Abstract
People experience stronger regret regarding negative outcomes resulting from more exceptional circumstances compared to routine. We hypothesized that the exceptionality-routine attribution asymmetry would extend to attributions of agency and moral responsibility. In Experiment 1 (N = 337), we found that people attributed more free will to exceptional behavior compared to routine when the exception was due to self-choice rather than external circumstances. In Experiment 2 (N= 561), we replicated and generalized this effect to other scenarios, with support for the classic exceptionality effect regarding regret, and an extension to moral responsibility. In Experiment 3 (N = 128), we replicated these effects in a within-subject design. When using a classic experimental philosophy paradigm contrasting a deterministic and an indeterministic universe, we found that the results were robust across both contexts. We conclude that there is consistent support for a link between exceptionality and free will attributions. All materials, data, and code are available here: https://osf.io/f2pck/