It seems that people—from philosophers to scientists to journalists to the ordinary “folk” we have surveyed—share the intuition that “if our brain makes us do it, then we aren’t morally responsible.” We think that this intuition runs deep and that it is driven by people’s tendency to view a reductive...

My initial work, with collaborators Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner (2005, 2006), on surveying folk intuitions about free will and moral responsibility was designed primarily to test a common claim in the philosophical debates: that ordinary people see an obvious conflict between...

The first 100 years of experimental psychology were dominated by 2 major schools of thought: behaviorism and cognitive science. Here the authors consider the common philosophical commitment to determinism by both schools, and how the radical behaviorists' thesis of the determined nature of higher...