Free Will Belief Boosts Daily Happiness
Believing in free will is linked to better daily well-being, and studies show that promoting this belief can directly boost positive emotions.
Stronger belief in free will is linked to a greater likelihood of feeling good in everyday life, according to research published in Social Psychological & Personality Science. The study, led by Kathi Diel and colleagues, found this association holds even after accounting for factors like life satisfaction, self-control, and political orientation.
Belief in free will is the conviction that people can freely choose their actions and are responsible for their decisions. While the existence of free will is debated, psychologists are increasingly studying how the belief in it affects people. Past research connected it to broader well-being, but this new work focuses on moment-to-moment feelings.
The Daily Life Connection
Two initial studies analyzed existing experience-sampling datasets. Study 1 involved 429 German adults who reported their momentary affect five times a day for six days. They first completed the 15-item Free Will Inventory. In the most comprehensive model, each one-point increase on the free will belief scale corresponded to a 15% increase in the odds of reporting positive affect at any given moment. An exploratory hint suggested the link might weaken at extremely high belief levels.
Study 2 replicated the core finding across 952 participants from England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. People with stronger free will beliefs reported greater daily happiness during the UEFA EURO 2024 football tournament. The possible weakening effect at high belief levels from Study 1 did not appear again.
Experimental Evidence for Causality
The first two studies were correlational. They could not prove belief causes better moods. Study 3 tested causality with a new, preregistered experiment.
Researchers recruited 1,053 English-speaking adults through Prolific. Participants were randomly assigned to read passages presenting supposed scientific evidence either supporting or challenging free will. They then selected statements consistent with that viewpoint and described related personal experiences.
| Condition | Average Affect Rating (1-7 scale) |
|---|---|
| Pro-Free-Will | 5.20 |
| Anti-Free-Will | 3.25 |
The manipulation worked. Those in the pro-free-will condition reported substantially more positive feelings about their experiences, averaging 5.20 versus 3.25 on the seven-point scale. The large effect size (d = 1.77) suggests adopting a free-will perspective can directly influence affect.
Together, the findings indicate that seeing oneself as capable of free choice may be a psychological resource for more positive daily feelings. The 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.
