Related Experiment Video
Updated: Nov 28, 2025

Virtual Hand with Ambiguous Movement between the Self and Other Origin: Sense of Ownership and 'Other-Produced' Agency
Published on: October 28, 2020
The weirdness of belief in free will
Renatas Berniūnas1, Audrius Beinorius2, Vilius Dranseika3
1Vilnius University, Institute of Psychology, Lithuania.
Abstract:
It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English "free will" with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of "free will" do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Personal Choice and Fate Attributions
Magical Thinking
Fundamental Attribution Error
The Behavioral Perspective on Personality
Carl Rogers' Humanistic Perspective on Personality
The organism refers to an individual's inherent blueprint, which Rogers saw as innately positive and directed toward helping others, unlike Freud's view of the id as driven by base impulses. The self is a person's...
Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory
Freud's concept of psychic determinism asserts...

