Control Motivation and Collective Identity: Testing a Model of Group-Based Control Restoration
Final Report Abstract
People want to be the masters of their own fate. They have a basic motive of controlling important aspects of their environment through their autonomous self, and satisfying this need keeps them healthy. We propose that, paradoxically at first glance, this need for control sometimes finds expression in people affiliating with groups, abandoning their personal self, and conforming to group norms. This should be the case when they reflect on the boundaries of controlling the world as an individual person, which may be existential (e.g., in case of mortality) or due to personal or societal crises (e.g., when people’s prospects of attaining status and wealth are thwarted in the context of economic crises). According to a model of group-based control, people use group memberships to regain a sense of control through their social, instead of their personal, self (the “We”). The present project aimed at systematically investigating which group-based strategies people use to regain control when personal control is subjectively deprived. We wanted to know whether these effects are specific for the deprivation of control (compared to threats to self-esteem or certainty) and whether control motivation is successfully reduced by people employing group-based strategies. Finally, we were interested in the boundary conditions under which control deprived people turn to their ingroups and when they rather tend to support external agents of control, such as powerful outgroups, which has been proposed by a competing theoretical account, the model of compensatory control. In more than 20, mostly experimental, studies, we found two basic group-based strategies people use when their personal control is threatened. First, they more strongly identify with or like to join those ingroups that they perceive to be agentic (i.e. successfully pursuing collective goals). Second, people join in collective behavior that is determined by the perceived norms and rules of their ingroup or in collective action that serves to demonstrate the collective agency of important ingroups when it seems questioned. We found first indications that these effects are specific for threatened control and not due to self-concept uncertainty or status striving and were able to identify neuro-physiological responses indicating that effects of mortality reminders resemble those of threatened personal control. It turned out to be difficult to capture people’s, likely automatic, responses to control threat on direct, non-physiological measures of control motivation. Thus, we did not get as far as intended in systematically testing whether employing group-based strategies indeed restores people’s general sense of control and thus reduces control motivation. However, preliminary findings consistently indicate that following processes of group-based control restoration people experience increased control on the collective level of the self (i.e., “We are efficacious”). With regard to the boundary conditions under which people show efforts of group-based control, we confirmed our hypothesis that increased ingroup identification is contingent on the group’s perceived agency. In addition, we also developed an integrative theoretical model, which helps to distinguish between responses of group-based vs. compensatory control and thus helps to make more specific predictions. Building on our first project findings, fully testing this model is warranted in future research. Taken as a whole, the current research advances our understanding of how people cope with lacking personal control in order to stay healthy and psychologically stable. At the same time it establishes the desire for control as an unique explanation of group-based cognition (e.g., “We”-thinking or social identity) and behavior (e.g., conformity and collective action) as well as intergroup conflict (e.g., discrimination of outgroups). However, in the project we not just advanced general models of human social behavior. We also devoted multiple additional studies to the investigation of how processes of group-based control help to understand and solve societal problems and phenomena, such as ethnocentric responses to economic crisis (Fritsche et al., in press), the possibility of liberal shift under conditions of terrorist threat, or the escalation of violent intergroup conflicts, such as war or asymmetric conflict.
Publications
- (2013). Controlling Death by Defending Ingroups - Mediational Insights into Terror Management and Control Restoration. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 1144-1158
Agroskin, D. & Jonas, E.
- (2013). Destined to die but not to wage war: How existential threat can contribute to escalation or de-escalation of violent intergroup conflict. American Psychologist, 68, 543-558
Jonas, E., & Fritsche, I.
- (2013). The power of we: Evidence for group-based control restoration. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49, 19-32
Fritsche, I., Jonas, E., Ablasser, C., Beyer, M., Kuban, J., Manger, A.-M., & Schultz, M.
- (2014). Existential Neuroscience: Self-esteem moderates neuronal responses to mortality-related stimuli. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9, 1754-1761
Klackl, J., Jonas, E., & Kronbichler, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nst167) - (2014). Threat and Defense: From Anxiety to Approach. In J.M. Olson & M.P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 49, pp.219-286). San Diego, CA: Academic Press
Jonas, E., McGregor, I., Klackl, J., Agroskin, D., Fritsche, I., Holbrook, C., Nash, K., Proulx, T., & Quirin, M.
- (2015). Striving for group agency: Threat to personal control increases the attractiveness of agentic groups. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 649
Stollberg, J., Fritsche, I., & Bäcker, A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00649) - (2016). Das Bedürfnis nach Kontrolle als soziale Motivation. In H.-W. Bierhoff & D. Frey (Eds.), Enzyklopädie der Psychologie. Band C/VI/1, Selbst und soziale Kognition (pp. 53-86). Göttingen: Hogrefe
Fritsche, I., Jonas, E., & Frey, D.
- (2016). The possibility of selfdetermined death eliminates mortality salience effects on cultural worldview defense: Cross-cultural replications. Psychology, 7, 1004-1014
Du, H., Fritsche, I., Talati, Z., Castano, E., & Jonas, E.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2016.77101) - (2017). Extending control perceptions to the social self: Ingroups serve the restoration of control. In M. Bukowski, I. Fritsche, A. Guinote & M. Kofta (Eds.), Coping with lack of control in a social world (pp. 133-150). New York: Routledge.
Stollberg, J., Fritsche, I., Barth, M., & Jugert, P.
