Freewill.....Do You Think You Have More or Less Than Others??

At the very beginning of his crazy rant-filled downfall, Charlie Sheen went on the radio and gave this advice to fellow addict Lindsay Lohan: "Work on your impulse control. Just try to think things through a little bit before you do them."

Getty
"Also, remove the hat and beard, Lindsay. It makes you look like a madman."

Now, it's easy to pass that off as just the hilarious pot/kettle/black ravings of a crazy person, but look closer: You have two people engaging in the exact same behaviors. In Sheen's mind, Lohan lacks self-control, but he controls himself. He makes decisions about what he does (cocaine and hookers) while she just does things because of her addictions and personality flaws (cocaine and grand theft). When she participates in a drunken high-speed chase with a suspended license, it's just her impulses controlling her like a puppeteer. He, on the other hand, is simply exercising his God-given free will when he does a suitcase of cocaine with porn stars for 36 hours.

Getty
God is great!

Laugh if you want, but science says that bizarre double standard is at work in all of us.

Part of this is because when not presented with a temptation (drugs, alcohol, sex, even food), we drastically miscalculate how much of said temptation we can handle. According to a study at the Kellogg School of Management, people think they can handle a whole lot more temptation than they actually can -- and the more sure they are of their self-control, the more likely they are to be drinking that 12th beer or eating that fifth slice of pizza.

Getty

Again, if you see a friend do it, you shake your head at how pathetically out of control his appetites are. But because, from inside your own mind, you can see how easily you could not drink that beer if you chose not to, that beer is treated as the product of your cold, logical choice rather than your raging alcoholism.

Another experiment found another way to look at it. Basically, we identify everyone in our life by a type ("the drunk," "the genius," "the rich kid") but don't identify ourselves as a type. The guy on the bus who flew into a rage did it because he's an angry asshole. When you flew into a rage the next day, it was because of a series of complex rational choices.

Getty
You wanted to go to the chocolate factory, but someone said you were too old for school trips now and you'd be arrested.

Those researchers also found that, without consciously thinking it, we assume that our own future is a wide-open horizon of possibilities ("Where will I be in five years? Who knows?"), but we think the futures of the people around us are basically set ("Steve will definitely get a promotion; he's really smart."). In other words, we're the only ones whose day-to-day choices actually matter. Everyone but us is a robot running a program. A program written by the man.

Getty
And any day now, you'll break free of the matrix and just fly away.

But not us! Because we're awesome.