Health & Environment

What Makes You Feel Like Your True Self?

What they found is that diminishing a person’s belief in free will leads to less self-knowledge.
By Lesley Henton, Texas A&M Marketing & Communications July 8, 2016

beachBelief in free will helps people be their true selves, according to a study authored by Texas A&M University researchers.

In their paper, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, lead author Elizabeth Seto, along with Joshua Hicks, both researchers in Texas A&M’s Department of Psychology, manipulated subjects’ beliefs in free will (the ability to freely choose your own actions) to examine how it would affect their “authenticity,” or sense of self.

What they found is that diminishing a person’s belief in free will leads to less self-knowledge, with participants reporting feeling more alienated from their true selves and experiencing lowered perceptions of authenticity while making moral decisions.

“When we experience or have low belief in free will and feel ‘out of touch’ with who we are, we may behave without a sense of morality,” says Seto, who studies how belief in free will influences judgments and social behavior.

The researchers randomly separated 300 participants into groups and asked them to write about experiences that either reflected free will or showed a lack of it. Then they were asked questions to evaluate their sense of self. Participants in the “low free will group” showed significantly greater feelings of self-alienation and lower self-awareness than those in the “high free will group,” Seto explains.

In a follow-up study, the researchers examined the effect of free will on decision-making. Participants completed the same manipulation of free will, but were then asked to make a decision: donate money to charity or keep it for themselves. After making the decision, participants were asked how they felt about their choice. Those in the low free will group reported feeling less like themselves during the decision-making process than those in the high free will group.

“These findings suggest that part of being who you are is feeling like you are in control over the actions and outcomes in your life,” says Seto. “If people are able to experience these feelings, they can become closer to their true or core self.”

This is important, she notes, if we want to improve the quality of life for individuals and society at large. “It might be worthwhile to identify ways to boost free will beliefs, so people behave more virtuously.”

The full study, “Disassociating the Agent From the Self: Undermining Belief in Free Will Diminishes True Self-Knowledge,” can be viewed at http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/06/10/1948550616653810.full.

Media contact: tamunews@tamu.edu.

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