Control from the actor's perspective.

Abstract

contributions in the April issue of the Canadian ]ournal of Behavioural Science on The Psychology of Control suggest both how much we have learned in the past twenty years and how far we still have to go. Although it is difficult to mark the beginning of any field, Glass and Singer (1972) set the stage by distinguishing between actual and control. Many of us subsequently investigated the negative consequences of the loss of perceived control (Dweck and Repucci, 1973; Seligman, 1975; Wortman and Brehm, 1975) and the positive consequences of gaining perceived control (Langer, 1975; Langer and Rodin, 1976; Bandura and Cervone, 1983). Unfortunately, when we identified perceived control as a variable with important consequences, we failed to distinguish between the perspectives of the actor exercising control and the observer witnessing that behaviour. Most researchers adopted the observer's perspective, which prompted us to label perceived control an (Langer, 1975). We discovered that subjects had a misplaced confidence in their own capacity to control events (Langer and Roth, 1975; Ayeroff and Abelson, 1976). More recently, the observer's perspective has prompted some investigators (Taylor and Brown, 1988) to assert that illusory control is good and even necessary for psychological well-being, while others (Wong, 1992) question whether sufficient attention has been given to the aversive consequences of control. We doubt that an illusion of control is beneficial. Rather than accepting perceived control as an illusion, we prefer to reassess the validity of the current theories of control. Would perceived control still appear illusory if we took the actor's perspective seriously? We focus on this question by examining a situation that embodies the entire spectrum of perceived control ranging from extreme helplessness to extreme domination. We consider sexual trauma from the perspective of the victim. From the actor's perspective, we make an important distinction between choice and prediction. This distinction allows us to recognize that, even in situations of apparent helplessness, perceived control may be legitimate from the actor's perspective. From this perspective, we can see that current theoretical frameworks on control may have distorted the actor's reality. We conclude that future research on perceived control should be guided by the actor's perspective. Canadian journal of Behavioural Science, 1992, 24:2 268 Langer and Brown