Belief change and the concept of Free Will

Over the last 15 years, researchers in psychology asserted that manipulating laypeople’s free will beliefs (FWB) has an impact on various downstream social behaviors (such as cheating). More recently, however, many of these findings failed to replicate, casting doubt on the behavioral effects of FWBs. Here, we argue that this is partly due to a disconnect between the FWB manipulation literature and psychological theories of attitude change, which are rarely discussed in the context of FWB manipulations. Existing manipulation techniques are often based on a small number of theoretical arguments from the philosophical debate on free will, and ignore less rational and implicit influences on attitude change. In this article, we discuss FWB manipulation methods in the context of current theories of belief and attitude change. This approach enables us to assess these preceding methods and attain insights into the reasons behind their lack of replicability.