Randomness, Anxiety, and Performance Monitoring
Several prominent theories spanning clinical, social and developmental psychology suggest that people are motivated to see the world as a sensible orderly place. These theories presuppose that randomness is aversive because it is associated with unpredictability. If this is the case, thinking that the world is random should lead to increased anxiety and heightened monitoring of one's actions and their consequences. Here, we conduct experimental tests of both of these ideas. Participants read one of three passages: (i) comprehensible order, (ii) incomprehensible order and (iii) randomness. In Study 1, we examined the effects of these passages on self-reported anxiety. In Study 2, we examined the effects of the same manipulation on the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related brain potential associated with performance monitoring. We found that messages about randomness increased self-reported anxiety and ERN amplitude relative to comprehensible order, whereas incomprehensible order had intermediate effects. These results lend support to the theoretically important idea that randomness is unsettling because it implies that the world is unpredictable.
Every year a new generation of physics students learns what should be a profoundly confusing truth; they learn, through the study of quantum entanglement, that the observation of one particle can 'instantaneously' influence another particle that is some distance away (Schrödinger, 1935). Many students are not sufficiently bothered by this information, at least according to Niels Bohr, who famously stated 'Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it' (Bohr, 1998). Bohr's comment speaks to a remarkable aspect of human nature: people are consistently able to come to terms with even the most puzzling truths about the world.
A number of theorists have taken note of this phenomenon and have suggested that people are adept at dealing with information that does not make sense. Constructs like effectance motivation (White, 1959), need for cognition (Cohen et al., 1955) and belief in a just world (Lerner, 1980) are intended to capture people's motivation to impose order on the environment. Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957), terror-management theory (Greenberg et al., 1986), the meaning maintenance model (Heine et al., 2006; Proulx and Inzlicht, 2012) and the compensatory control model (Kay et al., 2009) all propose that when people are faced with observations that are incoherent or otherwise violate their sense of order they use strategies that serve to restore it. Traumatic events can have long-term detrimental effects on psychological health, in part because people struggle to assimilate these experiences with previous assumptions about the world (Janoff-Bulman, 1989).
Theories of sense-making suggest that order is comforting because it is associated with predictability, and thus allows people to confidently pursue goals and interact with their environment (Harmon-Jones and Harmon-Jones, 2002; McGregor et al., 2009). Recent research has demonstrated that reminding people of the structure that exists in the environment increases people's willingness to engage in goal pursuit (Kay et al., 2014). The appeal of structure is also evident in people's stubborn insistence on explaining everything, even when the end result is clearly a fabrication. In his pioneering work with split-brain patients, Gazzaniga (1995) observed that when information is available only to the right side of the brain, the 'left-brain interpreter' creates a plausible, but false, explanation for how that information affected their behavior. Similarly, experiments have shown that people will make up sensible but demonstrably incorrect stories about how they solved intuitive problems (Maier, 1931), how they rationally developed their moral convictions (Haidt, 2001) and how they evaluated the pleasantness of pictographs (Payne et al., 2005). Behaviors like these have been taken as evidence that people have 'a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world' (Cohen et al., 1955, p. 291).
Abstract and Introduction
Abstract
Several prominent theories spanning clinical, social and developmental psychology suggest that people are motivated to see the world as a sensible orderly place. These theories presuppose that randomness is aversive because it is associated with unpredictability. If this is the case, thinking that the world is random should lead to increased anxiety and heightened monitoring of one's actions and their consequences. Here, we conduct experimental tests of both of these ideas. Participants read one of three passages: (i) comprehensible order, (ii) incomprehensible order and (iii) randomness. In Study 1, we examined the effects of these passages on self-reported anxiety. In Study 2, we examined the effects of the same manipulation on the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related brain potential associated with performance monitoring. We found that messages about randomness increased self-reported anxiety and ERN amplitude relative to comprehensible order, whereas incomprehensible order had intermediate effects. These results lend support to the theoretically important idea that randomness is unsettling because it implies that the world is unpredictable.
Introduction
Every year a new generation of physics students learns what should be a profoundly confusing truth; they learn, through the study of quantum entanglement, that the observation of one particle can 'instantaneously' influence another particle that is some distance away (Schrödinger, 1935). Many students are not sufficiently bothered by this information, at least according to Niels Bohr, who famously stated 'Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it' (Bohr, 1998). Bohr's comment speaks to a remarkable aspect of human nature: people are consistently able to come to terms with even the most puzzling truths about the world.
A number of theorists have taken note of this phenomenon and have suggested that people are adept at dealing with information that does not make sense. Constructs like effectance motivation (White, 1959), need for cognition (Cohen et al., 1955) and belief in a just world (Lerner, 1980) are intended to capture people's motivation to impose order on the environment. Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957), terror-management theory (Greenberg et al., 1986), the meaning maintenance model (Heine et al., 2006; Proulx and Inzlicht, 2012) and the compensatory control model (Kay et al., 2009) all propose that when people are faced with observations that are incoherent or otherwise violate their sense of order they use strategies that serve to restore it. Traumatic events can have long-term detrimental effects on psychological health, in part because people struggle to assimilate these experiences with previous assumptions about the world (Janoff-Bulman, 1989).
Theories of sense-making suggest that order is comforting because it is associated with predictability, and thus allows people to confidently pursue goals and interact with their environment (Harmon-Jones and Harmon-Jones, 2002; McGregor et al., 2009). Recent research has demonstrated that reminding people of the structure that exists in the environment increases people's willingness to engage in goal pursuit (Kay et al., 2014). The appeal of structure is also evident in people's stubborn insistence on explaining everything, even when the end result is clearly a fabrication. In his pioneering work with split-brain patients, Gazzaniga (1995) observed that when information is available only to the right side of the brain, the 'left-brain interpreter' creates a plausible, but false, explanation for how that information affected their behavior. Similarly, experiments have shown that people will make up sensible but demonstrably incorrect stories about how they solved intuitive problems (Maier, 1931), how they rationally developed their moral convictions (Haidt, 2001) and how they evaluated the pleasantness of pictographs (Payne et al., 2005). Behaviors like these have been taken as evidence that people have 'a need to understand and make reasonable the experiential world' (Cohen et al., 1955, p. 291).
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