Free Will-Determinism Scale

Abstract

The Free Will-Determinism Scale (FWDS), developed by Steven J. Stroessner and Clifton W. Green (1990), is an empirical psychometric instrument designed to assess individual differences in lay beliefs regarding human agency, volition, and deterministic causality. Expanding upon earlier philosophical and psychological conceptualizations that treated free will and determinism either as mutually exclusive categories or as opposite poles of a single unidimensional continuum (e.g., Viney, Waldman, & Barchilon, 1982), the FWDS operationalizes the construct as a multidimensional belief system. The finalized version of the instrument comprises 17 items scored across three distinct subscales: Religious-Philosophical Determinism (6 items), assessing the conviction that divine entities, cosmic plans, or supernatural forces dictate human behavior; Psychosocial Determinism (7 items), measuring the belief that environmental conditions, social background, conditioning, and developmental history determine human conduct; and Libertarianism (4 items), capturing the conviction that individuals retain sovereign personal autonomy, volitional choice, and self-determination independent of social or environmental pressures.

Items are rated on a 9-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“strongly agree”) to 9 (“strongly disagree”). In its primary validation study involving 507 undergraduate participants, the instrument underwent exploratory factor analysis (principal axes extraction with varimax rotation), confirming a three-factor latent structure after eliminating two non-loading items from an initial 19-item pool. Internal consistency estimates yielded Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .87 for Religious-Philosophical Determinism, .64 for Psychosocial Determinism, and .69 for Libertarianism. Construct validity was established through meaningful correlations with Julian Rotter’s locus of control construct and specific patterns of social judgment, including punitive attitudes toward criminal offenders and attributional consistency between self and other evaluations. The scale remains a foundational milestone in experimental philosophy, moral psychology, and social-cognitive research investigating personal agency and moral responsibility.

Keywords

Free Will-Determinism Scale, FWDS, libertarianism, psychosocial determinism, religious-philosophical determinism, agency, locus of control, moral responsibility, attribution theory, fatalism, psychometrics

Authors

The Free Will-Determinism Scale was authored and psychometrically validated by:

• Steven J. Stroessner, Ph.D. — Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, NY. Dr. Stroessner’s scholarship focuses on social cognition, stereotyping, prejudice, perceived social agency, and interpersonal judgment.
• Clifton W. Green, Ph.D. — Researcher in social psychology whose collaborative work addressed the interface of metaphysical belief systems, judicial decision-making, and attributional tendencies.

Correspondence regarding the foundational validation research was historically associated with the Department of Psychology at Columbia University and midwestern academic institutions affiliated with the study’s initial deployment.

Purpose

For centuries, the debate between free will and determinism was confined to theoretical discourse within philosophy and theology. Thinkers debated whether human beings possess genuine autonomy to choose their actions or whether every event, mental state, and deed is necessitated by prior causes and universal natural laws. In early psychological science, investigators often reduced this debate to a simplistic dichotomy or a linear continuum, presuming that an increase in deterministic beliefs inherently produced a commensurate decline in beliefs concerning human agency.

The primary purpose of the Free Will-Determinism Scale is to provide an empirically grounded, psychometrically sound instrument that captures the nuanced, multidimensional architecture of lay beliefs about agency. Social scientists recognize that the metaphysical reality of free will or determinism lies beyond empirical falsification; however, the subjective beliefs that individuals harbor regarding these constructs exert profound influences on cognition, emotion, motivation, and interpersonal evaluation. The scale operationalizes how ordinary individuals interpret the forces governing human action, distinguishing between distinct varieties of determinism and evaluating their relationship with volitional beliefs.

In clinical, personality, and social psychological research, the FWDS serves several vital functions:

• Investigation of Moral Responsibility and Punitiveness: The scale enables researchers to assess how beliefs in determinism versus libertarian choice influence attitudes toward criminal justice, retribution, rehabilitation, and legal sentencing.
• Attributional Analysis: It provides a framework for analyzing how people attribute causality to human behavior, testing foundational social psychological phenomena such as the fundamental attribution error and actor-observer asymmetries.
• Coping and Psychological Adjustment: By measuring beliefs in overarching divine plans versus environmental conditioning, clinicians and personality researchers can explore how metaphysical frameworks shape fatalism, existential anxiety, depression, and personal resilience.
• Self-Regulation and Agency: The instrument facilitates the study of how personal agency beliefs moderate self-control, intrinsic motivation, and goal persistence across academic, organizational, and health domains.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Free Will-Determinism Scale is the multi-component belief system regarding the origins, constraints, and volitional capacity of human conduct. Rather than treating free will and determinism as zero-sum opposites, the FWDS conceptualizes agency beliefs across three distinct, correlated cognitive schemas:

1. Religious-Philosophical Determinism

This dimension reflects an individual’s conviction that human destiny and daily actions are governed by transcendent, supernatural, or metaphysical forces. Endorsement of this construct indicates that a person views their life trajectory as guided by divine teleology, cosmic design, or predetermined fate. Individuals scoring high on this subscale perceive personal decisions not as autonomous, unconstrained innovations, but as events conforming to a pre-existing cosmic or divine blueprint (e.g., “My choices are limited by God’s plan for my life” and “God has my life planned out”). Crucially, this dimension differs from pure mechanical determinism because it posits an intentional, orderly entity or destiny operating from beyond the material world.

2. Psychosocial Determinism

Psychosocial determinism captures the belief that human behavior is the inevitable byproduct of material, empirical, and environmental antecedents. Rooted in behavioral and sociological paradigms, this construct emphasizes external constraints such as behavioral conditioning, early childhood upbringing, social class, race, gender, and economic status (e.g., “My behaviors are determined by conditioning and life experiences” and “My wealth, class, race, and gender determine my decisions and behavior”). High scorers endorse a mechanistic view of human action wherein an individual’s psychological output is completely shaped by developmental and ecological inputs, severely curtailing authentic personal agency.

3. Libertarianism

Drawing its terminology from philosophical libertarianism (distinct from the political ideology of the same name), this dimension assesses the belief that individuals possess genuine, unconstrained free will. It reflects the assertion that human beings are originating causal agents capable of making choices independent of antecedent social conditions, developmental conditioning, or divine imperatives (e.g., “I have total free will” and “I am free to make choices in my life regardless of social conditions”). High scores on libertarianism signify an uncompromising belief in personal sovereignty, sovereign responsibility, and volitional supremacy over environmental pressures.

The Role of Cosmic Chaos versus Order

A crucial theoretical insight emphasized by Stroessner and Green (1990) is that determinism and free will both presuppose an orderly, intelligible universe. Determinism requires lawful regularity through external antecedent causation (divine or psychosocial), whereas free will requires lawful regularity coupled with internal executive control. In contrast, a universe dominated by pure randomness, chaos, or caprice renders both determinism and rational free will incoherent. The FWDS specifically isolates lawful deterministic forces from random happenstance.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual foundation of the FWDS emerges at the intersection of philosophy of mind, attribution theory, and social-cognitive psychology.

Historical Trajectory: From William James to B.F. Skinner

In classical psychology, William James famously addressed the dilemma of determinism versus free will, asserting that while science must operate on deterministic assumptions, personal subjective experience affirms voluntary choice. Decades later, radical behaviorism, championed by B.F. Skinner, explicitly rejected free will as an unscientific illusion, proposing that all human behavior is controlled by external environmental contingencies and evolutionary history. Conversely, humanistic theorists such as Carl Rogers and existential psychologists posited that self-actualization requires the conscious exercise of subjective agency. Despite these polarized academic paradigms, lay belief systems remained unmapped until empirical psychologists began treating beliefs about free will as measurable social-cognitive schemas.

Viney, Waldman, and Barchilon’s Foundational Insights

Wayne Viney and colleagues (1982) demonstrated that ordinary individuals do not consistently endorse a rigid, monolithic philosophical camp. Instead, individuals often combine deterministic explanations for certain behaviors with libertarian views for others. Stroessner and Green (1990) synthesized this insight, identifying that determinism itself bifurcates into distinct external loci: theological/metaphysical oversight on one hand, and sociodevelopmental conditioning on the other. This bifurcation aligned the study of free will beliefs with modern multidimensional attitude measurement.

Attribution Theory and Locus of Control

Theoretically, beliefs in free will and determinism serve as overarching meta-attributions within Fritz Heider’s and Bernard Weiner’s attributional paradigms. When an observer judges why an actor engaged in a transgression, their macro-assumptions regarding agency dictate whether they attribute causality to internal volitional control (warranting blame and punishment) or external environmental constraints (warranting rehabilitation or leniency). Furthermore, the scale integrates closely with Julian Rotter’s Locus of Control theory. However, Stroessner and Green revealed that free will beliefs are not a mere proxy for internal locus of control; instead, complex interactions emerge between how one perceives cosmic destiny, environmental conditioning, and personal self-determination.

Validity

The empirical validity of the Free Will-Determinism Scale was substantiated through multiple psychometric and experimental procedures documented by Stroessner and Green (1990).

Content and Face Validity

The FWDS possesses robust face validity; the statements directly capture accessible, recognizable vernacular representations of volitional autonomy, divine intervention, and environmental determination. Because the items employ transparent, non-technical vocabulary, respondent comprehension is exceptionally high across diverse educational backgrounds.

Construct and Convergent Validity

To validate the scale’s construct validity, Stroessner and Green examined its convergent relationships with Rotter’s Internal-External (I-E) Locus of Control Scale. The analyses uncovered nuanced, theoretically coherent relationships:

• Psychosocial Determinists: Respondents exhibiting high scores in psychosocial determinism demonstrated significantly higher external locus of control, reflecting their underlying belief that socioeconomic structures, childhood conditioning, and environmental forces supersede personal mastery.
• Libertarians: High libertarianism scores correlated positively with an internal locus of control, verifying that belief in unconstrained free will aligns with perceived self-efficacy and personal mastery over life outcomes.
• Religious-Philosophical Determinists: Counterintuitively, religious-philosophical determinists scored significantly higher on internal locus of control than psychosocial determinists, while simultaneously displaying elevated external scores compared to low-belief peers. This phenomenon reflects the theological construct of “secondary agency,” wherein an individual believes they act with potent personal responsibility within an overarching divine framework.

Criterion-Related Validity: Attitudes Toward Punishment

The instrument’s predictive utility was verified against participants’ recommendations for criminal punishment and rehabilitation. Across experimental vignettes evaluating criminal infractions, individual differences on the FWDS subscales predicted judicial attitudes:

• Beliefs regarding punishment followed a non-linear pattern: individuals endorsing extreme metaphysical stances (either staunch libertarians or rigid determinists) recommended significantly harsher retributive penalties than moderate individuals.
• Psychosocial determinists displayed elevated support for systemic rehabilitation and environmental mitigation, reflecting the attribution that criminal misconduct stems from adverse developmental backgrounds rather than intrinsic malevolence.

Attributional Invariance (Absence of Fundamental Attribution Error)

A notable psychometric finding reported by Stroessner and Green was the structural invariance of the FWDS across attributional targets. Participants completed the scale either evaluating their own personal agency or evaluating the agency of people in general. Remarkably, no classic actor-observer divergence or fundamental attribution error was observed: participants applied identical deterministic and libertarian criteria to themselves as they did to others, demonstrating remarkable stability across self-referential and social-referential evaluations.

Reliability

The reliability of the Free Will-Determinism Scale was evaluated using internal consistency analyses based on the normative validation sample of 507 respondents.

Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha)

The subscales demonstrated varying levels of internal consistency reflecting their respective domain breadths:

• Religious-Philosophical Determinism: The 6 items measuring religious and teleological determinism exhibited high internal reliability, with a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .87. This robust coefficient reflects the tightly integrated, highly coherent cognitive schema that characterizes religious and fatalistic belief systems.
• Libertarianism: The 4 items evaluating belief in unconstrained human volition yielded an internal consistency coefficient of α = .69. Given the brief 4-item length of this subscale, this coefficient demonstrates acceptable reliability for exploratory and group-level social psychological research.
• Psychosocial Determinism: The 7 items assessing environmental, familial, and structural conditioning produced a Cronbach’s alpha of α = .64. The somewhat lower reliability of this subscale is attributable to the diverse array of external determinants included within the item pool (e.g., social class, race, gender, parental upbringing, behavioral conditioning, and luck), which represent distinct facets of environmental causation rather than a singular homogeneous construct.

Test-Retest Stability

Although Stroessner and Green (1990) did not report longitudinal test-retest reliability data in their original publication, subsequent investigations into philosophical attitudes indicate that metaphysical worldviews operate as stable, trait-like cognitive dispositions across adulthood, barring major life crises, religious conversions, or intensive philosophical re-education.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the FWDS was empirically established via exploratory factor analysis conducted on an initial 19-item questionnaire administered to 507 university students.

Extraction and Rotation Methods

Stroessner and Green employed principal axes factor extraction followed by an orthogonal varimax rotation. The factor extraction criteria were governed by eigenvalues exceeding 1.0 (Kaiser’s criterion) and examination of the scree plot.

Factor Loadings and Latent Architecture

The exploratory factor analysis cleanly revealed three primary latent dimensions, perfectly mirroring the theoretical constructs postulated by the authors:

• Factor 1: Religious-Philosophical Determinism: Six items loaded robustly and exclusively onto this factor, with high factor loadings (predominantly exceeding .60). These items specifically indexed divine control, God’s plan, cosmic design, and destiny.
• Factor 2: Psychosocial Determinism: Seven items loaded distinctly on this dimension. These statements specifically referenced environmental learning, social stratification (race, class, wealth, gender), childhood experiences, and parental background.
• Factor 3: Libertarianism: Four items loaded onto this factor, capturing absolute personal choice, lifelong free will, and autonomy that operates irrespective of social pressures or physical conditions.

Item Retention and Elimination Criteria

Items were retained only if they demonstrated high, unambiguous primary loadings on their designated latent factor and minimal cross-loadings on secondary factors. During this procedure, two items from the initial 19-item questionnaire failed to meet the psychometric threshold: they failed to contribute meaningful variance to any single factor and exhibited diffuse cross-loadings. Consequently, these two ambiguous items were dropped, resulting in the final, psychometrically purified 17-item scale.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Free Will-Determinism Scale is configured as an objective, self-report psychometric questionnaire:

• Scale Name: Free Will-Determinism Scale (FWDS)
• Authors: Steven J. Stroessner and Clifton W. Green (1990)
• Primary Reference: Journal of Social Psychology, 130(6), 789–799
• Test Type: Paper-and-pencil or computerized self-report assessment
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults of normal cognitive intelligence (ages 14+)
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes
• Total Item Count: 17 scored items (from an original 19-item pool)
• Response Format: 9-point Likert-type scale anchored from 1 = “strongly agree” to 9 = “strongly disagree”
• Subscale Allocation:
  • Religious-Philosophical Determinism (6 items): Items 6, 8, 12, 14, 15, and 17
  • Libertarianism (4 items): Items 3, 4, 9, and 10
  • Psychosocial Determinism (7 items): Items 1, 2, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 16
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Subscale scores are typically computed by summing the numerical ratings of the constituent items for that dimension. Note that on the original 1 to 9 scale, lower numerical values denote higher agreement with the construct.
  • Researchers wishing to calculate an overarching “Belief in Determinism” composite score reverse-score the Libertarianism items (Items 3, 4, 9, 10; where a response of 1 becomes 9, 2 becomes 8, etc.) and sum them alongside the deterministic items.
  • Alternatively, many contemporary researchers prefer to recode the 9-point scale so that 1 = “strongly disagree” and 9 = “strongly agree” prior to analysis to ensure intuitive directional interpretation.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Free Will-Determinism Scale was published in 1990 in the Journal of Social Psychology. As an academic assessment tool developed for psychological research, the FWDS is considered part of the public academic domain for non-commercial educational, scientific, and clinical research purposes under fair use doctrine, provided appropriate academic citation is given to Stroessner and Green (1990). No formal commercial licensing fees or royalty payments are required to administer the scale in empirical investigations. Researchers planning commercial deployments or integrations within proprietary software platforms should contact the copyright holders of the original journal publication (Taylor & Francis / Heldref Publications) and the corresponding authors.

References

• Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976
• Skinner, B. F. (1971). Beyond freedom and dignity. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Stroessner, S. J., & Green, C. W. (1990). Effects of belief in free will or determinism on attitudes toward punishment and locus of control. The Journal of Social Psychology, 130(6), 789–799. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1990.9923014
• Viney, W., Waldman, D. A., & Barchilon, J. (1982). Attitudes toward punishment in relation to beliefs in free will and determinism. Human Relations, 35(11), 939–950. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872678203501101
• Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548–573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)