Why is it so hard to take
responsibility for our errors? Of course, the obvious and somewhat glib answer
is that our ego gets in the way. But there is more to it than that. Recent
experiments show that one undiscovered basic cause involves our sense of
agency, that is, our sense of being responsible for what we choose to do (1).
Only recently have
scientists started to spend much effort on understanding human agency (2). I discovered this to my
dismay when recently asked to write a book chapter on the subject. It is hard
to write knowingly on any subject when not much is known. Of course agency and
sense of agency are two different things, and here we are concerned with how
people perceive how much control they have over their lives. Given the growing
dependency on government in this country, a likely prediction is that more and
more people will surrender to the belief that they can’t do much about their
lives. Research has shown that a person’s sense of agency depends on how many
options they have to choose from (3). Options shrink when government or anything else constrains your range of
choices. Moreover, another study showed that people believe that they have more
self-control than others (4), which might explain why so many politicians treat the public as helpless and in
need for a government nanny.
Anyway, on the point of
accepting blame for one’s failings or mistakes, it seems that people claim
ownership of their actions more readily when the outcomes are positive.
Negative outcomes from their deeds are associated with less ownership and sense
of responsibility. The most recent experiments had a primary focus on our sense
of time in association with voluntary actions. The experimental design was based
on prior evidence that the perceived estimate of time lag between when we do
something and when we think we did it is an implicit index of our sense of
ownership. Investigators asked people to press a key, which was followed a
quarter of a second later by negative sounds of fear or disgust, positive
sounds of achievement or amusement, or neutral sounds. The subjects were then
asked to estimate when they had made the action and when they heard the sound. Timing
estimation errors were easily measured by computer.
Subjects sensed a longer
time lag between their actions and the consequences when the outcome (the
sound) was negative than when it was positive. The interpretation is that with
positive outcomes, the subjects sensed a more direct connection between what
they did and their action of button pressing. With negative outcomes, subjects
wanted to put more distance (time in this case) between what they did and the
outcome. This seems like a rather indirect way to assess sense of agency, but
we must await a cleverer and more direct way to measure it.
In any case, such
experiments support our intuition that ownership of what we do can be affected
by whether or not things turn out well. In other words, we have a self-serving
bias to take more credit for when things turn out well than when they don’t. When
they turn out badly, we want to insulate ourselves from responsibility and put
blame elsewhere. Of course, we probably already knew that, but now we have
objective experimental ways to study and perhaps manipulate sense of agency.
Parents and social pressures don’t always succeed in teaching people to accept
blame when it is due. This problem is likely to continue to get worse as more
and more children lack responsible parents or even a father and a stay-at-home
mom in the home. Maybe there are more systematic ways to train people to
recognize how the consequences of their deeds affect their sense of
responsibility.
1.Yoshie, et al. (2013). Negative emotional outcomes attenuate sense of agency
over voluntary actions. Current Biology. Dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub2013.08.034
2. David, N. (2012)/ New frontiers in the
neuroscience of the sense of agency. NCBI. Retrieved Oct. 2, 2013 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3365279.
3. Barlas, Z., and Obhi, S. S. (2013). Freedom,
choice, and the sense of agency. Frontiers in Human Neurosience. August 29. Doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00514
4. Pronin, E, and Kugler, M. B.
(2010). People believe they have more free will than others. PNAS. 107 (52),
22469-22474.
