Which kind of sameness? Disambiguating two senses of identity with a novel linguistic task.

When people report that a person's identity has changed, what do they mean by this? Recent research has often assumed that participants are indicating a change in numerical, rather than qualitative, identity. Investigations into this matter have been hampered by the fact that English has no clear way to demarcate one type of identity from the other. To resolve this matter, we develop and test a novel task in Lithuanian, which has lexical markers for numerical and qualitative identity. We apply this task to intuitions about changes in moral capacities, which has previously shown to lead to high ratings in identity change. We discover that, when people say that a morally altered person is dramatically different, they mean the person is qualitatively transformed, but numerically intact. We conclude that this methodology is a valuable tool not only for illuminating the specific phenomenon of the moral self, but for general use in studying folk ascriptions of identity persistence.

The weirdness of belief in free will.

It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English "free will" with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of "free will" do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.