Open research questions in Free Will and Agency
80 gap statements mined from Free Will and Agency papers in our 4.5M-paper local library, which holds 753 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.
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What the literature leaves open
Underdamping is a common issue, but it is often not considered in the interpretation of arterial pressure waveforms.
However, how the brain integrates seemingly separate moments into a coherent whole remains poorly understood.
The results suggest that further investigation into the ways in which internal awareness, expectations about external appearance, and free will belief relate to authenticity, may be useful in clinical practice.
From ‘Know thyself!’ to ‘Be your true self’: free will belief as a mediator in the relationship between internal state awareness, appearance consciousness, style consciousness, and social anxiety with authenticity · 2025 · DOIWhether SoA corresponds to those neural representations that implement actual neuromuscular control is an open question with ethical, medical, and legal implications.
We agree that this interplay warrants further investigation to advance the pathophysiological understanding of FMD and other movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.
Response to: ‘Hyperbinding’ in functional movement disorders: role of supplementary motor area efferent signalling · 2024 · DOIHowever, philosophers have reached no consensus on the nature of this problem, let alone on whether it is solvable.
Yet, studies investigating the sense of agency in these patients show seemingly conflicting results: some indicated under-attribution of self-agency (coherently with certain positive symptoms), while others suggested over-attribution of self-agency.
Sense of agency in schizophrenia: A reconciliation of conflicting findings through a theory-driven literature review · 2024 · DOIFurther exploration of the implications of the paper's argument for our understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Engagement with other philosophical approaches to the Luck Argument. Application of the paper's approach to other contexts and debates.
The paper identifies a gap in the restorative justice literature regarding the structural contradiction created when a restorative circle is followed by a punitive sentence. The paper argues that the community's role in transgression and the concept of punishment as a category error remain unspoken in restorative practice.
The paper identifies a gap in the literature on determinism and free will in the context of criminal law. It suggests that the compatibilist position has not been fully explored in this context.
Determinizm i wolna wola w doktrynie prawa karnego – wybrane konteksty. Propozycja kompatybilistyczna · 2026 · DOIThe need for a bounded, auditable ethical review framework. The lack of a framework that preserves hard floors, unresolved remainder, contest, and accountable human decision.
The gap is the need to update our understanding of free will to better fit with our overall understanding of the world. The author identifies the need to revise our overall best account of free will to conflict with elements of widespread convictions about how we tend to think about free will.
The lack of a clear defense against skeptical arguments. The need to examine the relation between freedom and determinism. The need to address objections from various philosophers.
It argues that the W-Defense can be used to fill this gap. The paper also discusses the limitations of prior work on the topic.
It highlights the need for a clearer analysis of the relationship between the inability story and the strong urges story.
The paper does not explicitly state the research gap it aims to address, but it seems to be related to the concept of mereological emergentism and its application to agent-causal libertarianism. It discusses the challenges faced by emergentism, including the exclusion problem and the general incoherence objection.
The ways in which we can change our practices so as to attach consequences to norm-transgressions which can both serve the needs of justice and serve the needs of care, warrants further exploration. Yet despite these considerations, threshold ages for legal culpability still vary widely across democratic states.
The paper identifies a gap in understanding the neurocognitive basis of intention, particularly whether it is based on predictive or postdictive processes. There is a need to investigate how intention is informed by the expectancy of action-related sensory feedback.
The lack of a clear definition of responsibility and its relation to the special question 'Why?'. The limitations of current approaches to defining intentional action. The need for a novel theory of responsibility that overcomes the objections to the use of the special question.
The concept of intentionality is not fully understood in the context of moral agency.
Testing whether parts of the boundary role can be played by other agents with sufficiently different frames.
Another Frame Problem: The Outermost Frame and Constitutive Recording in Self-Amending LLM Systems · 2026 · DOIIt argues that the incompatibilist conception of two-way powers is incompatible with the causal conception of acting.
The challenge of determining which consequences matter in consequential decisions. The challenge of preserving hard floors, unresolved remainder, contest, and accountable human decision.
Further research could investigate the neural basis of intention and its relationship with action feedback expectancy, - The study could be replicated with a larger sample size and a more diverse population, - Future studies could explore the implications of the findings for our understanding of free will…
The evidence is currently lacking for the concept of we-agency, - The specific nature of the change in the sense of agency during joint action has yet to be clarified, - The usage of other perceptual effects as markers of agency is still…
Most-cited papers in Free Will and Agency
- Human agency in social cognitive theory. · American Psychologist · 1989 · 5,017 citations
- Categorization of action slips. · Psychological Review · 1981 · 1,211 citations
- Toward a Psychology of Human Agency: Pathways and Reflections · Perspectives on Psychological Science · 2018 · 605 citations
- THE CORRELATION‐BASED LAW OF EFFECT1 · Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior · 1973 · 561 citations
- Identifying the variables maintaining self-injurious behavior · Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · 1988 · 506 citations
- The phenomenology of action: A conceptual framework · Cognition · 2007 · 475 citations
- The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self · Political Theory · 1984 · 415 citations
- Spontaneous Order · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 1989 · 404 citations
- Illusion of sense of self-agency: discrepancy between the predicted and actual sensory consequences of actions modulates the sense of self-agency, but not the sense of self-ownership · Cognition · 2004 · 382 citations
- Responsibility and dependency. · Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology · 1963 · 267 citations
Most recent work
- Determined and Unforeseeable: Free Will Resolved as Full Determinism Plus Forced Self-Opacity · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- PEA - Primitive Ethical Axioms; P-Gates PPP Kernel · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- SΔϕ-08 — Agency–Responsibility–Freedom Closure: Irreversible Path Constraint and Operational Freedom (v1.1, AI-Readable Package) · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Reframing the free will debate: the universe is not deterministic · Synthese · 2026
- Bayesian Integration in Sense of Agency: Understanding Self-Attribution and Individual Differences · Cognitive Computation · 2026
- One Axiom : The Act · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Controls for Measuring Human Oversight: The Instruments and What Killed Them · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- Free will belief predicts everyday punitiveness across 44 countries · British Journal of Social Psychology · 2026
- Chance, choice, and control: free will in an indeterministic universe · Synthese · 2026
- Should we indict action categorization? · Research on Language and Social Interaction · 2026
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