In this video I discuss the downsides of perceived control and choice and how we assign blame when things don’t go our way. I describe Sherman James’s idea of John Henryism, review the concept of locus of control, and consider how thinking of stress as a cause of illness may place unfair blame on the sick and suffering.

James S.A., Strogatz D.S., Wing S.B., Ramsey D.L. (1987) Socioeconomic Status, John Henryism, and hypertension in blacks and whites https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3…

Gregory E. Miller, Tianyi Yu, Edith Chen and Gene H. Brody – Self-control forecasts better psychosocial outcomes but faster epigenetic aging in low SES youth: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10…

Barry Schwartz – The Paradox of Choice: https://amzn.to/2GWCuCv (Amazon affiliate link)

Video Transcript

Hi I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In previous videos we’ve looked at learned helplessness, perceived control, and position in the social hierarchy, and how all these relate to the stress response. And you might think that having greater perceived control would always be beneficial; that if you felt that you could manage or control any stressor that came your way that this would be associated with lower stress response and more health benefits. But as we’ll see in this video that’s not always the case because there are some stressors that you can’t actually control and it might not be useful here to feel that you have control over them.

This brings us to consider the relationship between our perceived control, the choices that we have, and our feelings of blame and this brings us to what the epidemiologist Sherman James called “John Henryism“. This was named after a man he interviewed, John Henry Martin, but also after the legend of John Henry, the African-American railroad worker who challenged a steam-powered spike driver to a competition. And John Henry defeated the machine but he worked himself to death in doing so. And so the idea of John Henryism is it’s a belief that hard work can overcome any challenge; that when you’re stressed or when things are difficult you always have to just work harder and that’s always the solution. If you just work harder then you’ll be able to overcome anything. And what Sherman James found was that this attitude, this approach towards life and this approach towards dealing with stress was associated with hypertension in lower socioeconomic status African Americans.

A similar idea has been shown in research by Greg Miller and colleagues which found that disadvantaged children from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds who had a higher sense of self-control, they had a greater feeling of control. This was actually associated with more rapid immune cell aging in these children and so this is a reminder that our work ethic can’t confront all stressors. It doesn’t matter how strong it is we remain vulnerable and there are some things that are out of our control, and believing that we have control over them might just lead us to blame ourselves if we fail.

We can also consider the role of choice because choice is related to our perception of control. If we have choice we might think we have greater control over certain outcomes and this is discussed by Barry Schwartz in his book “The Paradox of Choice” and he points out that more choices can make choosing more difficult. So if you don’t have any choice at all, if there’s one option, then it’s easy to make the decision. But if there’s 10 options now making a choice is much harder and if you’re unhappy with the result you might blame yourself. You might think “I should have chosen differently. If I had chosen another option maybe I’d be happier now.” So we have more control over more aspects of our lives than ever before but with this increased choice we have greater feelings of control and potentially greater feelings of blame. If we’ve had unlimited choice in nearly all aspects of our lives and yet we’re still unhappy then we might wonder if we’ve just chosen poorly. Are we the ones to blame if things have gone wrong? And if we’re unhappy with the results now it’s hard to tell. Sometimes, sometimes our choice might not have anything to do with our present unhappiness or our present circumstances but we might wonder how much we were to blame and how much control we really had over the current circumstances.

And so this brings us to consider the relationship between control and blame and what we might want is greater cognitive flexibility where we can shift our locus of control depending on the circumstances. So you might recall Julian Rotter’s idea of locus of control. This is an internal locus of control or we believe that we are responsible versus an external locus of control or believe that something outside of us is responsible.

Now it might be useful to have an internal locus of control when it comes to our achievements. When we’ve done well might like to think that “I’m the reason that I have achieved this” when we fail however it might be better to blame things outside of ourselves. Now it might not always be better and we need to take responsibility for certain outcomes, but sometimes things really are outside of our control and it might be useful to recognize when that happens, to shift to an external locus of control. And this is referred to as a self-serving bias and many of us actually show this to some degree. We have a tendency to accept responsibility when things go our way and when we achieve what we want and to blame others or blame circumstances when things don’t go our way.

And it’s useful for reminding us when we don’t actually have control. There are some things that we do have control over certain health outcomes that we have control over, certainly you can take some responsibility over the food that you eat and whether or not you exercise, but you don’t have complete control over your health. The universe is indifferent to your efforts. You might cross paths with some microbial invader through no fault of your own and there really maybe was nothing you could have done to prevent this. Sometimes illnesses, accidents, and diseases just happen to people through no fault of their own and we need to take that into consideration, particularly when it comes to assigning blame.

We want to avoid the “just-world bias” that I talked about in a previous video because it leads us to blame victims and this can be the case when we think about diseases. We can have a feeling that people who are sick deserve their illness for some reason or another, perhaps one we don’t fully understand. But we might think that they’re to blame for developing this, if they had just acted differently. And the problem is this can worsen the stress of people who are suffering, people who are suffering from some illness, if we also have a tendency to blame them for their illness or for the accident that was actually outside of their control.

And so a final point I’d like to make about stress and blame is in future videos we’re going to look at some coping mechanisms and ways of dealing with stress but it’s important to remember that these are mostly designed for minor to moderate stressors. They’re not cure-alls and they can’t deal or address all possible stressors. There are some stressors that really are beyond people’s control and some stressors that are severe enough that these tips and coping mechanisms aren’t necessarily helpful.

And we want to remember that stress is a risk factor for some illnesses and diseases but we shouldn’t think of it as being the sole cause of any illness and the reason for that is if you start thinking of stress as the cause of illness that has a tendency to put blame on the sufferer, to blame the person who is sick; but if they had just been better able to manage their stress then they wouldn’t be suffering from this illness. And so this is not really the right approach. We don’t want to be placing additional blame on people who are already suffering. This doesn’t do anything to alleviate their suffering if we tell them “well I guess you should have relaxed more before and then you wouldn’t be suffering” or “if you had just gone for a jog” through your, you know, crime-riddled neighborhood right? There are some cases and some suggestions for dealing with stress that aren’t applicable to some people and that might not have helped with whatever illnesses they’re suffering from. It’s important for us to remember that when it comes to thinking about control and thinking about assigning blame for certain outcomes. So some stressors are not easily smiled or meditated away and it’s important to keep that in mind. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!