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When Libet and colleagues published their results on the temporal order of movement preparation and the reported time of conscious will to move in 1983, they shed some doubt on the existence of free will. This marked the beginning of a controversial and still ongoing debate, not only about the existence of free will, but also about the appropriateness of methods and validity of results from research on free will. Only a few empirical contributions were added to this debate in the last decades, so the discussion about the existence of free will sometimes seems to rely more on personal views than on empirical evidence. Opportunely, belief in free will was also discovered as psychological research topic. Literature on belief in free will shows some evidence that most laypersons across different cultural backgrounds believe that they have free will and that a person’s belief in free will might have an impact on cognition and behavior, tending to positive outcomes with a greater belief in free will. Empirical findings from the German-speaking area are sparse, probably due to a lack of validated measurements assessing belief in free will available in the German language. For many psychological research fields, recent years have been characterized by the publication crisis. To overcome the crisis, it is important to critically scrutinize the methodological procedures used in a specific research field, to replicate published results, and to examine the ability to generalize these results to a broader context. The aim of this dissertation is to critically examine some aspects in psychological research on free will and the belief in free will. Two studies are reported that aim to generalize the Libet paradigm for a free and voluntary decision with consequences for the acting person, as this was never reported to have been researched in literature before, and to test the critical objection that the measurement of reporting the conscious intention to move has a direct effect on the result in the Libet paradigm. Furthermore, the construction of the first inventory measuring belief in free will in the German language is described. This inventory was also created with the aim of overcoming some methodological problems in the existing instruments in English language. Furthermore, studies on the experimental manipulability of the belief in free will are reported. These findings provide implications in view of the current state of research on free will and belief in free will and its reliability.
