The weirdness of belief in free will

Renatas Berniūnas; Audrius Beinorius; Vilius Dranseika; Vytis Silius; Paulius Rimkevičius

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2020.103054

The weirdness of belief in free will

Conscious Cogn. 2021 Jan:87:103054. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2020.103054. Epub 2020 Nov 27.

Authors

Renatas Berniūnas¹, Audrius Beinorius², Vilius Dranseika³, Vytis Silius², Paulius Rimkevičius²

Affiliations

¹ Vilnius University, Institute of Psychology, Lithuania. Electronic address: renatas.berniunas@fsf.vu.lt.
² Vilnius University, Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Lithuania.
³ Vilnius University, Institute of Philosophy/Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Lithuania.

PMID: 33254053
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2020.103054

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.

Keywords: Belief in free will; Cognitive anthropology; Concepts; Construct validity; Cross-cultural research; Experimental philosophy; External validity.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Review

MeSH terms

Humans
Language*
Personal Autonomy*