magazine issue 10 2013 / Issue 18

Sense-making through science

• written by Bastiaan Rutjens, Frenk van Harreveld & Joop van der Pligt
• edited by Laysee Ong

People are sense-making creatures in a world that does not always make sense. This is a problem – although we prefer our world and environment to be orderly and predictable, and an expanding body of research shows that we do not like randomness and a lack of control over life’s outcomes (Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008; Lerner, 1980), our world and our social environment are far from perfectly orderly and controlled. Life in modern society can be complex and uncertain, and randomness, risk, and unpredictability are never far away. Consider terrorism, climate-change, recession, social unrest, and war— the list could go on and on. There are many examples of societal and natural instability, crisis, and threat that might instill the view that we live in a ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992) or even in the ‘age of anxiety’ (Twenge, 2000). Threats to our cherished perceptions of order do not necessarily stem from large-scale societal and natural events; they can also be triggered by events in our personal lives, sometimes quite mundane. Consider boarding an airplane, or recall (and try not to get angry) the last time your laptop crashed. Such events also lower our perceptions of control. Likewise, when we unexpectedly get fired or when someone close to us suddenly falls ill, we may be struck by life’s randomness and unpredictability.

(Author Note. The writing of this article was supported by a Niels Stensen Fellowship awarded to the first author.)

People are highly motivated to impose order and causality on a sometimes chaotic world (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996; Landau et al., 2004; Lerner, 1980; Pittman, 1998). Why did something happen, or why did something not take place (see Kray et al., 2010; Norenzayan & Lee, 2010)? Can I, or someone else, predict if an event is likely to reoccur in the future? Given that it is inevitable for people to encounter or experience events that threaten perceptions of order, predictability, and control, it is not surprising that they have developed a wide array of cognitive and motivational strategies that help them to restore these perceptions. This restoration can be domain-specific, that is, consist of an attempt to restore a sense of personal control or reinterpret the threat. Moreover, when such (domain-specific) restoration is not possible people can compensate by affirming order in a potentially different domain (a process known in the literature as ‘fluid compensation’ or affirmation; see Steele, 1988; Proulx & Inzlicht, in press). In other words, when we lack control or when the world seems to operate in random and unpredictable ways, we can turn to threat compensation strategies that either remove the threat directly by restoring perceptions of control (regulation; Rutjens, van Harreveld, & van der Pligt, in 2013; Rutjens, 2012; see also Ruiter, Abraham, & Kok, 2001) or help us cope by affirming control or order elsewhere (compensation). Indeed, threats to personal control have been found to enhance belief in God (Kay et al., 2008; see also Spilka, Shaver, & Kirkpatrick, 1985), belief in intelligent design (Rutjens, van der Pligt, & van Harreveld, 2010), the endorsement of conspiracies (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008), system defense (Kay et al., 2008), susceptibility to superstitious thinking (Keinan, 2002; Vyse, 1997), stereotyping (Burris & Rempel, 2004), in-group defense (Fritsche, Jonas, & Fankhanel, 2008), and the perception of illusory patterns (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008).

The compensatory control model (CCM; Kay et al., 2008; Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, & Galinsky, 2009) can be employed to explain these effects; which all can be seen as ways to maintain or increase perceptions of order. Simply put, the CCM argues that when personal control is low, people can compensate by bolstering belief in external sources of control (see also Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982). Thus, control-threat motivates people to bolster their belief in a controlling God, strong government, or affirm their membership of a powerful in-group, because these offer external control. Superstitious beliefs and falsely detecting patterns and causality can be interpreted as attempts to restore personal control (i.e., illusory control, Langer, 1975; Matute, 1994; Rothbaum et al., 1982; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008). It is important to note that the basic tenet of the CCM is that maintaining perceptions of order and avoiding perceptions of randomness is the core motive, and that personal (either illusory or real) and external control are intersubstitutable means to maintain these order perceptions. Given that the CCM argues that personal and external control are interchangeable, hydraulic sources of order, and that perceiving order and stability in the world is the primary motivation underlying control motivation, compensation would be – according to the model – functionally equivalent to regulation.

Fig. 1. An analogy (Kay et al., 2008) to explain the compensatory control model. Imagine that a full glass represents sufficient perceived order and stability in the world. We can start by filling the glass with personal control over outcomes. Since this often will not suffice (personal control tends to fluctuate) we add to the order-cocktail a certain amount of external control. Together, personal control and external control should fill the glass completely. When one source of order fluctuates (e.g., decreases), the other does so too (e.g., increases).