible because the future is fixed and inevitable and therefore impervious to human choice (Kane, 2011). These arguments include theological assertions of divine omniscience that entails foreknowledge of all future events (Calvin, 1559), as well as the relentless ineluctability of scientific causa- tion (Laplace, 1902). Meanwhile, thinkers have objected to assorted concepts of free will on various grounds, such as believing that free will constitutes an exemption from causation (Bargh, 2008), that free will postulates causation by nonphysical entities such as souls (Montague, 2008), that free will is a psychological illusion (Wegner, 2003), or that it is a logically impossible construct used to rationalize behavior (Miles, 2011). In recent years, however, attention has turned to layperson concepts of free will and to how that understanding operates in human social life (Baumeister, 2008; Knobe et al., 2012; Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, & Turner, 2005; Nichols, 2006, 2011). Variations in beliefs about free will have been shown to cause a variety of changes in interpersonal and moral behavior (e.g., Vohs & Schooler, 2008). This has raised the ques- tion of how ordinary people understand the concept. Monroe and Malle (2010) found that people spoke about free will as making choices unconstrained by external factors (or even going against external pres- sures) and doing what one wants, possibly aided by planning and fore- thought. Stillman, Baumeister, and Mele (2011) found that people’s notions of free will were linked to morally responsible behavior, self- control, achieving goals, and high levels of conscious thought and delib- eration. Implicit in many of these conceptions is the notion of acting on the basis of deliberate choice (Baumeister, Sparks, Stillman, & Vohs, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 55 (2014) 239–245 ☆ Portion of this paper is based on the PhD Dissertation of Gilad Feldman (first author) submitted to Department of Management at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology under the supervision of Kin Fai Ellick Wong (third author). Preparation of this article was supported by RGC General Research Fund (HKUST 644312) and UGC Infra-Structure Grant (SBI14BM23) awarded to Kin Fai Ellick Wong. E-mail address: filian@connect.ust.hk (G. Feldman). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2014.07.012 0022-1031/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp