Achieve to believe: Success increases free will attributions and beliefs

Three experiments (N = 977) provide evidence that reflecting on a personal success increases people’s perceptions of their own free will. In Experiment 1, participants who wrote about a workplace success endorsed higher free will beliefs than participants who wrote about a workplace failure. In Experiment 2, participants who wrote about an effortful success attributed more free will to themselves in the situation they wrote about, and endorsed higher beliefs in their own free will, than participants who wrote about a lucky success or participants who wrote about a failure. In Experiment 3, participants who wrote about an important success attributed more free will to themselves in the situation they wrote about than participants who wrote about an unimportant success or participants who wrote about an important failure. Experiments 2 and 3 also found that the effects of effortful success and important success on participants’ attributions of free will to themselves were mediated by their attributions of responsibility to themselves. The present research suggests that people increase their perceptions of their own free will to assume responsibility for success, primarily when that success is effortful or important.