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

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.