Free will, and why I'm better than you

This post initially appeared on Science Blogs

Scicurious has a great post about free will, and how most people think they have more free will than others. It doesn't matter whether we HAVE free will or not, our daily lives seem to make us FEEL that we have it. We make many decisions, consider many options every day, some big, some small, but in most of them, we feel like we have a choice, and that we are making that choice of our own free will.

But what's funny is that we don't seem to feel that way about OTHER PEOPLE. While we often feel we have free will in our choices, we don't really feel like our friends do.

Apparently this isn't that uncommon. In the book I'm currently reading (a review to be posted shortly), the author makes a similar point about perceptions of objectivity: everyone acknowledges that people often have biased and uninformed positions, but view themselves as being superhumanly objective and informed. We've clearly evolved an amazing capacity to understand the minds of others, and an ability to introspect and understand our own minds - but the understanding is by no means equal.