Daniel Wegner

Daniel Merton Wegner (1948 to 2013) was an American social psychologist who held posts at Trinity University, the University of Virginia and Harvard and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He applied experimental methods to mental control, producing ironic process theory, which describes how trying to suppress a thought can make it more likely to return. He also originated the study of transactive memory and action identification. In The Illusion of Conscious Will he argued that the felt sense of willing an act is a construction of the mind, so that free will is better understood as an illusion.