Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog Ordinary people think free will is a lack of constraint, not the presence of a soul Andrew J. Vonasch a, ⁎ , Roy F. Baumeister b,c , Alfred R. Mele d a Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States b Department of Psychology, Florida State University, United States c School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Australia d Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Free will Constraints Beliefs Choice ABSTRACT Four experiments supported the hypothesis that ordinary people understand free will as meaning unconstrained choice, not having a soul. People consistently rated free will as being high unless reduced by internal constraints (i.e., things that impaired people’s mental abilities to make choices) or external constraints (i.e., situations that hampered people’s abilities to choose and act as they desired). Scientific paradigms that have been argued to disprove free will were seen as reducing, but usually not eliminating free will, and the reductions were because of constrained conscious choice. We replicated findings that a minority of people think lacking a soul reduces free will. These reductions in perceived free will were fully explained by reductions in people’s perceived abilities to make conscious decisions. Thus, some people do think you need a soul to have free will—but it is because they think you need a soul to make conscious decisions. 1. Introduction Scholars have debated for centuries about whether free will exists. The answer presumably depends on what “free will” means, and how ordinary people understand free will bears on the issue of meaning. Is the ordinary concept of free will infused with the unscientific, religious concept of a soul? Past work investigating the ordinary concept of free will has sometimes shown that people invoke the soul, but other times has found instead that degree of constraint is what matters. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that people see constraints on people’s abilities to choose as limiting free will. We propose that all things posited to limit free will, including souls and science, are seen as limiting free will because they are seen as constraining choice. 1.1. Belief in free will Ordinary people see free will as important for morality. A person can be held morally responsible if she acted freely, but many people doubt that people can be morally responsible if they act unfreely (Nahmias, Coates, & Kvaran, 2007). Also, attitudes toward free will have behavioral consequences, as people whose beliefs in free will are experimentally reduced tend to behave in antisocial ways: they are more aggressive (Baumeister, Masicampo, & De Wall, 2009), more likely to cheat (Vohs & Schooler, 2008), and less likely to want to punish people who violate moral rules (Shariff et al., 2014). Conversely, people with strong beliefs in free will tend to behave prosocially (Stillman et al., 2010), harshly punish antisocial behavior (Stroessner & Green, 1990), and express prosocial https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.03.002 Received 10 July 2017; Received in revised form 23 January 2018; Accepted 1 March 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand. E-mail address: andy.vonasch@gmail.com (A.J. Vonasch). Consciousness and Cognition 60 (2018) 133–151 1053-8100/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. T