Progress in Social Psychology

Volume 1

Martin Fishbein

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317534969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1980, this title was the first of a new monograph series in social psychology. The editor presents a format for showing the progress of social psychology as a viable, exciting and relevant discipline.

The papers contained in this volume represent progress in theory and method as well as in basic and applied research. In addition, recognising that not all social psychology is produced by people who label themselves as 'social psychologists' the volume contains the contributions of scholars who are best known for their work in other areas.

1	Attribution of Choice

Ivan D. Steiner

University of Massachusetts

INTRODUCTION

With rare exceptions social psychologists have never been very happy with traditional stimulus-response formulations of human behavior. They almost invariably attempt to identify states or processes of the organism that mediate between stimulus and response and determine which of many possible behaviors the individual will produce. Attitudes, motives, personality traits, and a wide assortment of cognitive variables have been invoked in attempts to understand the seeming consistency and inconsistency of human conduct. But in recent years a special kind of postulated internal mediator has received increasing attention. Behavior is said to be influenced by the amount of choice, freedom, volition, or internal control exercised by the actor. Although the meaning of such constructs remains somewhat obscure, and each may have its own unique properties, all refer to an experiential state in which selection among options is believed to be controlled by the actor himself. This state is alleged to mediate dissonance, reactance, the impact of persuasive communications, the attribution of dispositional characteristics, and responses to success and failure.

Most social psychologists are not greatly concerned with whether people actually decide among options, or merely obey the dictates of external and / or historical forces. Regardless of where the true locus of control may lie, people sometimes feel that they are genuine decision-making agents, and sometimes do not. This fact has led social psychologists to address two fundamentally different questions: What are the affective and behavioral consequences of feeling that we (or our associates) are genuine decision-making agents? and under what circumstances do we feel that we (or our associates) are genuine decision-making agents? Research bearing on each of these questions has tended to ignore, or presuppose answers to, the other.

After a very brief survey of research into the consequences of feeling that we “have a choice,” this chapter examines the conditions under which choice is experienced.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF MANIPULATED CHOICE

Two research paradigms have generated most of the experimental evidence concerning the consequences of attributed choice. In one of them the subject is exposed to manipulations designed to convince him that one, a few, or many options of equal or unequal attractiveness are available for selection, and/or that the average attractiveness of options is high or low. In many studies these manipulations are embedded within an experimental design that systematically manipulates other variables as well. Responses are assessed either before or after the subject commits himself to an option, and sometimes after the outcome of the subject’s commitment and actions has become apparent. The dependent variables in such research may be overt behaviors, scores on attitude scales, or self-reported evaluations of satisfaction, success, optimism, or some aspect of the current environment.

The other popular procedure entails informing subjects of the options available to someone else, and then observing subjects’ reactions to the stimulus person, or eliciting their appraisals of him. Actual exposure to an experimental accomplice, videotaped presentations of staged episodes, and written descriptions of the situations confronted by a stranger have been widely used to convey information about the stimulus person’s alternatives. In most studies of this kind, subjects’ reactions are assessed after they have learned which option was selected by the stimulus person.

Manipulation of Choice Available to the Subject

In “forced compliance” research (cf. Collins & Hoyt, 1972) subjects are asked to perform a counterattitudinal act, and are either told or not told they are free to decline the experimenter’s request. When assured of their right to decline, subjects are presumed to have two viable options, although, in fact, they almost never refuse to produce the counterattitudinal behavior. Evidence (Brehm & Cohen, 1962; Brock & Becker, 1967; Linder, Cooper, & Jones, 1967) suggests that only those subjects whose “right to decline” has been explicitly acknowledged manifest any appreciable dissonance reduction (e.g., report increased approval of the counterattitudinal act or the position it represents) following commitment and/or performance of the act.

Reactance research (cf. Brehm, 1972; Wicklund, 1974) typically employs a before-after design to examine the consequences of an actual or threatened reduction in the number of options among which the subject may choose. After learning that he may select any of several alternatives, the subject is told that one of them is not, after all, available. These procedures are reported to lead to heightened evaluation of the threatened option, efforts to reestablish its availability, aggression, or behaviors that imply the threatened option is still available. Reactance theorists interpret these consequences as indicating that people value “freedom of choice.”

In another line of research, subjects are, or are not, offered the opportunity of determining which of two or more tasks they will perform, or of deciding the order in which they will perform a series of tasks. Luginbuhl (1972) found that college students who selected an examination from a set of three available tests scored more highly than did those who were assigned whichever examination they had previously judged to be least difficult. Subjects who decide the order in which they will take a series of tests have been found to perform better (Mandler & Watson, 1966) and to manifest less palmar sweating (Stotland & Blumenthal, 1964) than those for whom the order is prescribed by the experimenter. Failure to achieve an expected level of performance on a self-selected task has been reported (Arkin, Gleason, & Johnston, 1976) to evoke more self-criticism than does comparable failure on an assigned task.

Whether or not subjects choose to receive a message may mediate its persuasive impact. Himmelfarb and Arazi (1974) noted that messages from low-credibility sources are more persuasive when subjects have elected to receive them than when they are transmitted without prior consent. Eagly and Whitehead (1972) found that electing to receive a message enhances its impact provided its content is unfavorable to the recipient’s self-concept; if the content supports the recipient’s self-concept, prior consent reduces the message’s effect.

Manipulation of Choice Available to a Stimulus Person

When examining the consequences of choice that is attributed to a stimulus person, researchers have often manipulated subjects’ awareness of external constraints that clearly favor one option over any other. Some subjects are informed that the stimulus person has been assigned a role or is operating under strong social pressures, whereas others are not. Subjects’ reactions to the stimulus person’s behavior are then observed.

Observers are found to render more confident judgments of a stimulus person’s opinions when he is thought to have chosen his own course of action (Jones & Harris, 1967; Steiner & Field, 1960), and to make fewer inferences about the dispositional qualities of a person who is enacting a role (Jones, Davis, & Gergen, 1961). Stimulus persons who select the task they perform are believed to be more strongly committed than those whose task is assigned (Steiner, Doyen, & Talaber, 1975). Seemingly voluntary acts of benevolence are more strongly appreciated (Thibaut & Riecken, 1955) and more likely to be reciprocated (Goranson & Berkowitz, 1966) than those portrayed as compulsory. Stimulus persons who are represented as operating under strong external pressures are less likely to be held personally responsible for their actions than those who are not (Harvey, Harris, & Barnes, 1975; Kruglanski & Cohen, 1973). Poor performance on a group task prompts less punitive responses from colleagues if the offending individual has not previously demonstrated competence than if he has (Lanzetta & Hannah, 1969; Wiggins, Dill, & Schwartz, 1965), and disliked behaviors that are readily explainable as due to unavoidable error, illness, or lack of information evoke less aggressive reactions from involved observers than do behaviors that are not (Berkowitz, 1962; Cohen, 1955; Pastore, 1952; Rothaus & Worchel, 1960).

What is Being Manipulated?

Dissonance theorists claim to manipulate “choice,” while reactance theorists generally speak of “freedom of choice.” Other investigators employ different words: volition, freedom, decision control, or self-determination. Some researchers avoid all such labels and are content to describe the manipulations by which the availability of options has been varied. But even when such caution is excercised we may assume that the observed effects of experimental manipulations depend upon the creation of an internal, subjective state. Unfortunately, we cannot name that state with certainty; as Baron and Fellman (1975) have observed, we lack a “consensual vocabulary” with which to categorize experiential states, and are often unable to specify the subtle meanings of the labels we do apply. In everyday language the expression “feeling of choice” probably comes as close as any to identifying the experience researchers believe themselves to be manipulating. We will use the word “choice” as a synonym for “feeling of choice.”

Failure to Elicit Subjects’ Asssessments of Choice. When experimenters attempt to manipulate subjects’ internal states (e.g., their perceptions, attitudes, or emotions) they often perform “manipulation checks.” Subjects are asked to report the perceptions or feelings they experienced while, or after, manipulations were administered. But such reports have not often been elicited by researchers who examine the consequences of manipulated choice. Dissonance theorists have rarely asked their subjects whether they experienced choice when told they were free to decline an experimenter’s request, a fact that has permitted critics (Holmes & Strickland, 1970; Kelley, 1967; Steiner, 1970) to suggest that very little choice may actually have been experienced. The present writer has failed to locate a single reactance study in which subjects were asked whether they felt their freedom of choice was threatened when told that an option was no longer available. Manipulation checks have been more often included in studies performed outside the dissonance and reactance traditions, but have not been routine.

Failure to ask subjects whether they experienced choice might be attributed to a pervasive distrust of introspective reports were it not for the fact that much of social psychology has been built on self-assessed attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and aspirations. Perhaps it reflects a more specific distrust of subjects’ abilities to understand and communicate about a construct that can have different meanings for different people. An alternate explanation is that the manipulations employed by many investigators (e.g., dissonance and reactance theorists) are so blatantly focused on choice that they can readily be imagined to have had their intended effect. Furthermore, manipulations have generally seemed “to work”—at least in the case of studies that are submitted for publication and survive editorial review. Predicted or postdicted relationships between manipulations and subjects’ overt responses are sometimes obtained, and these relationships are consistent with the assumption that choice has been successfully varied.

The Importance of Examining Subjects’ Assessments of Choice. It is easy for an experimenter to project his own feelings onto his subjects. “If I were exposed to these manipulations, I would feel that I had (did not have) a choice. My subjects will feel the same way I would.” This logic substitutes the experimenter’s phenomenology for that of his subjects, but it is the latter which is a critical element in the theory that is being tested.

Evidence suggests that subjects’ reports do not always confirm the experimenter’s phenomenology, even in cases where predicted findings are obtained. Miller (1974) noted that fully 38% of his subjects reported a level of choice that contradicted the intent of his manipulations. Kauffman (1971) found that subjects who heard the dissonance theorist’s standard assurance about “freedom to decline the experimenter’s request” reported only slightly greater choice than those who did not, and the average rating of the former subjects still fell on the “no choice” half of graphic scales. Langer and Rodin (1976) found that elderly persons who were permitted to make their own decisions showed substantial improvements in alertness, attentiveness, and well-being. But they did not report increased control over their lives. Perhaps, as Langer and Rodin suggest, subjects did not understand what was meant by control, but it is also possible that their improved status was a “Hawthorne effect” rather than a consequence of manipulated choice per se.

The particular circumstances that are created by experimenters are probably only a small sample of the conditions that prompt or inhibit choice. We may surmise that they constitute a biased sample in which blatantly compelling circumstances are over-represented and events whose effects are more subtle or circuitous tend not to be included. If our aim is to understand the real-life implications of choice, we must eventually deal with the subtle as well as the blatant. It seems reasonable to believe that human subjects can tell us something we do not already suspect about the myriad events that affect their feelings of choice.

Although studies focused on the behavioral consequences of choice have seldom attempted to enumerate the conditions under which choice is experienced, or to identify reasons why those conditions favor a feeling of choice, these aims have been pursued by another line of research.

A THEORY OF CHOICE

Our review of research into the consequences of choice surveyed studies in which the number and/or quality of the options available to subjects have been found to have behavioral or judgmental effects. We avoided troublesome questions concerning the meaning of choice and did not attempt to specify circumstances under which people should, or should not, experience it. The following discussion proposes a set of conceptual distinctions and examines the antecedents of choice.

Decision Control Versus Outcome Control

A person may feel he has a choice without believing he has strong control over the consequences of his decision. Outcomes may be influenced by other people’s actions, unanticipated accident or illness, or by features of the chosen option that are not foreseen at the time it is selected. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between control over the selection process and control over the eventual outcomes of the selected option. It is the former that conveys a feeling of choice.

Recent publications have reported many studies (cf. Averill, 1973; Glass & Singer, 1972; Langer & Rodin, 1976; Seligman, 1975; Shulz, 1976) dealing with “personal control.” Some of this research is clearly focused on control over the selection of options, some examines control over outcomes, and a few studies (e.g., Ayeroff & Abelson, 1976; Langer, 1975) are concerned with both. Rotter’s (1966) instrument for assessing “locus of control” deals with people’s explanations of good and bad outcomes, as does much of the work reported by Weiner, Freize, Kukla, Reed, Rest, and Rosenbaum (1971). They do not clearly discriminate between decision control and outcome control. This chapter concentrates on people’s judgments of their own, or an associate’s, control over the selection of options.

However, we cannot ignore beliefs about outcome control. When selecting among options, decision makers may be presumed to assess the likelihood, as well as the valence, of the outcomes they associate with each alternative (Atkinson, 1964; Edwards, 1954; Porter & Lawler, 1968; Rotter, 1954; Vroom, 1964). Depending upon whether an individual believes he has high or low contr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Attribution of Choice
• 2. Causal Schemas in Judgments Under Uncertainty
• 3. Individual Differences in Social Judgment: A Multivariate Approach
• 4. Social Combination Processes of Cooperative Problem-Solving Groups on Verbal Intellective Tasks
• 5. Group Decision and Procedural Justice
• Author Index
• Subject Index