People who believe in free will tend to feel more positive

People who believe more strongly in free will tend to feel better in their everyday lives, and experimentally encouraging these beliefs may increase positive feelings, according to research published in Social Psychological & Personality Science.

Belief in free will generally refers to the conviction that people can freely choose how to act and are therefore responsible for their decisions. Although whether free will actually exists is a topic of longstanding debate among philosophers and scientists, psychologists have increasingly studied whether believing in free will matters for how people think and behave.

Previous research has linked stronger free will beliefs with judgments of intentionality and responsibility, punishment decisions, victim blaming, and prosocial behavior. Past research has also found that people who believe more strongly in free will tend to report greater overall well-being and life satisfaction. However, these broad evaluations do not necessarily tell us how people actually feel from moment to moment in their everyday lives.

Positive affect, including experiences such as happiness and joy, is an important aspect of well-being in its own right and has been linked with health, relationships, success, and a sense of meaning. Kathi Diel and colleagues therefore examined whether believing in free will is associated specifically with positive feelings in daily life and whether changing these beliefs can actually influence how people feel.

Studies 1 and 2 involved secondary analyses of previously collected experience-sampling datasets. Study 1 drew on a broader study of social comparison in everyday life. The final sample included 429 adults living in Germany, recruited through research panels and databases, social media, and flyers at the University of Cologne.

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Participants completed the 15-item Free Will Inventory, which assessed belief in free will, determinism, and dualism on seven-point scales, along with measures of trait self-control, moral identity, religious beliefs, political orientation, life satisfaction, and demographics. They then completed six days of mobile assessments, receiving five prompts per day between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. and indicating at each prompt whether they currently felt “good” or “bad.” In total, participants provided 9,229 reports of their momentary affect.

Study 2 drew on a separate pre-existing dataset from a larger project examining daily well-being during the UEFA EURO 2024 football tournament. The final sample included 952 participants from England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, who provided 3,627 daily assessments. At intake, participants rated their belief in free will from 1, “no belief in free will,” to 7, “absolute belief in free will,” and reported demographic information, political orientation, and life satisfaction. After each match played by their national team, they rated how happy and satisfied with life they felt that day on seven-point scales.

Study 3 was a new, preregistered experiment involving 1,053 English-speaking adults recruited through Prolific. Participants were randomly assigned to read a passage presenting supposed scientific evidence either supporting or challenging free will, selected three statements consistent with that viewpoint, and described a personal experience related to each. After each description, they rated how they felt from 1, “extremely bad,” to 7, “extremely good,” before completing a manipulation check.

In Study 1, stronger belief in free will was associated with a greater likelihood of feeling good in everyday life. This relationship remained after accounting for beliefs in determinism and dualism, as well as self-control, life satisfaction, moral identity, religious beliefs, political orientation, age, gender, and education. In the most comprehensive model, each one-point increase in free will belief corresponded to a 15% increase in the odds of reporting positive affect. An exploratory finding suggested that the association might weaken at extremely high levels of free will belief.

Study 2 replicated the central finding across five European countries: people with stronger free will beliefs reported greater daily happiness, even after accounting for demographic factors and both their general and day-to-day life satisfaction. However, the possible weakening of the relationship at very high levels of free will belief found in Study 1 did not replicate.

Study 3 provided experimental evidence that adopting a free-will perspective could influence affect. Participants in the pro-free-will condition clearly interpreted the material as more supportive of free will, confirming that the manipulation worked. They also reported substantially more positive feelings about their personal experiences than those in the anti-free-will condition, averaging 5.20 versus 3.25 on the seven-point affect scale (d = 1.77).

The experimental findings complement the first two studies by suggesting that the association is not solely because happier people happen to believe more strongly in free will; encouraging a stronger free-will perspective itself produced more positive affect.

Of note is that the first two studies were correlational and therefore could not determine whether stronger free will beliefs actually caused better everyday moods; however, Study 3 provided experimental evidence supporting a causal effect.

Together, the findings suggest that seeing oneself as capable of freely choosing and taking responsibility for one’s actions may be an important psychological resource for experiencing more positive feelings in everyday life, beyond overall life satisfaction.

The research “Are Free Will Believers Happier? Converging Evidence From Daily Life and Experimental Research” was authored by Kathi Diel, Giel van der Spiegel, Wilhelm Hofmann, David Wisniewski, Sonja Grelle, Yannik A. Escher, Hannes M. Petrowsky, and Oliver Genschow.