(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 ...

IN considering the life of man in history or in contemporary social relations there are two hypotheses open to us. We may postulate that, from the largest sweep of the historic process down to the ...

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 ...

I love a good oxymoron, and free will is one of my favorites. There’s often wisdom to be harvested from oxymorons. Freedom is unconstrained dithering, doing whatever. Will is self-discipline, ...

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 ...

IT HAS been done to death in New Scientist since the 1990s, which is why we often insist we will publish no new examples. Then more appear that are almost too good to be true, and we are back in the ...

Abounded response to events is the key to defining a hard real-time system. Real-time systems require determinism to ensure predictable behavior. Without determinism, systems can't be called real-time ...