Simple things affect your health.
A study in Science magazine describes how feeling a lack of control affects decisions you make. Contrary to what you might expect, the study was not about the stress response but about the stories you tell yourself to explain what’s happening to you. When they felt that they had little control, the experiment’s subjects tended to explanations using what the researchers call illusory patterns: “the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli.”
Conspiracy theories, rituals, and superstitions are some of the common practices these researchers attribute to our need to tell ourselves a story that gives us some feeling of control in situations where we don’t seem to have any.
In the experiment, the researchers manipulated a variety of situations ranging from an image recognition test to a stock market game. Half the people were made to feel they lacked control in the situation and then were tested to find out whether they saw patterns that weren’t there. For example, whether they saw images on a computer screen that in fact had nothing but visual noise.
The researchers did indeed find that those made to feel a lack of control were prone to recognize patterns where none existed. The explanation offered was that what these people were seeing registered in two places: the cognitive brain and the emotional brain. Both look for patterns—and for obvious reasons. The emotional brain registers patterns for immediate action—go to it, get away from it, don’t care about it. The cognitive brain registers patterns for thought and evaluation—looks like a good thing, but on second thought it’s not. As Joseph LeDoux, the author of The Emotional Brain, remarked on our show recently, the emotional brain trumps the cognitive brain.
So the emotional brain gets the message that you don’t have control, so the cognitive brain comes up with a pattern, explanation, or story that seems to give you a greater degree of control and thereby reduce the emotional hit.
The people who were not set up to feel a lack of control responded as one would expect—for example, they did not see images in visual noise. More importantly, when people in the lack-of-control group were told to envision a situation in which they had a high degree of control, they performed the same as the people in the control group. In other words, there was no difference between the two groups—the manipulation that created a feeling of lack of control had no effect.
What this tells me is that someone who feels they have little control in a situation is not only prone to manipulation but also prone to taking actions that might not otherwise make sense to them. I think immediately of common interactions with the medical system, designed as they are to remove control from the patient. I also think of numerous political situations—the tea bag movement seems a good example of people feeling they lack control and acting on illusory patterns.
On the one hand, much in our social life is designed to limit our control, and not surprisingly increase our sense of helplessness and powerlessness. The experiment reported in Science suggests that the stories we tell ourselves about medical, political, and other situations that try to make us powerless will also make us see patterns that aren’t there because they are stories that enable us to avoid feeling helpless. The experiment tells me that a simple way to regain a sense of power is to recall a situation in which you had control and, most importantly, its feeling—not so you’ll think happy thoughts, but so you’ll be able to put your cognitive brain to work.
On the other hand, recalling those situations in which you had control will not solve the actual problem: that there are institutions and social forces designed to make you helpless. What the emotional memory exercise does is enable you to take individual and collective action based on a clear recognition of the patterns that are actually there. That’s rarely a simple task. But empowering your cognitive brain to recognize how you take control can be a simple thing—a simple act of emotional memory.
