Divorce: Crisis, Challenge, Or Relief?

10 Who Leaves Whom: The Importance of Control

10 WHO LEAVES WHOM: THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTROL H. B. Wilder and David A. Chiriboga Each of the preceding chapters has examined factors that contribute to the tremendous variabilityin how people respond to separation and divorce. One psychological factor suggested to have major importance but which has been examined only superficially in past studies is control over the initiation of divorce. Those who have considered it seem to agree (e.g., Weiss 1976; Krantzler 1973) that control is a pivotal concept in understanding people's reactions to divorce. Unfortunately, control is also a concept that is difficult to measure because people's reports of control are subject to the vagaries of social desirability, self-justification and other problems associated with retrospective bias. Control and Stress One reason why control may be a pivotal concept lies in its key role in the stress process. Mandler and Watson (1966) and Sells (1970) were among the first to emphasize the deleterious consequences of a perceived lack of control in a stressful situation. Some 14 years later, Lazarus and Folkman (1984) drew much the same conclusion in studying both life events and day-to-day hassles. Ample evidence exists that control can play a powerful role in mitigating the effects of stress and that lack of control can be an important factor in creating and heightening stress reactions(e.g., Bandura 1989; Seligman 1989). 224 W H O L E A V E S W H O M 2 2 5 THEORETICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTROL Control has received attention from social scientists for over 50 years. It has been written about under many names and under the auspices of many theories. One of the earliest advocates for the importance of the general sense of personal control was Alfred Adler. In establishing what he called a "will to power/' Adler (1969) cast the construct as predicated on an evolutionary need to master the environment in the best possibleway. During the decades that have passed since Adler first introduced the basic concept, writers have continued to stress the primacy of control. According to one expert, "man's primary motivation propensity is to be effective in producing changes in his environment. Man strives to be a causal agent, to be the primary locus of, causation for, or the origin of, his behavior; he strives for personal causation" (deCharms 1968, 269). White (1959, 1960), in a series of papers written from an ego psychology point of view, proposed much the same thing with what he called a competence model. The concept of competence subsumes the whole realm of learned behavior whereby the child comes to deal effectively with his environment. It includes manipulation, locomotion, language, the building of cognitive maps and skilled actions, and the growth of effective behavior in relation to other people. . . . The directed persistence of such behavior warrants the assumption of a motivation independent of drives, here called effectance motivation, which has its immediate satisfaction in a feeling of efficacy and its adaptive significance in the growth of competence. Effectance motivation can be likened to independent ego energies in the psychoanalytic scheme. (White 1960, 138) Lack of perceived control has been isolated by writersof various theoretical persuasions as a central factor in psychopathology. Sociopathy (e.g., Melges and Bowlby 1969), depression (e.g., Brown and Harris 1989; Melges and Bowlby 1969; Seligman 1975) and indeed multiple areas of both physical and mental illness have been related to lack of perceived control (Rodin 1986). Seligman (1975) has marshaled impressive evidence that organisms are capable of learning not simply that their actions bring about desirable or undesirable consequences, but that their actions have no effect on the environment . He argues that this perception, termed learned helplessness, is an important element in many dysfunctional patterns of human adjustment. 2 2 6 C O N T R I B U T I N G F A C T O R S RESEARCH ON CONTROL Research on control has been organized along one of two major lines. The first, which subsumes the bulk of existing research, involves studying the effect of control across situations; here we will call this "general control." The second looks at control in the context of specified situations, and can be thought of as "situational control/' General Control Research on general control often considers control as a dimension of personality , and has dealt almost exclusively with perceptions of control, rather than with actual control...