Each of us belongs to a world of cause and effect, governed by natural laws. Author and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that our actions, like everything else, are fully determined by conditions ...

(This article was coauthored with Kathleen D. Vohs and first published in Dialogue, the newsletter for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, alongside a companion piece by John Bargh and ...

IN considering the life of man in history or in contemporary social relations there are two hypotheses open to us. We may postulate that, from the largest sweep of the historic process down to the ...

READERS new to Feedback may be unaware of our attempts over the years to expand humanity’s understanding of nominative determinism – the phenomenon, first identified in this column, in which people’s ...

Psychic determinism is a type of determinism that theorizes that all mental processes are not spontaneous but are determined by the unconscious or preexisting mental complexes. It relies on the ...

I love a good oxymoron, and free will is one of my favorites. There’s often wisdom to be harvested from oxymorons. Freedom is unconstrained dithering, doing whatever. Will is self-discipline, ...