Helplessness experience and intentional (un-)binding: Control deprivation disrupts the implicit sense of agency.

Abstract

Prolonged deprivation of personal control induces cognitive, motivational, and affective impairments that can lead to learned helplessness syndrome. Research on cognitive mechanisms involved in responding to uncontrollable events reveals a critical role of lack of contingency between one’s action and outcomes. However, the impact of experienced uncontrollability on individuals’ sense of self-agency has not been explored yet. This research examined how prolonged control deprivation affects implicit sense of agency. We exposed participants to action–outcome noncontingency of varying lengths and measured implicit sense of self-agency manifested in intentional binding. In 2 studies (N = 133 and N = 354, respectively), we found that control deprivation decreased the intentional binding effect, and that the relationship appeared to be monotonic: the longer the control deprivation, the smaller the intentional binding effect. Moreover, in the condition of prolonged control deprivation, no intentional binding was observed at all: Participants evaluated the time elapsing between the action and the effect as if both occurred separately. Our finding suggests that long-term exposure to uncontrollability has detrimental effects on the ability to detect consequences of one’s actions, the basis of implicit self-agency. The implications of our results for the theory of control deprivation and sense of agency are thoroughly discussed.

Not All in the Same Boat. Socioeconomic Differences in Marital Stress and Satisfaction During the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…Moreover, lower-class individuals tend to explain social outcomes by using more contextual factors (that are outside of their control), as contrasted to higher-class individuals who use more dispositional (and controllable factors) (Kraus et al, 2009). Thus, feeling that their environment is less controllable during the pandemic, lower social class individuals might develop an increased sense of helplessness (Soral et al, 2021). In the end, some past reviews suggest that socioeconomic status and gender are two sociocultural contexts the determine the elaboration of one self over the others (Stephens et al, 2014).…”

A Revised Framework for the Investigation of Expectation Update Versus Maintenance in the Context of Expectation Violations: The ViolEx 2.0 Model

“…Here, it is less important whether the situation is objectively controllable but rather whether the agent feels or judges that an outcome can be influenced by them. On the one hand, prolonged experiences of low control may result in experiences of “helplessness” where goal-directed behavior is suppressed ( Seligman, 1972 ) and individuals may become less sensitive to changes in action-outcome contingencies ( Soral et al, 2021 ). Deviations of experienced control from reality imply that there is no valid internal representation of the objective situation (cf.…”

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“…This effect can be considered as a mechanism which preserves the feeling of agency even when success is elusive. It presumably helps agents to avoid learning helplessness when actions repeatedly result in unwanted outcomes (Maier & Seligman, 2016;Soral, Kofta, & Bukowski, 2020), and thus fosters further attempts to try and effectively learn about a specific task at hand, and achieve mastery. We suggest that sense of agency, at least as measured by intentional binding, is boosted when there is motivation to improve performance by learning from errors.…”