(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 ...

Determinism is not just causality. Determinism goes far beyond causality, and certainly much farther than psychological science requires. Many scientific psychologists embrace determinism without ...

Mr. Singal is the author of “The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.” Long before Reddit users discovered the firefighter Les McBurney, humans were fascinated by the idea that a ...

Back in 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace was mulling over the implications of Newtonian mechanics, and realized something profound. If there were a vast intelligence -- since dubbed Laplace's Demon-- that ...

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. It’s no surprise that Stephen Cave’s story in our current issue, ...

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 ...

The takeaway of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is basically the same as that espoused by those Snickers commercials: You’re not you when you’re hungry. Except ...