 Experiments in social psychology suggest that belief in free will is linked to increased counterfactual thinking (Alquist et al. 2015). Further, they have shown that counterfactually reflecting on past events and choices is one significant way humans imbue life experiences with meaning and create a sense of self (Galinsky et al. 2005; Heintzelman et al. 2013; Kray et al. 2010). Incompatibilists might be able to cite this result as an explanation for why so many people believe they have free will. It is a specific form of wishful thinking: it is interwoven with the practices of counterfactual reflection that give our lives meaning. Seto et al. (2015) support this idea by showing that variation in subjects’ belief in free will predicts how much meaning they derive from relevant instances of counterfactual reflection. This might even be used as part of a pragmatic argument for believing in free will: roughly, belief in free will is so practically important, and our knowledge of the world so incomplete, that it is rational to believe that it  exists.[8]