This article argues that (a) ego, or self, is an organization of knowledge, (b) ego is characterized by cognitive biases strikingly analogous to totalitarian information-control strategies, and (c) these totalitarian-ego biases junction to preserve organization in cognitive structures. Ego's cognitive biases are egocentricity (self as the focus of knowledge), "beneffectance" (perception of responsibility for desired, but not undesired, outcomes), and cognitive conservatism (resistance to cognitive change). In addition to being pervasively evident in recent studies of normal human cognition, these three biases are found in actively functioning, higher level organizations of knowledge, perhaps best exemplified by theoretical paradigms in science. The thesis that egocentricity, beneffectance, and

The experience of willing an act arises from interpreting one's thought as the cause of the act. Conscious will is thus experienced as a function of the priority, consistency, and exclusivity of the thought about the action. The thought must occur before the action, be consistent with the action, and not be accompanied by other causes. An experiment illustrating the role of priority found that people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that in fact they were forced to perform when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence. Conscious will is a pervasive human experience. We all have the sense that we do things, that we cause our acts, that we are agents. As William James (1890) observed, "the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life... depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago " (p. 453). And yet, the very notion of the will seems to contradict the core assumption of psychological science. After all, psychology examines how behavior is caused by mechanisms—the rattling off of genetic, unconscious, neural, cognitive, emotional, social, and yet other chains that lead, dully or not, to the things people do. If the things we do are caused by such mechanisms, how is it that we nonetheless experience willfully doing them? Our approach to this problem is to look for yet another chain—to examine the mechanisms that produce the experience of conscious will itself. In this article, we do this by exploring the possibility that the experience of will is a result of the same mental processes that people use in the perception of causality more generally. Quite simply, it may be that people experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action. This idea means that people can experience conscious will quite independent of any actual causal connection between

Recent research on contingency judgment indicates that the judged predictiveness of a cue is dependent on the predictive strengths of other cues. Two classes of models correctly predict such cue interaction: associative models and statistical models. However, these models differ in their predictions about the effect of trial order on cue interaction. In five experiments reported here, college students viewed trial-by-trial data regarding several medical symptoms and a disease, judging the predictive strength of each symptom with respect to the disease. The results indicate that trial order influences the manner in which cues interact, but that neither the associative nor the statistical models can fully account for the data pattern. A possible variation of an associative account is discussed. The ability to detect predictive relationships among envi-ronmental events grants humans and other animals a distinct benefit. Therefore, the mechanisms underlying this ability are of considerable interest. Recent research with humans on judgments of contingencies has shed light on these mecha-nisms. It has suggested two classes of theoretical models that

An integrative framework, designed to organize the heterogeneous constructs related to "'control'; is based on 2 fundamental distinctions: (a) objective, subjective, and experiences of controt; and (b) agents, means, and ends of control. The framework is used to analyze more than 100 terms, such as sense of control, proxy control, and primary control. It is argued that although many terms reflect aspects of perceived control (both distinct and overlapping), some are more usefully considered aspects of objective control conditions (e.g., contingency), potential antecedents of perceived control (e.g., choice), potential consequences (e.g., secondary control), sources of motivation for control (e.g., mastery), or other sources of motivation (e.g., autonomy). Implications for theory, measure-ment, research, and intervention are explored. Control is important to psychological functioning. Decades of research in sociology and psychology have demonstrated that a sense of control is a robust predictor of physical and mental

Human cognition is often biased, from judgments of the time of impact of approaching objects all the way through to estimations of social outcomes in the future. We propose these effects and a host of others may all be understood from an evolutionary psychological perspective. In this article, we elaborate error management theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000). EMT predicts that if judgments are made under uncertainty, and the costs of false positive and false negative errors have been asymmetric over evolutionary history, selection should have favored a bias toward making the least costly error. This perspective integrates a diverse array of effects under a single explanatory umbrella, and it yields new content-specific predictions. Better safe than sorry. (folk wisdom) Nothing ventured, nothing gained. (contradictory folk wisdom) These two wisdoms seem contradictory. The first urges caution, whereas the second reminds us that we have nothing to lose and should throw caution to the

Tested the hypothesis that perceived controllability and stringency of performance standards would affect self-regulatory mechanisms governing performance attainments of a simulated organization. Ss who managed the simulated organization under a cognitive set that organizations are not easily controllable displayed low perceived self-efficacy, even when standards were within easy reach, and lowered their organizational goals. Ss who operated under a cognitive set that organizations are controllable maintained a strong sense of self-efficacy, set increasingly challenging goals, and exhibited effective analytic thinking. The divergent changes in these self-regulatory factors were accompanied by large differences in organizational attainments. Path analyses revealed that perceived self-efficacy, which was affected by prior accomplishments, influenced subsequent organizational performance through its effects on analytic strategies. After further experience, the performance system was regulated more extensively and intricately by Ss ' self-conceptions of efficacy. Perceived self-efficacy affected subsequent organizational attainments both directly and indirectly through its influence on personal goal challenges. Personal goals, in turn, enhanced organizational attainments directly and through mediation of analytic strategies. Research on cognitive motivators and regulators of action has

When people try to obtain a desired event and this outcome occurs independently of their behavior, they often think that they are controlling its occurrence. This is known as the illusion of control, and it is the basis for most superstitions and pseudosciences. However, most experiments demonstrating this effect had been conducted many years ago and almost always in the controlled environment of the psychology laboratory and with psychology students as subjects. Here, we explore the generality of this effect and show that it is still today a robust phenomenon that can be observed even in the context of a very simple computer program that users try to control (and believe that they are controlling) over the Internet. Understanding how robust and general this effect is, is a first step towards eradicating irrational and pseudoscientific thinking.

this paper. Correspondence should be addressed to M. J. Dennis, Madsen Center, Augustana College, 2001 S. Summit Ave., Sioux Falls, SD 57197 (e-mail: dennis@inst.augie . edu)

The authors previously described a procedure that permits rapid, multiple within-participant evaluations

Three experiments examined human processing of stimuli as predictors and causes. In Experiments 1A and 1B, two serial events that both preceded a third were assessed as predictors and as causes of the third event. Instructions successfully provided scenarios in which one of the serial (target) stimuli was viewed as a strong predictor but as a weak cause of the third event. In Experiment 2, participants ’ preexperimental knowledge was drawn upon in such a way that two simultaneous antecedent events were processed as predictors or causes, which strongly influenced the occurrence of overshadowing between the antecedent events. Although a tendency toward overshadowing was found between predictors, reliable overshadowing was observed only between causes, and then only when the test question was causal. Together with other evidence in the human learning literature, the present results suggest that predictive and causal learning obey similar laws, but there is a greater susceptibility to cue competition in causal than predictive attribution. This paper examines differences between predictive and causal learning in humans. Events often occur in our environment according to a consistent temporal distribution. Some events occur simultaneously (e.g., the sound and sight of water running out of the tap), whereas other events occur sequentially (e.g., hunger dissipates after the intake of food). When the events repeatedly take place following a sequential distribution in time, the first event (i.e., the antecedent event) can become a signal for the occurrence of the second event (i.e., the subsequent event). Learning to predict the occurrence of an event on O.P. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish