Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology

15. Personal Control and Well-Being

15 Personal Control and Well-Being Christopher Peterson Personal control refers to the individual's beliefthat he or she can behave in ways that maximize good outcomes and/or minimize bad outcomes. Because personal control leads the individual to engage the world in a vigorous fashion, outcomes that originally elude control may eventually become controllable. An extensive theoretical and empirical literature links personal control to well-being in a variety of domains. Nevertheless, well-being is overdetermined; personal control enables well-being, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition. "PERSONAL CONTROL" refers to the individual's belief that he or she can behave in ways that maximize good outcomes and/or minimize bad outcomes . A belief in personal control may or may not be veridical, but what makes the notion intriguing is its self-fulfilling nature. Because personal control leads the individual to engage the world in a vigorous fashion, outcomes that originally elude control may eventually become controllable . Psychologists throughout the twentieth century have been interested in various incarnations of the personal control construct. My purpose in this chapter is to review some of this work and in particular its relevance to well-being, an obviously broad notion that can be approached at biological, emotional, cognitive, behavioral, interpersonal, sociocultural , and historical levels. Regardless of the level of analysis, personal control is often linked to well-being, and lack of control to passivity and poor morale, social estrangement, academic and vocational failure, and even illness and untimely death. I refrain from equating personal control and well-being, preferring to regard the former as an enabling condition for the latter (cf. Myers and Diener 1995). Given the consistent yet less than perfect correlation between personal control and well-being, our challenge is to specify when and how this association occurs. Much of this chapter focuses on research within the learned helplessness tradition, a well-known and representative approach to personal control. This line ofwork began with an interest in the effects of experience with uncontrollable events in a given situation. While it is hardly surprising that animals and people who experience uncontrollability in one setting become passive in that setting, they sometimes generalize the resulting helplessness from that setting to others where outcomes, objectively , can be controlled. The attempts to explain when and why this generalization occurs and to specify failures of human adaptation that are analogous to the helplessness phenomenon have guided research for three decades (Peterson, Maier, and Seligman 1993). CONTINGENCY LEARNING: THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTROL Throughout the early part ofthe twentieth century, stimulus-response (S-R) conceptions of learning dominated psychological theorizing. According to s-R accounts, learning entails the acquisition of particular motor responses in particular situations and the forging of associations between stimuli and responses; the more closely these are linked together in experience (contiguity), the more likely learning is to occur. Under the sway of behaviorism , learning was thought to have no central (cognitive ) representation. Although this approach was dominant, there were voices of dissent. Perhaps the strongest argument against S-R views of learning are findings that the associations acquired in conditioning are strengthened not by contiguity per se but rather by contingency: the degree to which stimuli provide new information about responses (Rescorla 1968). Traditional S-R conceptions of learning hold that individuals are sensitive only to the temporal conjunction of the response and the reinforcer. In the language of conditional probability, the probability of reinforcement given the occurrence ofsome responseP (Rft/R)-governs all learning. But animals and people are actually sensitive to all possible variations and combinations of P (Rft/R) and P (Rft/no R). Said another way, individuals are responsive to the correlation between stimulus and response. Whenever the two probabilities are unequal, there is an association between the response and the reinforcer. Here individuals have some control over the reinforcer in the sense that they can make its occurrence more versus less likely by enacting or withholding the response, as the case may be. Roughly, the greater the difference between the two probabilities, the greater the degree of control. When the two probabilities are equal for some response, the reinforcer is not associated with it, and the individual is unable to exert any control over the reinforcer, regardless of what is or is not done. The differences between traditional S-R theory and the contingency view have important implications . S-R theory stresses only temporal contiguiry between the response and the reinforcer, viewing the individual...