There are a few studies which shed at least some light on what 'the person in the street' thinks free will is, and the picture which emerges is that it's often libertarian or libertarian-esque, often mixed up with something that seems like a version of compatibilism, and in fact in some situations, that we don't have any free will at all. In other words, it's a mish-mash, which is what we might expect it to be, because the 'person in the street' is mostly using folk psychology and hasn't spent enough time doing detailed philosophy.
If you want to know what most people would mean by free will if they ever use that expression, you better ignore philosophy altogether, because most people have no formal knowledge in philosophy. And I don't see any mechanism that would make philosophers strive to reflect the conception of the man on the street when discussing free will, whereas I can see how each philosopher may think of free will depending on his own personal ideological leanings.
What would definitely be more interesting is how people would use the expression if ever they had to use it, which is probably not very often. I suspect most people won't ever use it. I don't think I used it myself more than a couple of times in all my life, if that (outside this venue), except possibly in conversations around some hot political topic or other. So, overall, all you could do is opinion polls and I don't think those could work well unless the pollsters could give the necessary time for people to think about the idea of free will. Or perhaps, if they know of a clever way to tease out how people use the expression outside the context of a formal enquiry, something which sounds rather difficult to achieve.
Either way, because of its historical and folk psychology baggage, free will is arguably a loaded term and I go back to my analogy with defining god so it still exists.
Again, most people would have no or too little knowledge of whatever would be the "historical baggage" or the "folk psychology baggage" of free will to take those into account. People make up their own mind as to the psychology of human beings and human relations through their personal experience of life. They will come to a particular way of using the expression "free will" mostly through interaction with people close to them. It's the day-to-day practice of language that comes to determine the way we use words, and our practice of language is overwhelmingly through our relation with people who are the closest to us. There are specific situations, of course, such as religious communities but, nowadays, those have lost most of their influence.
So, I don't understand this fixation about this idea that "free will" is a loaded term. And that goes also for the word "God". I don't see how what most people mean by the word "God" could make it a loaded term. What counts is how people use these words, so probably what people mean when they use them, and nothing else.
though I do wonder what the capacities were that you thought you had before you formally encountered the term and the arguments, such as when you were aged 9 for example
Personally, my guess would be that we have an impression of possessing autonomous agency, and that has to be what we call "free will".
Why should I use the term freely-willed for a decision which is already determined? Allowing for the additional possibility of random.
There's no reason you should. It's just a fact that people will use the expression "free will", most of the time I would guess either to express the idea that they or human beings generally have free will, or to express the idea that somebody in particular has been deprived or never had free will because of some specific condition, such as a political context or some mental illness.
The expression "free will" is in use in the general population. People don't get to use it very often, if at all, but they still do. You can abstain if you have some reason for doing that. Me, I don't think there's any good reason. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, and that's a very good reason for me to use the term "free will" given that I don't see any good reason not to.
EB
