(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 ...

Our last Insights puzzle explored how a smooth, random distribution of objects arises in a classic, deterministic machine called a Galton board or bean machine. We examined the inner workings of this ...

In my brushes with the self-help movement, I have repeatedly come across the phrase "Everything happens for a reason" (EHR). I don't know how common this belief is, but it seems to be widespread. At ...

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 ...

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 ...

READERS new to Feedback may be unaware of our attempts over the years to expand humanity’s understanding of nominative determinism – the phenomenon, first identified in this column, in which people’s ...

Under certain extreme conditions Einstein’s general theory of relativity seems to violate determinism, according to an international team of physicists. The group has shown that in a universe ...