Freewill in a nutshell

If you want to ask about the question of freewill you need better framing including a grasp of neurophysiology, evolutionary, cognitive, developmental psychology & personality/temperament. .

TL;DR the closer someone gets to ideology the more the notion of freewill is irrelevant.

The best model of your average meatbag are the hosts from West World except the meatbags generally lack a diagnosic mode or the ability to limit affect. AI is a reasonable model for for the software (psycho-technologies) at the individual and (sub) cultural level.

"Hand on a hot stove" questions like Sam Harris poses are just dumb, straight up strawman fallacies. Anything that engages the autonomic nervous system is going to be an automated reaction by definition. You need to look higher up the brain stem into the cortex(s).

The 3 principal networks that need to be addressed here are the executive, salience and default mode networks and their interdependence.

Temperamental disposition is going to determine the "off the shelf" psychological settings. This will effect aspects of behavior (response mechanisms) as well as salient (what you find relevant in the world). This is also going to impact the system around the 3 fundamental neurotransmitters, serotonin, dopamine & oxytocin and the impacts they have on behavior and keeping people in emotional rather than cognitive states of awareness.

The default mode network manages internally directed thinking/processing along routines and habituated behavior. The executive network is managing context switching between the other brain networks.

The base platform is just an NPC unless there is further augmentation, specifically the capacity for metacognition. This is somewhat linked to IQ (there's a minimum threshold for the process) but there's no guarantee that someone of high IQ will have metacognition.

This comes back to learning modes, System 1 (fast) & System 2 (slow). System 1 is basically mimetics (monkey see, monkey do) vs process & first principles of System 2. It's the difference between believing and ideology and understanding a methodology.

If you have the latter then there is a potential to engage in doing something with intention or habituating change through intention otherwise people generate posthoc rationalizations to explain their behaviour.