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Compensatory Control and the Appeal of a Structured World

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Mark J. Landau
Mark J. Landau
Mark J. Landau
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Aaron C. Kay
Aaron C. Kay
Aaron C. Kay
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Jennifer A. Whitson at University of California, Los Angeles
Jennifer A. Whitson
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Abstract

People are motivated to perceive themselves as having control over their lives. Consequently, they respond to events and cognitions that reduce control with compensatory strategies for restoring perceived control to baseline levels. Prior theory and research have documented 3 such strategies: bolstering personal agency, affiliating with external systems perceived to be acting on the self's behalf, and affirming clear contingencies between actions and outcomes within the context of reduced control (here termed specific structure). We propose a 4th strategy: affirming nonspecific structure, or seeking out and preferring simple, clear, and consistent interpretations of the social and physical environments. Formulating this claim suggests that people will respond to reduced control by affirming structured interpretations that are unrelated to the control-reducing condition, and even those that entail otherwise adverse outcomes (e.g., pessimistic health prospects). Section 1 lays the conceptual foundation for our review, situating the proposed phenomenon in the literatures on control motivation and threat-compensation mechanisms. Section 2 reviews studies that have demonstrated that trait and state variations in perceived control predict a wide range of epistemic structuring tendencies, including pattern recognition and causal reasoning. We posit that these tendencies reflect a common desire for a structured understanding of one's environment. Accordingly, a new meta-analysis spanning the reviewed studies (k = 55) revealed that control reduction predicts nonspecific structure affirmation with a moderate effect size (r = .25). Section 3 reviews research on individual differences and situational moderators of this effect. The discussion addresses the interplay of compensatory control strategies and practical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
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Compensatory Control and the Appeal of a Structured World
Mark J. Landau
University of Kansas
Aaron C. Kay
Duke University
Jennifer A. Whitson
University of Texas at Austin
People are motivated to perceive themselves as having control over their lives. Consequently, they
respond to events and cognitions that reduce control with compensatory strategies for restoring perceived
control to baseline levels. Prior theory and research have documented 3 such strategies: bolstering
personal agency, affiliating with external systems perceived to be acting on the self’s behalf, and
affirming clear contingencies between actions and outcomes within the context of reduced control (here
termed specific structure). We propose a 4th strategy: affirming nonspecific structure, or seeking out and
preferring simple, clear, and consistent interpretations of the social and physical environments. Formu-
lating this claim suggests that people will respond to reduced control by affirming structured interpre-
tations that are unrelated to the control-reducing condition, and even those that entail otherwise adverse
outcomes (e.g., pessimistic health prospects). Section 1 lays the conceptual foundation for our review,
situating the proposed phenomenon in the literatures on control motivation and threat-compensation
mechanisms. Section 2 reviews studies that have demonstrated that trait and state variations in perceived
control predict a wide range of epistemic structuring tendencies, including pattern recognition and causal
reasoning. We posit that these tendencies reflect a common desire for a structured understanding of one’s
environment. Accordingly, a new meta-analysis spanning the reviewed studies (k⫽55) revealed that
control reduction predicts nonspecific structure affirmation with a moderate effect size (r⫽.25). Section
3 reviews research on individual differences and situational moderators of this effect. The discussion
addresses the interplay of compensatory control strategies and practical implications.
Keywords: control motivation, structure, compensatory control theory, self-regulation
People are motivated to perceive themselves as having control
in their daily lives. As a consequence, they normally respond to
events and cognitions that reduce personal control with efforts to
restore perceived control to baseline levels. What psychological
strategies do people use to compensate for low and reduced per-
ceived control? Traditional theoretical perspectives focus on peo-
ple’s tendency to bolster personal agency, or to view themselves as
capable of obtaining desired outcomes and achieving goals. These
perspectives also recognize that people shore up confidence that
particular actions will produce expected outcomes in a given
domain of experience. Other, more contemporary, lines of research
have shown that people compensate by viewing powerful external
systems (e.g., deities) as intervening or collectively operating to
control outcomes on their personal behalf.
Complementing these insights, we propose that another com-
mon compensatory strategy is to affirm nonspecific epistemic
structure—that is, to sustain interpretations of one’s social and
physical environments as simple (vs. complex), clear (discern-
able; not hidden or obscure, vague or ambiguous), and consis-
tent (stable as opposed to erratic; marked by a coherent relation
of parts vs. disordered). To elaborate, maintaining personal
control requires more than knowledge about contingencies be-
tween actions and outcomes within particular domains, such as
academics or finance. It also requires a domain-general con-
ception of the world as structured in such a way that any willful
action has a reliable chance of success. This idea can be used to
reveal patterns in social cognition and behavior that have yet to
be formally acknowledged in the control motivation literature.
It suggests that people will compensate for reduced control by
projecting structure on the world, even when no objective
structure exists. It also suggests that control reduction will
increase affirmation of structured interpretations that do not
bear in any straightforward way on the control-reducing con-
dition. In fact, control reduction may increase people’s attrac-
tion to structured interpretations that they would otherwise find
aversive.
This article was published Online First February 16, 2015.
Mark J. Landau, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas;
Aaron C. Kay, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University; and Jennifer A.
Whitson, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin.
The authors contributed equally to this work. This material is based upon
work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number
BCS-1222047 (Mark J. Landau) and the Social Science and Humanities
Council of Canada (Aaron C. Kay). We are grateful to Lucas Keefer and
Austin Flohrschutz for their help with the literature review and meta-
analysis. Dr. Neal Kingston (University of Kansas) provided helpful com-
ments and suggestions on the meta-analysis.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mark J.
Landau, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk
Boulevard, Fraser Hall, Room 426, Lawrence, KS 66045-7556. E-mail:
mjlandau@ku.edu
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
Psychological Bulletin © 2015 American Psychological Association
2015, Vol. 141, No. 3, 694–722 0033-2909/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038703
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... This proposition is consistent with compensatory control theory (Kay et al., 2008(Kay et al., , 2009Landau et al., 2015). This theory states that when people experience a loss of personal control (such as during a natural disaster), they may rely on external sources of control such as powerful institutions (Landau et al., 2015). People therefore may initially rely on their government during natural disasters. ...
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