Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception

By Jennifer Whitson, Adam D. Galinsky. Science, 2008

1,001 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Decision Sciences, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4244aef772b2eb2846e729cdbe445bf764047cd

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In General Decision Sciences

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making (2012, background): “For example, Whitson and Galinsky (2008) demonstrated that violations of control would enhance the motivation to see patterns within events that are not inherently related—ranging from simple causal attributions to grand conspiracy theories.”
What's in a Term? Paranormal, Superstitious, Magical and Supernatural Beliefs by Any Other Name Would Mean the Same (2012, background): “…a similar way, superstitions were defined as resting on illusory pattern perception; for example, on irrational illusory correlations (Haselton & Nettle, 2006) or the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008).”
A functional model of hierarchy (2011, background): “…of control (Fast, Gruenfeld, Sivanathan, & Galinsky, 2009), whereas lack of control and power enhances illusory pattern perception such as superstitions and conspiratorial conjectures (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008) and impairs executive functions (Smith, Jostmann, Galinsky, & van Dijk, 2008).”
Measuring Individual Differences in Generic Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories Across Cultures: Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (2013, background): “However, in our data there was no relationship between conspiracy mentality and lack of personal or interpersonal control despite recent evidence that inducing perceptions of low personal control also increases the attribution of ambiguous events to conspiracies (Whitson and Galinsky, 2008; Kay et a”
The Effect of Stress on Consumer Saving and Spending (2016, background): “That is, people acquire necessities to make the environment more predictable, which is a commonly used strategy to restore a sense of control (Kay and Eibach 2013;Whitson and Galinsky 2008), as we noted previously.”
Turn-frogs and careful-sweaters: Non-conscious perception of incongruous word pairings provokes fluid compensation (2011, result): “These results largely correspond to those that follow from explicit meaning threats, such as self-unity threats (Proulx & Heine, 2009) and personal control threats (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008), although we unexpectedly failed to find increasedmotivation to detect patterns, as in the other studies.”
The Compensatory Consumer Behavior Model: How self-discrepancies drive consumer behavior (2017, neutral): “…to maintain stable levels of psychological assets related to the self, such as self-esteem, belongingness, feelings of power, and feelings of control over one's environment (Crocker & Park, 2004; Kay, Wheeler, & Smeesters, 2008; Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs, 1995; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008).”
Putting the stress on conspiracy theories: Examining associations between psychological stress, anxiety, and belief in conspiracy theories (2016, background): “For example, an individual experiencing stressful life events may begin to engage in cognitive patterns (e.g., seeing patterns in unrelated stimuli, making dispositional inferences about others; Sullivan et al., 2008; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008) that promote conspiracist ideation.”