Cusimano, Corey, "Attributions Of Mental State Control: Causes And Consequences" (2019). PhD Thesis, Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations, 3524. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3524
Abstract: A popular thesis in psychology holds that ordinary people judge others’ mental states to be uncontrollable, unintentional, or otherwise involuntary. The present research challenges this thesis and documents how attributions of mental state control affect social decision making, predict policy preferences, and fuel conflict in close relationships. In Chapter 1, I show that lay people by-and-large attribute intentional control to others over their mental states. Additionally, I provide causal evidence that these attributions of control predict judgments of responsibility as well as decisions to confront and reprimand someone for having an objectionable attitude. By overturning a common misconception about how people evaluate mental states, these findings help resolve a long-standing debate about the lay concept of moral responsibility. In Chapter 2, I extend these findings to interpersonal emotion regulation in order to predict how observers react to close others who experience stress, anxiety, or distress. Across six studies, I show that people’s emotional support hinges on attributions of emotion control: People are more inclined to react supportively when they judge that the target individual cannot regulate their own emotions, but react unsupportively, sometimes evincing an intention to make others feel bad for their emotions, when they judge that those others can regulate their negative emotion away themselves. People evaluate others’ emotion control based on assessments of their own emotion regulation capacity, how readily reappraised the target’s emotion is, and how rational the target is. Finally, I show that judgments of emotion control predict self-reported supportive thoughts and behaviors in close relationships as well as preferences for university policies addressing microaggressions. Lastly, in Chapter 3, I show that people believe that others have more control over their beliefs than they themselves do. This discrepancy arises because, even though people conceptualize beliefs as controllable, they tend to experience the beliefs they hold as outside their control. When reasoning about others, people fail to generalize this experience to others and instead rely on their conceptualization of belief as controllable. In light of Chapters 1 and 2, I discuss how this discrepancy may explain why ideological disagreements are so difficult to resolve.
Limitations and Future Directions
Subjects in our studies were exclusively recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical
Turk. Although samples recruited from AMT are more representative of the U.S. than
typical university student samples, individuals on AMT tend to be less religious,
wealthier, and better educated than the average person in the United States (Paolacci &
Gabriele, 2014). Additionally, our entire sample consisted of people living in the United
States who, like other so-called WEIRD populations, are wealthier and better educated
than most people in the world, and are predominately Christian (Heinrich, Heine &
Norenzayan, 2010). Cross cultural work has revealed striking differences in how different
groups think about individuals’ agency. Of particular note, individuals in some non-U.S.
cultures appear to attribute less agency to individuals than do individuals in the United
States (e.g., Iyengar and Lepper, 1999; Kitayama et al., 2004; Miller, Das, &
Chakravarthy, 2011; Morris, Nisbett & Peng, 1995; Savani et al., 2010; Specktor et al.,
2004). For instance, compared to children in the United States, Nepalese children are
more inclined to view some behaviors as constrained by social rules and therefore outside
of their control, with this gap widening with age (Chernyak et al., 2013). In a similar
vein, Indian adults appear to be less likely than U.S. adults to construe everyday
behaviors as choices (Savani et al., 2010). Of clearest relevance to the present studies,
some work suggests that Christians tend to attribute more control to others over deviant
mental states (e.g., consciously entertaining thoughts of having an affair) than do Jews,
thus showing evidence for cultural moderation with respect to mental states in particular
(Cohen & Rozin, 2001). In light of this sort of evidence, we should not automatically
assume that the results from our studies will replicate across different cultural or religious
contexts.
Although we are uncertain as to whether our findings will generalize to all
cultures, our findings do suggest an important direction for cross-cultural work.
Specifically, future work measuring attributions of belief control should distinguish
between lay theories of belief control and the introspective-experience of belief control.
One virtue of measuring both is that we may expect different amounts of variation
between these two measures of control across cultures. For instance, assuming that
beliefs are indeed uncontrollable to a significant degree (see above), we should expect
that the felt-experience of low control will vary little from culture to culture. By contrast,
the lay theory of belief, which may be influenced by highly variable norms (e.g., religious
norms, Cohen & Rozin, 2001), or folk theories of agency (see paragraph above), may be
more likely to vary across cultures. For this reason, we speculate that self-other
differences in belief control are most likely to arise in cultures where the lay theory of
belief posits high control, as it is in these cultures where this lay theory will most likely
diverge from the felt-experience of belief.
Another limitation in our studies regards the limited range of beliefs that we
sampled. The beliefs in Studies 3.1-3.3 were highly abstract, complex, or value-laden
(e.g., belief in God, the correct policy for genetically modified foods, the wrongness of
not returning money to its rightful owner). We addressed this in Studies 3.4-3.5 by using
beliefs that subjects themselves provided – specifically, the first beliefs that came to
mind. This yielded a considerably wider sampling of belief contents (see Table 3.2 for a
list of examples). Yet, it still leaves open the question of how people reason about their
own control relative to that of others for very simple, concrete beliefs (e.g., “there is a
two thirds chance of pulling a marble out of the bucket,” “there is a quarter in my
pocket,” “it is raining”). We are ambivalent about whether to expect the same
discrepancy in cases such as these. It may be that the self-other difference is attenuated or
eliminated given that the relevant constraints on belief change are far more apparent for
beliefs of this sort. Continuing to delimit the bounds of the self-other discrepancy remains
a valuable goal for future research.
Finally, research should investigate whether, and when, self-other differences in
attributions of belief control extend to other mental states. Although the present paper
focuses only on the constraints on belief change, it may be that other mental states,
including desires, evaluative attitudes, and emotions, are subject to similar constraints. If
they are, then we might expect similar self-other discrepancies in perceived control –
particularly in light of past work showing that people generally attribute high control to
others over many mental states (Cusimano & Goodwin, in press). Indeed, there is
already one reason to expect the self-other discrepancy to extend to other mental states,
namely, that a person’s beliefs often play a pivotal role in determining his or her other
mental states. For instance, if someone is depressed because she believes she will not
recover from a severe illness, an observer may think she is more capable of cheering up
than she herself does, precisely because the observer judges her as more able to change
her belief about her prognosis than she does. However, whether such self-other
differences do in fact extend to other mental states awaits empirical testing.
Luck Beliefs and Happiness
Our finding that Belief in Luck is broadly negatively associated with happiness is consonant with Maltby et al.’s (2008) suggestion that Belief in Luck is perhaps a maladaptive trait. Consequently, any notion of happy-go-lucky individuals cheerfully trusting to luck would seem to be inaccurate, at least if those individuals believe in luck as a non-random, deterministic and external phenomenon. Indeed, insofar as such individuals may irrationally trust to luck as a deterministic phenomenon, they would seem to do so unhappily not happily.
However, our finding that Belief in Personal Luckiness is positively associated with happiness tends to suggest the happy may indeed go lucky, in the sense that happiness and believing oneself to be lucky are associated. Of course, the relatively large size of associations we find here suggests that Belief in Personal Luckiness might in fact be a facet of an overall happiness construct. A possible implication of this is that Belief in Personal Luckiness’ association with any particular happiness measure could, perhaps, be fully accounted for by controlling other happiness measures. To investigate this possibility, we separately regressed each of the four measures of happiness on Belief in Personal Luckiness while simultaneously controlling for the three remaining happiness measures in each respective case, to see if Belief in Personal Luckiness maintained a significant beta. Doing so we found Belief in Personal Luckiness is not associated with either Positive or Negative Affect. However, Belief in Personal Luckiness is still significantly associated with Happiness (β = .09, p < .01; ΔR2 = .05, p < .01), and Optimism (β = .09, p < .01; ΔR2 = .06, p < .01). This would seem to support, partly at least, that Belief in Personal Luckiness may represent either a facet of happiness or a discrete personality trait positively associated with happiness.
Luck Beliefs, Five-Factor Model and Happiness
Neither Belief in Luck nor Belief in Personal Luckiness appear from our findings to be mediators of the association between the five-factor model of personality and happiness.
Indeed, our analyses, in part, suggest the contrary: that Neuroticism fully mediates Belief in Luck’s association with happiness. This does not imply that Belief in Luck necessarily ‘causes’ Neuroticism, but it is reasonable to speculate that the underlying irrationality and the lack of both agency and self-determination that would seem to underpin Belief in Luck also to some extent underpin or are facets of Neuroticism. This would be consonant with previous research demonstrating significant relationships between Neuroticism and locus of control (Judge et al. 2002; Morelli et al. 1979), self-determination (Elliot and Sheldon 1997; Elliot et al. 1997), and irrational beliefs (Davies 2006; Sava 2009).
We do not find evidence for any component of the five-factor personality model mediating Belief in Personal Luckiness’ association with happiness, nor do we find evidence of any pronounced confounding effects between Belief in Personal Luckiness and the five-factor model and their respective associations with happiness. Hence, considering Belief in Personal Luckiness to be a trait discrete from fundamental personality models would on the basis of our findings not seem unreasonable. Nor would it seem unreasonable to suggest that Belief in Personal Luckiness might potentially be either a facet of happiness or a personality trait discrete from but associated with not just the five-factor model but also happiness.
Our conclusions here certainly seem to apply with greatest saliency to the most direct measure of trait happiness we used, Lyubomirsky and Lepper’s (1999) Subjective Happiness Scale, and to a lesser extent to Optimism, a measure closely allied with happiness (Brebner et al. 1995; Chaplin et al. 2010; Furnham and Cheng 2000; Salary and Shaieri 2013). However, while the pattern of relationships is broadly similar for both Positive Affect and Negative Affect, the effect sizes are smaller and either less significant or insignificant. This would suggest that, while both Positive Affect and Negative Affect are often used as proxies for happiness, they might perhaps best be regarded as constructs related to, rather than directly synonyms of, happiness.
Limitations and Further Research
While our research sheds new empirical light on the relationships between luck beliefs, happiness and the five-factor personality model, a number of limitations need to be kept in mind. As with any findings based on cross-sectional data, interpreting our findings in terms of directions of causality would be imprudent and, of course, constrained by the assumption of our research that happiness, luck beliefs, and the five-factor model are all personality traits rather than individual difference states. Personality traits may, of course, be associated in systematic patterns, but the very notion of traits being essentially innate and non-manipulable, unlike individual difference states, intrinsically excludes the possibility that one might be ‘caused’ by another. To take the five-factor model as an example, its five personality traits have a well-established systematic pattern of associations, but it would be implausible to suggest any of the five in any mechanistic sense causes another: they exist together discretely, with none generally argued to be a facet or sub-component or effect of the other. This said, an area for further research might be to examine the effects of trait luck beliefs on state affect that varies temporally and is manipulable, so hence susceptible to theorization and testing using either longitudinal or experimental data.
A further limitation to our study relates to necessary caution in generalizing its findings in view of the deliberately homogeneous population we used. Further research to replicate our findings amongst heterogeneous populations in terms of nationality, occupation, and socio-economic status would be useful as it has been shown across multiple domains that psychological characteristics and their relationships may vary accordingly (Becker et al. 2012; Boyce and Wood 2011; John and Thomsen 2014; Rawwas 2000; Thompson and Phua 2005a, 2005b; Winkelmann and Winkelmann 2008). Furthermore, although each of the happiness and luck measures we employ have been individually validated across internationally diverse samples including Hong Kong Chinese, underlying conceptions of both are known to exhibit nuanced cultural differences (Lu and Gilmour 2004; Lu and Shih 1997; Raphals 2003; Sommer 2007), which conceivably could modify measured associations between them.
We also note that our study, in common with most research, has limitations due to the limited selection of measures with which we operationalized our investigation. We selected just four measures commonly used in studies of trait happiness, but several others exist, although some, like the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al. 1985) can arguably be regarded as assessing state rather than trait happiness. We also selected a five-factor model measure that, while not as potentially prone to poor measurement validity as extremely short measures, is sufficiently brief as to exclude examination of possible relationships of each of the big-five elements on a sub-component basis. Certainly given our findings in relation to Neuroticism, further research using multi-component measures of this dimension of the five-factor model might prove illuminating.
In addition, research examining possible mediation and moderation effects of cognate psychology constructs such as, for example, locus of control (Pannells and Claxton 2008; Verme 2009), illusion of control (Larson 2008; Erez et al. 1995), and gratitude (Sun and Kong 2013; Toussaint and Friedman 2009) might help further the understanding of relationships between luck beliefs, happiness, and the five-factor model.