Contiception: A program to study the effects of contingency parameters on judgments of control

Little is known about the heuristics people use in evaluating the degree to which they control events. The DOS-basedContiception program allows users to independently set the extent to which subjects’ actions are necessary and sufficient (the two components of contingency) to cause a change in an animated display. Up to four subject actions (keypresses) can each cause up to four dimensions of the display to change according to independently set contingencies. The task within which subjects judge their control involves interacting with the display in real time. To facilitate modeling of the possible algorithms used by different groups of subjects or under different conditions, the program provides several calculations of contingency magnitude and algebraic rules upon which the literature suggests subjects might base their control judgments. The program also allows sessions (trial sequences) to be saved and provides raw and summarized data output.