People judge others to have more voluntary control over beliefs than they themselves do.

People believe they have more free will than others.

Four experiments identify a tendency for people to believe that their own lives are more guided by the tenets of free will than are the lives of their peers. These tenets involve the a priori unpredictability of personal action, the presence of multiple possible paths in a person's future, and the causal power of one's personal desires and intentions in guiding one's actions. In experiment 1, p...

What do ye more than others?

Religious People Really Do Have More Children

A few months ago, the Washington Post ran an article [2] titled, "Stop assuming that families with lots of children are religious." The article supported its case with some data from Pew (2014 Religious Landscape Study [3]), which surveyed 35,000 Americans, and anecdotes about the plight of large secular families that must bear the heavy burden of answering questions from strangers who assume t...

Why Do Some People Do “More” to Mitigate Climate Change than Others? Exploring Heterogeneity in Psycho-Social Associations

The urgency of climate change mitigation calls for a profound shift in personal behavior. This paper investigates psycho-social correlates of extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change, while also testing for potential (unobserved) heterogeneity in European citizens' decision-making. A person's extra mitigation behavior in response to climate change is conceptualized--and different...

Moderators of wellbeing interventions: Why do some people respond more positively than others?

Interventions rarely have a universal effect on all individuals. Reasons ranging from participant characteristics, context and fidelity of intervention completion could cause some people to respond more positively than others. Understanding these individual differences in intervention response may provide clues to the mechanisms behind the intervention, as well as inform future designs to make ...