Free Will, Study Of

Free will is a controversial idea in social psychology. Researchers have begun to talk about it and study it, including ordinary people's beliefs about it, but there are many social psychologists who insist that all such beliefs are mistaken. As a field of scientific research, social psychology is almost certainly unable to prove whether free will exists or not. But social psychology can study how people make choices, when they feel themselves to be free versus less free, how action is initiated and controlled, how people react when their freedom is taken away, and what the consequences are of believing versus disbelieving in free will.