(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 ...

Do you prefer to run in packs or operate as a loner? Your answer is determined by your genes, a new study claims. It’s a big shift in social behavior theory, since scientists previously thought the ...

To arrive in front of a class and feel powerless in the face of students with a bleak future all mapped out for them, is a frustration that many teachers can feel. But is the future really that mapped ...

Hard-determinism is "If we ran it again, it would return the same results, because conditions were identical, and it wouldn't make a difference anyway." Any discussion of "Free will" or "determinism" ...

Psychic determinism is a type of determinism that theorizes that all mental processes are not spontaneous but are determined by the unconscious or preexisting mental complexes. It relies on the ...

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 ...