Social reality and the hole in determinism

To believe in free will is to believe that people really make choices, in which more than one outcome is possible. Instead of the outmoded dualism of mind and body, we need to understand the duality of physical and social reality. Social reality, composed of meaning, reveals the inadequacy of physical determinism. Social realities (e.g., money, justice, democracy, law, mathematics, culture) do not have the properties of physical matter (e.g., chemical composition, mass, velocity, molecular structure), but they can affect behavior and thereby enter into the stream of physical causation. (c) 2007 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.