Grabbing Your Bootstraps: Threats to Economic Order Boost Beliefs in Personal Control

Individuals are motivated to maintain perceptions of order and predictability in the social environment. Compensatory control theory proposes that when an individual’s perception of her or his own control is threatened, the individual can turn to external systems that may provide a perception of control (e.g., organized government). Conversely, the theory also predicts that when external systems of control are threatened, individuals may respond by exaggerating perceptions of personal control, although this effect has received relatively little empirical support. In the present study, we examined how a threat to an external system of economic control affects individual perceptions of personal control. Specifically, we found that a threat to the perceived distribution of economic resources based on hard work and effort (i.e., meritocracy) led to greater perceptions of personal control. Moreover, this increase in personal control directly increased participants’ optimism about their future economic outcomes. This study provides important insight into the broad influence of external systems on individuals' perceptions of personal control and assessment of future action.     

Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through the Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens

ABSTRACT— We propose that people protect the belief in a controlled, nonrandom world by imbuing their social, physical, and metaphysical environments with order and structure when their sense of personal control is threatened. We demonstrate that when personal control is threatened, people can preserve a sense of order by (a) perceiving patterns in noise or adhering to superstitions and conspiracies, (b) defending the legitimacy of the sociopolitical institutions that offer control, or (c) believing in an interventionist God. We also present evidence that these processes of compensatory control help people cope with the anxiety and discomfort that lacking personal control fuels, that it is lack of personal control specifically and not general threat or negativity that drives these processes, and that these various forms of compensatory control are ultimately substitutable for one another. Our model of compensatory control offers insight into a wide variety of phenomena, from prejudice to the idiosyncratic rituals of professional athletes to societal rituals around weddings, graduations, and funerals.     

Knowledge and authority: the godfather fantasy.

Three strategies are tentatively proposed by which human beings try to assuage the need for transcendence: (1) seizing the godhead; (2) submission to God; and (3) the godfather fantasy, whereby an attempt is made to clothe a mere mortal in the cloak of godly power. These strategies are connected to our innate, often conflicted, tendencies to obedience and rebellion, later elaborated into submission to authority or resistance to or cooptation of authority. These psychic tendencies are illustrated in Dostoevsky's "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" and in Mario Puzo's The Godfather, both brilliant demonstrations of social hierarchical control. The almost universal pull to obedience is demonstrated in the research of Stanley Milgram on obedience in hierarchical situations and theorized by Freud in his formulation of "the thirst for obedience" as a product of infantile life. It is proposed that the function of the group mind, in the form of ideology, is to counter anxieties generated throughout life, not only the remnants of childhood anxiety but also fears of death and oblivion. That a person's will to power can get out of hand and lead to disaster hardly needs saying; yet the will to submission, when connected to a shared ideology, can lead to results no less devastating. More people are killed in the name of an ideological cause run amok than are destroyed by virtue of thwarted passion, personal vendettas, criminality, or greed.     

The bystander effect and social control behavior: the effect of the presence of others on people's reactions to norm violations

Observers of deviant social behavior sometimes communicate disapproval directly or indirectly to the perpetrator of a deviant act. This reaction has been termed ‘social control’. Three field studies were conducted to explore the influence of the number of bystander‐observers on the likelihood of social control. We predicted that the presence of others would inhibit people's tendency to communicate their disapproval to the deviant but only if personal implication was low. In the first study, we measured participants' perceptions of two fictive situations, one in which a deviant draws graffiti in an elevator of a shopping center and one in which a deviant litters in a small neighborhood park by throwing a plastic bottle in the bushes. As expected, participants considered both behaviors to be equally counternormative but felt personally more implicated by the littering behavior in the park. In Studies 2 and 3, the two situations were enacted with confederates of the experimenter. Naïve bystanders served as participants, and social control was the primary dependent variable. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found evidence for a bystander effect in the low personal implication situation (‘graffiti in the elevator’) but not in the high personal implication situation (‘littering in park’). These results make clear that perceived personal implication moderates the extent to which people are inhibited by the presence of others when they decide whether they should exert social control or not. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Just following orders? The rhetorical invocation of ‘obedience’ in Stanley Milgram's post‐experiment interviews

Recent research has begun to challenge the received idea that Milgram's ‘obedience’ experiments are demonstrations of obedience as typically understood (i.e., as social influence elicited in response to direct orders). One key warrant for explaining the studies in terms of obedience has been the post‐experiment interviews conducted with participants. The present study uses data from archived audio recordings of these interviews to highlight the extent to which participants used rhetorical strategies emphasising obedience when pressed by the interviewer to account for their behaviour. Previous research that has used these accounts as reports of underlying processes misses the extent to which they performed particular social actions in the context of their production. It is concluded that the standard social psychological version of ‘obedience’ is present in the experiments after all, but in a rather different way than is typically assumed—rather than an empirical finding, obedience is a participants' resource.     

Reminders of an agentic ingroup buffer disease uncontrollability

Chronic illness has negative impacts beyond those on physical health. In particular, because it is often experienced as uncontrollable, chronic illness might reduce people's general sense of personal control and, subsequently, personal well-being. Drawing on recent theory and research, we proposed and tested in four experiments (N_total = 1323) a potential buffer to these negative effects: thinking about an agentic social ingroup in one's life. In Study 1, patients suffering from a chronic illness that was either high or low in medical disease controllability were asked either to think about an agentic ingroup or a personal issue. Low perceived disease-related control was associated with low perceived personal control only when participants' personal self, but not when their ingroup, was salient. In three follow-up vignette studies, we asked participants to take the perspective of a person who suffered from a health problem of low medical disease controllability and attended a self-help group that was described as either high or low in agency. The findings supported the predicted buffering effect: participants who reflected on a target suffering from a low control disease thought that the target would experience more personal control when the agentic (vs. the nonagentic) self-help group was salient. These findings suggest ingroups can serve as a source of personal control in the context of health-related threats to the extent that they are perceived as agentic. Thus, focusing on agentic properties of (health-related) ingroups might be a promising novel strategy when designing effective group-based interventions to cope with chronic illness.     

Stationäre Rehabilitation alkoholabhängiger Patienten

Systemic therapy concepts are widely used in therapy and rehabilitation of alcohol addictive patients. Although very useful in practice, evaluation studies are rare. Adequate evaluation strategies should be developed and implemented. This study was realized in a clinical rehabilitation centre (Hirtenstein, Allgäu/Germany), whose systemic concept is characterized by patient's wideranged possibilities of choice concerning therapy measures and therapy goals, the activation of social and personal resources, the development of an individually appropriate life-style, the training of desired competencies, and an offer for marital and family therapy. The evaluation is based on a repeated measures design without control group. The instruments and constructs of the evaluation are: F-SOZU (perceived social support), IIP (perceived interpersonal problems), MLDL (quality of life), SOC (sense of coherence), and an assessment sheet for personal resources (RI). Patients (n= 44) reported increased personal ressources as well as an increased level of quality of life. Perceived social support and the sense of coherence changed only moderately. Scaling of treatment satisfaction and goal attainment at the end of the rehabilitation program resulted in high positive scores. Patients reported only positive, no negative treatment side effects. The results indicate the usefulness of systemic and resource oriented concepts in the rehabilitation of alcohol addictive patients.     

系统合理化何以形成——三种不同的解释视角

系统合理化理论认为, 人们会自然地将其所在的社会系统感知为公平合理的, 这一倾向即系统合理化。而系统合理化形成之原因, 一直是该领域理论和研究关注的重点。为此, 研究者先后提出了三种解释思路。认知失调视角认为, 系统合理化之所以产生是因为个体想要缓解因系统无法满足他们的需求而产生的焦虑。补偿性控制视角认为, 系统合理化源于个体自身控制感的缺乏。社会认知视角则认为人们固有的认知倾向特别是对于社会经济差异的内归因倾向是造成系统合理化的根源。未来可以考虑在同一个研究中包含来自于不同理论视角的解释变量, 借鉴相近领域的发现探索其他可能存在的系统合理化的形成机制, 探究中国文化特有的系统合理化的来源, 同时对积极的合理化与消极的合理化作出区分, 并在此基础上针对社会现实问题加强应用研究的开展。     

Organizational Communication in Emergencies: Using Multiple Channels and Sources to Combat Noise and Capture Attention

This study relies on information theory, social presence, and source credibility to uncover what best helps people grasp the urgency of an emergency. We surveyed a random sample of 1,318 organizational members who received multiple notifications about a large‐scale emergency. We found that people who received 3 redundant messages coming through at least 1 synchronous communication source—for example, phone or face‐to‐face communication—perceived the urgency of the situation the most quickly, whereas those receiving official messages through asynchronous channels—most often text message—had the lowest sense of urgency. Our findings suggest that by understanding people's reactions to various kinds of redundant communication, organizations can design more strategic emergency messages that capture attention.     

Power increases the self-serving bias in the attribution of collective successes and failures

Three studies test the effect of power on the self-serving bias in attributing collective outcomes. The first two studies measure (Experiment 1) and manipulate (Experiment 2) power and then measure the internal (vs. external) attribution of past successes and failures. Consistently, those who feel powerful show a stronger self-serving tendency to selectively attribute successes internally and failures externally than those who feel powerless. Experiment 3 compares the effects of power (control over others) and personal control (over oneself). We find that power increases the self-serving bias, but a lack of control can limit this effect by reducing the external attribution of failures. Presumably, people who lack control are disinclined to attribute outcomes—including failures—externally because doing so would further aggravate their lack of control. Together, these results suggest that power increases a bias in the attribution of success and failure and thus presents a fundamental challenge to good leadership.     

Ignoring biased feedback: Membership in a stigmatized group as a moderator of mnemic neglect

A personal history of being the target of biased negative evaluation may lead individuals to habitually divert attention from negative feedback when it is possible to do so. Two studies tested for the first time the hypothesis that people belonging to a stigmatized group (Black students on a predominantly White campus) will, relative to non-stigmatized people, be more likely to engage in mnemic neglect—that is, they will reveal a greater tendency to insulate themselves from the effects of negative self-relevant feedback by means of motivated forgetting. The results of Study 1 supported that hypothesis. In Study 2, priming the concept of egalitarianism reduced the tendency of Black participants to engage in higher levels of mnemic neglect, consistent with the idea that the higher observed levels of mnemic neglect among stigmatized individuals derives from expecting biased, discriminatory responses from other people.     

从概念界定角度看控制感研究中的问题

在目前关于“控制感”的研究中,概念界定一直是困扰许多研究者的问题。研究从控制源、自我效能感两个概念出发,阐述控制感概念与两者之间存在区别,包含更多的内容,提出控制感概念界定可以从方向和强度上予以考虑,并将控制感定义为：个体相信自己能够影响事件地进行而获得所期望结果的程度,而且这种影响是由个体自己而非外界的因素来决定的。概念的清晰界定对于今后控制感的测量和理论发展有着较大的益处。     

Reduction of Perceived Social Distance as an Explanation for Media's Influence on Personal Risk Perceptions: A Test of the Risk Convergence Model

The risk convergence model proposes reduction of perceived social distance to a mediated personality as a mechanism through which the mass media can influence audiences' personal risk perceptions. As an initial test of the model, this study examined whether 5 audience variables known to facilitate media effects on personal risk perceptions—identification, parasocial interaction, personal relevance, transportation, and perceived realism—would exert their influences through the reduction of perceived social distance. The results indicate that reduction of perceived social distance fully explained the process of identification and transportation influencing personal risk perceptions, while partially mediating the relationship between personal relevance and personal risk perceptions. Theoretical and practical implications for health risk communication and entertainment education are discussed.     

When lack of control enhances closeness to others: The case of unemployment and economic threat

When personal control is threatened, people often turn to their own group and show negativity towards others. In three studies, we tested an alternative prediction that the salient lack of personal control (vs. control) experienced in the context of unemployment can lead to connectedness and more positive perception of similar others (e.g., members of groups affected by unemployment or the economic crisis). In two European countries, we found experimental (Study 1: Poland) and correlational (Study 2: Spain) evidence that a lowered sense of control of unemployed people was related to more favorable intergroup evaluations. Furthermore, when lack of control related to unemployment threat was experimentally induced, participants perceived a Greek outgroup more positively, and this effect was mediated by identification with and similarity to this group (Study 3). We discuss the role of the shared experience of collective uncontrollability in promoting positive intergroup relations.     

FINDING ROTHKOWITZ: THE JEWISH ROTHKO

While Mark Rothko's canvases are renowned for their rich, monumental expanses of colour, he has insisted that his paintings should be appreciated on more than an aesthetic level. “The people who weep before my pictures,” he commented in 1956, “are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” While various critics and scholars have recognized the importance of this remark, just what Rothko meant by “religious experience” has been highly contested. In this article I will argue that Rothko's Jewish identity—informed by his experiences in Russia and New York—influenced his understanding of “religious experience” in subtle but powerful ways. I will not attempt to spot a raft of Jewish symbols and references in Rothko's work, an endeavour that has yielded spurious results in previous studies. Instead, I will examine Rothko's sense of “religious experience” as an evolving concept in his thought and painting; a process which finds its culmination in the Rothko Chapel, a space informed but not defined by the artist's Jewishness.     

Orders to Shoot (a Camera): Effects of Ostracism on Obedience

Research suggests that ostracism increases susceptibility to indirect forms of social influence (e.g., conformity). Yet, no study to date has explored whether the effects of ostracism extend to the most direct form of social influence—obedience. We investigated whether ostracized individuals would be more likely to obey a direct command to do something effortful in uncomfortable conditions. Participants (N = 62) were randomly assigned to be included or ostracized in Cyberball, or assigned to a control condition. They were then approached by the experimenter and commanded to go outside when temperatures were below 30°F and take 39 unique and creative photographs in the cold of winter. Ostracized participants were more likely to obey the experimenter’s command to be creative when taking photographs. No differences in obedience emerged between the inclusion and the control condition. We provided evidence completing the social influence “trifecta”: ostracism increases susceptibility to conformity, compliance, and now, obedience.     

A cleansing fire: Moral outrage alleviates guilt and buffers threats to one’s moral identity

Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test the counter-intuitive possibility that moral outrage at third-party transgressions is sometimes a means of reducing guilt over one’s own moral failings and restoring a moral identity. We tested this guilt-driven account of outrage in five studies examining outrage at corporate labor exploitation and environmental destruction. Study 1 showed that personal guilt uniquely predicted moral outrage at corporate harm-doing and support for retributive punishment. Ingroup (vs. outgroup) wrongdoing elicited outrage at corporations through increased guilt, while the opportunity to express outrage reduced guilt (Study 2) and restored perceived personal morality (Study 3). Study 4 tested whether effects were due merely to downward social comparison and Study 5 showed that guilt-driven outrage was attenuated by an affirmation of moral identity in an unrelated context.     

The obedience–disobedience dynamic and the role of responsibility

Obedience has been thoroughly studied in social psychology, both in its positive and negative aspects. Nevertheless, in these empirical studies disobedience has been considered to be the opposite of obedience and indeed its negation. Instead, some recent studies suggest that if obedience to authority is important in ensuring the continuity of social and group life, disobedience is crucial, under some circumstances, in stopping the authority relationship from degenerating into an authoritarian relationship. In this perspective, disobedience may be conceived of as a protest undermining the legitimacy of authority, or else it can represent an instrument of the community for controlling the legitimacy of the authority's demands, becoming a factor safeguarding against authoritarianism. The aim of the present study was to empirically verify the dynamics existing between disobedience and obedience. The results show that people who attach importance to both obedience and disobedience in the relationship between the individual and society recognize the importance of democratic values and consider themselves responsible for the defence of human rights. Instead, people who only recognize the value of obedience and consider disobedience as a threat to the status quo are more authoritarian, individualistic people. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self-Linking and Self-Competence as Dimensions of Global Self-Esteem: Initial Validation of a Measure

Three studies were conducted to validate the conceptualization of global self-esteem as consisting of two dimensions: a sense of social worth, or self-liking, and a sense of personal efficacy, or self-competence. In Study 1, confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the a priori structure of the Self-Liking/Self-Competence Scale, a self-report instrument designed to measure the two dimensions. In Study 2, a second structural analysis showed the dimensionality of Rosenberg's (1965) Self-Esteem Scale to parallel the proposed dichotomy. In Study 3, self-linking and self-competence were related to several theoretically linked constructs—depression, self-perceived abilities, and perceived parental approval—with the resulting pattern of correlations supporting their conceptualization as substantively distinct dimensions. The implications of these findings for understanding global self-esteem are discussed.     

Ethical contexts of healing: Character and ritual

Conclusion Jesus was asked by what authority did he heal. I suggest that the authority of the healing ministry of Jesus occurred because his work was a part of the inbreaking of God's Reign, was consistent with call to covenantal obedience within the Jewish community and because his life was the incarnation of God's righteousnes. The authority of the contemporary Christian therapist is different in degree not in kind. Our authority emerges when healing occurs that is consistent with the Sermon on the Mount, when the people of God have blessed our service and when our lives approximate the ethic of the Reign of God. It is my hope that an ethic of God's Reign, a normative people and our personal character as disciples of Christ might more significantly shape the therapeutic process.This is the third article in a series published in Pastoral Psychology. The first two appeared in the previous two issues.