“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
The Little Engine That Could
Influencing our world: in ch. 10 Dr. Reeve’s takes up the issue of our attempts to affect our environments. He takes up the topic of how we can affect ourselves in ch. 11, an optional reading for you. You and I can briefly consider the topic of self-control below.
He sets up his discussion by considering what motivation we might have to attempt to exercise personal control, and advances the idea that his will reflect the strength of our expectancies to be able to do so:
- “Expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur.” (p. 228)
- Consistent with other formulations, he suggests there are two types of expectations:
- Efficiency: Can I do it?
- Outcome: Will it work?
- He argues that both efficacy and outcome expectations must be “reasonably high” before behavior, “becomes energetic, goal directed, and sustained over time.” [note, this is his basic formulation of motivated behavior from ch. 1].
- Kelly McGonigal is a clinical and research psychologist who has studied the concept of self-control. I made reference early in the semester to her book: The Willpower Instinct: How self-control works, why it matters and what you can do to get more of it. NY:Avery. She discusses a number of factors that have been shown to influence our success (and failure) at effects to direct our out lives.
- hunger (Recall, the frontal lobes [and/or Lineman’s System 2) is an energy hog, consuming up to 90% of the calories used by your CNS (which, uses about a third of of your total energy consumption each day, very disproportionate to its size/weight). Thinking is very expensive from your body point of view. Remember those candy bar commercials: “your not yourself when your hungry”?, not totally off base (although refined sugar is not necessarily the best solution).
- fatigue (Getting enough sleep has numerous health benefits and also increases capacity for self-regulation
- practice (McGonigal compares willpower to muscle power–(the right kind of) exercise increases both. Exercises for willpower? Meditation, possibly especially mindfulness meditation; slowing your breathing, increasing heart-rate variability. Getting enough sleep (see above).
- awareness (of contingencies, short and long term; “keep your eyes on the prize”, humans have the capacity to bring the future into the now.)
- self-monitoring (not just a definite plan but a way to track progress)
- We should also consider alcohol (and any other substance that impairs frontal lobe/executive functions.
- Finally, Dr. Reeve considers how the individual might cope with failure
- Challenge: opportunity for growth and learning (Note the similarity of this idea to his discussion of the Growth mindset)
- Threat: threat to self
- And notes that, “appraisal and coping are highly social processes” (p. 230)
Self-Efficacy
- “one’s judgment of how well (or poorly) one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces” (p. 231, referencing Bandura’s work)
- Reeve argues that self-efficacy is not equivalent to efficacy expectations: “Self-efficacy is a more generative capacity in which the individual . . . . organizes and orchestrates all of his or her skills and capacities to cope with the demands and circumstances he or she faces”, “the capacity to use one’s personal resources well under diverse and trying circumstances.” (p. 231). It is not the same as, “ability.”
- The research of Bandura and others suggests that self-efficacy makes a, “significant and a unique contribution to the prediction of performance and outcomes.” (p. 231)
- The opposite of self-efficacy is doubt: doubt causes anxiety, confusion, negative thinking, aversive physiological arousal.
- Sources of self-efficacy beliefs:
- Reinforcement history: (Dr. Reeve’s personal behavior history; Bandura’s performance outcomes), possibly the more influential according to Bandura
- Vicarious experience: Bandura’s self-modeling; modeling is a major source of social learning in humans (an several other species)
- Verbal persuasion: Bandura: verbal encouragement
- What the coach says at halftime
- What we tell ourselves
- Physiological state: Bandura: emotional state. History (initial experience, repeated experience) and interpretation (cognitive formulation) is important here
- Major points:
- “Self-efficacy beliefs predict people’s learning, coping, performance, and achievement” (p. 237)
- “high self-efficacy beliefs can be acquired and changed.” (p. 237)
- “therapeutically enhanced self-efficacy beliefs can improve people’s lives.” (p. 237)
- Reality check: back to page 234-235: “the effect that skilled performance has on self-efficacy is stronger than the effect that self-efficacy has on skilled performance.” (p. 235).
- That said, “fake it till you make it” has some validity across many areas of human activity, especially social interactions.
- George Kelly’s fixed role therapy
- Mastery beliefs: “the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and presenting aversive ones” (p. 239)
- Ways of Coping (p. 239): the items on this table appear to be more a nosology than a taxonomy (I especially liked “Alloplastic versus Autoplastic” but am not quite willing to use it as a quiz item.). Alternative ideas that you may have encountered: defense mechanisms (psychodynamic), coping behaviors/skills (cognitive-behavioral), emotional-regulation and distress tolerance (cognitive-behavioral), coping responses, self-regulation behavior
- Related concepts:
- Richard DeCharms’ “origin-pawn” variable
- “The perception of a person as the origin of his own behavior or as a pawn pushed around by external agents” (DeCharmes, Carpenter, & Kuperman, 1965)
- Origins identify motivation as internal and integral
Pawns identify motivation as external and manipulative - DeCharms’ work influenced Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory; Ryan and Deci’s work in turn influenced Dr. Reeve’s thinking and research
- Rotter’s locus of control (1966)
- Internal: I control the consequences of my behavior
- Better academic achievement
- better interpersonal relations
- greater efforts to learn
- positive attitudes to exercise
- lower cigarette smoking
- lower hypertension and heart attacks
- External: the consequences of my behavior are outside my control
- More resigned to conditions “as they are”
- lower efforts to deal with health
- lower levels of psychological adjustment
- but
- in nonresponsive environments: greater sense of satisfaction
- Internal: I control the consequences of my behavior
- Richard DeCharms’ “origin-pawn” variable
- Learned Helplessness
- Effects of failure on motivation
- extinction effects
- effects on self-esteem
- Martin Seligman’s learned helplessness theory
- effects of unavoidable shocks
- Seligman’s learned helplessness hypothesis was formulated based on his observation of animals in unavoidable shock situations. Dr. Reeve’s discussion of this material sometimes seems to conflate perception and reality (and our experience is often a mixture of both).
- learned helplessness as a model of depression
- learned helplessness as a model of effects of domestic violence
- The learned helplessness theory of depression could be seen as the inverse of superstitious conditioning.
In learned helplessness we reach the “conclusion” that our actions have no effect
In Skinner’s superstitious conditioning we reach the “conclusion” that our actions are related to outcomes that are not actually contingent upon our behavior - The literature on a learned helplessness theory of clinical depression is quite mixed. My impression is that much of the supportive literature is based on analogue studies (research on college students, subclinical “depression”, and short term effects)
- There is evidence supporting Beck’s cognitive triad of depressive beliefs: negative views of the self, the world, the future. As your text points out, clinically depressed individual’s perceptions of the world (in some ways) may be more accurate than the views of “normal” individuals, especially with respect to attributes of personal influence. On the other hand, a great deal of literature, both clinical and empirical (Peter Lewinsohn’s work) shows clear “cognitive distortions” in the perceptions of depressed clients.
- An alternative view of depression is that it is an adaptive response to repeated failure: conserves energy, curtails repeated negative experiences, “live to fight another day” (of course this presumes that we do “live”, a problem when suicide is one associated risk of clinical depressions), this perspective is sometimes advanced in attempts to explain why depression has continued in our evolutionary history (mild depressions may be adaptive in some sense: conserve energy)
- Effects of failure on motivation
- Reactance Theory
- Reactance refers to efforts to reestablish personal control when this is threatened or curtailed.
- “Psychological reactance is a construct used to explain people’s tendency to try to restore their freedom when they think they are being contgrolled (Brehm, 1966)” (Friedberg & McClure, 2002, p. 176)
- Related ideas are: counter control (operant behavior theory), resistance (psychodynamic theory), oppositional behavior (psychopathology), rebellion (political theory)
- “Both reactance and learned helplessness theories therefore focus on how people react to uncontrollable outcomes” (p. 249), yet suggest different outcomes
- Your text reviews the integrated model proposed by Wortman & Brehm (1975), suggesting reactance as an early response to frustration and learned helplessness as an eventual outcome with repeated failure experiences
- Reactance refers to efforts to reestablish personal control when this is threatened or curtailed.
- Self-Control
- How do we influence ourselves?
- Manipulation of external reinforcers
- if-then contingencies: “First I’ll do my homework, then I’ll watch Black Widow“
- mental time travel (focus on delayed versus immediate consequences): “I really want to do well this semester (and doing homework now will further that goal)”
- Manipulation of self-evaluation
- private speech
- flavors of self-talk
- first-person private speech: “I did that well”, “I really suck at that”, “I’m a good person”, “I’m such a loser”
- third-person private speech (distanced self-talk): “[your name], you want to . . . .”, “[your name] that was not consistent with your value of . . . .”, “you need to study now”
- Third-person and distanced self-talk effects greater self-control and emotional regulation (Moser, et al., 2017; Orvell et al., 2019; Orvell, et al., 2021)
- Manipulation of environments/setting conditions/discriminative stimuli
- alcoholic goes into a bar: drinks
- alcoholic drives passes former favorite bar, goes into bar, drinks
- alcoholic has bad day at work, drives past former favorite bar, . . . .
- alcoholic has disagreement with boss, has bad day at work, . . . .
- alcoholic has disagreement with boss, engages in emotional regulation strategy, goes to AA meeting, goes home sober for another day
- We have the greatest opportunity for personal influence early in the chain