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

(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 ...

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 ...

It might sound far-fetched, but psychological researchers claim to have found evidence that your name can determine the direction of your life. Though it might sound like the sort of woo-woo ...

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 philosophy, free will is defined as “the conduct of a human being which expresses personal choice, and is not determined by physical or divine forces.” People who believe in free will are called ...

On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is ...

Geomancy and environmental determinism, respectively Eastern and Western concepts which accord "nature" a primary role in shaping human life, show striking similarities and differences. Both ...

Baker, Barber, Butcher, Painter: why we want to see our own selves reflected in what we do for a living. A proctologist called Dr Butts, a pastry chef called Baker – is it sheer coincidence, or does ...