People judge others to have more voluntary control over beliefs than they themselves do.

People think other individuals have considerable control over what they believe. However, no work to date has investigated how people judge their own belief control, nor whether such judgments diverge from their judgments of others. We addressed this gap in 7 studies and found that people judge others to be more able to voluntarily change what they believe than they themselves are. This occurs when people judge others who disagree with them...