Chasing ‎the "Free Will Rabbit": A Journey in Open Science

This post was written by Alison Lam from the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom, who conducted a systematic review about "folk conceptions of free will" discussed in this post. Alison is now leading a meta-analysis on free will and agency constructs. Gilad Feldman edited this post for Psychology Today.

My journey started very much like Alice’s adventure. I was beginning to plan my dissertation, which I had long decided would be a systematic review about free will. In one drowsy afternoon of reading, I caught a glimpse of a white rabbit exclaiming, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! We have no free will!” I thought to myself, how strange; what did the rabbit mean, and why would it think such a thing? Burning with curiosity, I chased after it, never once considering where this strange rabbit would lead me, and so, down I tumbled into the rabbit hole. As I fell through, I picked up a jar labelled “Proof that Free Will Exists,” but to my great disappointment it was empty. Suddenly, thump! The fall was over, and I landed in a hall with many locked doors.

The hall marked the first stage of research; there are many potential paths to pursue, but the doors only unlock with the right keys of knowledge. One might have to try many doors until finding the right one; the lock may be too large for one’s key to fit, or the doorway may be too small for one’s big head of ideas. Alas, my head was too big for the door that I opened! Luckily, an adventurer saw my peeping eyes from the other side. “If you please, sir, I’m searching for a white rabbit who seemed very upset about free will. Could you help me get through, so I could ask what it meant?” I asked, a little timidly. “Very well,” the adventurer pointed at a bottle of potion labelled “Open Science Me” on a glass table behind me. I examined the bottle and sipped it carefully, until I shrunk down to just the right size, and into the wonderland I went.

The adventurer greeted me, “Welcome to the Wonderland of Open Science.” With wide eyes I marvelled at this strange haven; all the houses were made of glass, and everything was open and transparent. Curiously, no one seemed to mind that everything they were doing was in plain sight. “About your rabbit,” the adventurer suggested, “the cross-stitchers having a party over there might be able to help you.” So I thanked him and headed off to the party…

Joining the Open + Meta Science Party

The kind adventurer I encountered was Gilad, and the cross-stitchers were Jade and Marta, the project leaders of Non-Interventional, Reproducible, and Open (NIRO) systematic review guidelines (Torpor et al., 2021). As a first-generation dreamer only just converting to psychology in my masters, I had very little idea about how psychological research actually works before my dissertation. Although I was only a novice researcher, Jade and Marta warmly welcomed me to the party and shared with me all their cakes and tea. Doing research can be quite isolating, and having a network of supportive friends and colleagues to talk to can make a world of difference!

When I was still doing research for my coursework, I always liked to look for systematic reviews and meta-analyses to get the big picture about a given topic. Before learning about NIRO, I had some ideas about how to conduct a systematic review from my reading and consulting a best practice guide (Siddaway et al., 2019). Yet, the gold standards for systematic reviews such as the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA; Page et al., 2020) had many items that only applied to interventional research, which can be confusing for first-timers not conducting a systematic review about intervention outcomes. NIRO was perfect for my research question—how do ordinary folk conceptualise free will—and provided me the necessary recipes for protocol pre-registration and report writing.

A systematic review protocol is essentially a research plan detailing the research questions, assumptions, search strategies, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and planned analyses. Pre-registering a protocol before conducting the systematic search can help avoid review duplication (finding out a team of professionals is conducting a systematic review on the very same research question could give a student reviewer a heart attack, so do check!), as well as help minimise questionable research practices and reporting biases (Nosek et al., 2018; Siddaway et al., 2019), which is especially important for students who will have to conduct the review alone. No “sentence first—verdict afterward”!

Pre-registration on a public platform such as Open Science Framework (OSF) can be daunting at first: What if I make a mistake for the whole world to see? But soon I realised, in the wonderland of open science, mistakes are a normal part of the research process. One of the problems with traditional research is that it is like the Queen of Hearts’ red roses—some polished publications appear as though they were always perfect. But do not dread, if your roses are white and you forgot to paint them red, you won’t lose your head! It is perfectly good and well to update your protocol if you forgot or wanted to change something, simply let the readers know: We’re painting the roses red (and here’s why)!

Chasing the Free Will White Rabbit

Sifting through vast literature to find the white rabbit can get tedious, and I have found myself lost and frustrated at a cross-road many times. You may become unsure whether to include an article or not when it borders on the exclusion criteria; you may even start to question the inclusion decisions you have already made. That is why detailed record-keeping and data sharing are very important, so we and others would be able to detect and correct any mistake that might have been made (and that’s okay)!

Free Will Essential Reads

Why Ozempic Beats Free Will

Do We Have Free Will?

And we can canvas our systematic search for the white rabbit in the whole of the Queen’s garden, but sometimes, the rabbit (or concrete evidence to answer your research question) may not be there in the literature just yet. In my case, there was a lack of cross-cultural evidence on folk concepts of free will. Again, it is perfectly good and well to tell the readers, “I looked for the white rabbit and sadly it wasn’t home; but I interviewed its friends, and here’s what I found out!” You can always visit the white rabbit’s home again at a later time and update your systematic review.

Many wonderful individuals have helped me in my search for the white rabbit. Of course, there will always be some discouraging Caterpillar who questions, “Whooo aaare youuu?” and a Cheshire Cat who you really need to consult but just keeps disappearing. But in the end, the more you reach out, the more you will realise that most academics, especially those in the wonderland of open science, are welcoming and happy to help.

Well, I never did find that strange free will rabbit, but I asked other characters of different origins how they understood “free will,” and whether they believed in it. As it turns out, most ordinary folk do appear to believe in free will. Unlike the authoritative Caterpillar who thought free will requires some kind of “uncaused cause,” like a soul, that defies the causal flow of the universe, laypeople simply think free will is about having the capacity for making choices following their goals and desires, without being coerced and reasonably free from internal and external constraints. In the mind of the folk, free will is a dynamic concept, and whether someone has free will or not depends on the situation.

Alison Lam

Source: Alison Lam

Interested to know more about folk conceptions of free will, or want to ask me questions about conducting a systematic review as a student? Find my systematic review here and connect with me on Twitter @alisonlightdark. Welcome to the wonderland!