When Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, proposed to limit the size of soft drink cups sold in cafeterias, critics denounced the flagrant disregard for freedom of choice. Supporters of the mayor, in turn, boasted the expected benefits to public health. These irreconcilable values, freedom versus well-being, heated a debate about the limits of state paternalism. Recently, however, based on evidences of cognitive failures and biases diagnosed by psychologists and behavioral economists, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler suggested a third way, the weak or libertarian paternalism, which would increase people s well-being without eliminating options to choose from: in instead of coercion, subtle nudges toward better decisions. Although the weak paternalism was a success among governors, the same success was not followed within the academy: Sarah Conly considered it inefficient to be an alternative to the strong paternalism and liberals considered it against freedom, specifically against one type of freedom: autonomy. Thus, one comes to the hypothesis that the rejection of strong paternalism stems from the perception of loss of freedom in the negative sense, whereas the rejection of weak paternalism stems from the perception of loss of freedom in a positive sense or autonomy. In order to test this hypothesis, several experiments were ran using methods of social psychology. The results of the experiments corroborate the hypothesis by indicating the correlation between belief in scientific determinism, which challenges the notion of autonomy and self-determination, and less rejection of weak paternalism of state.