Conceptual and methodological ambiguities surrounding the concept of perceived behavioral control are clarified. It is shown that perceived control over performance of a behavior, though comprised of separable components that reflect beliefs about self-efficacy and about controllability, can nevertheless be considered a unitary latent variable in a hierarchical factor model. It is further argued that there is no necessary correspondence between self-efficacy and internal control factors, or between controllability and external control factors. Self-efficacy and controllability can reflect internal as well as external factors and the extent to which they reflect one or the other is an empirical question. Finally, a case is made that measures of perceived behavioral control need to incorporate self-efficacy as well as controllability items that are carefully selected to ensure high internal consistency.

Summary and Conclusions
Perceived control over performance of a behavior can account for consider- able variance in intentions and actions. However, ambiguities surrounding the concept of perceived behavioral control have tended to create uncertainties and to impede progress. The present article attempted to clarify conceptual ambiguities and resolve issues related to the operationalization of perceived behavioral control. Recent research has demonstrated that the overarching concept of perceived behavioral control, as commonly assessed, is comprised of two components: self-efficacy (dealing largely with the ease or difficulty of performing a behavior) and controllability (the extent to which performance is up to the actor). Contrary to a widely accepted view, it was argued that self-efficacy expectations do not necessarily correspond to beliefs about internal control factors, and that controllability expectations have no necessary basis in the perceived operation of external factors. Instead, it was suggested that self-efficacy and controllability may both reflect beliefs about the presence of internal as well as external factors. Rather than making a priori assumptions about the internal or external locus of self-efficacy and controllability, this issue is best treated as an empirical question.

Also of theoretical significance, the present article tried to dispel the notion that self-efficacy and controllability are incompatible with, or independent of, each other. Although factor analyses of perceived behavioral control items provide clear and consistent evidence for the distinction, there is sufficient commonality between self-efficacy and controllability to suggest a two-level hierarchical model. In this model, perceived behavioral control is the overarching, superordinate construct that is comprised of two lower-level components: self-efficacy and controllability. This view of the control component in the theory of planned behavior implies that measures of perceived behavioral control should contain items that assess self-efficacy as well as controllability. Depending on the purpose of the investigation, a decision can be made to aggregate over all items, treating perceived behavioral control as a unitary factor, or to distinguish between self-efficacy and controllability by entering separate indices into the prediction equation.

Perceived Behavioral Control, Self-Efficacy, Locus of Control, and the Theory of Planned Behavior

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.

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The WEIRDest People in the World

Are Americans more individualistic and less collectivistic than members of other groups? The authors summarize plausible psychological implications of individualism-collectivism (IND-COL), meta-analyze cross-national and within-United States IND-COL differences, and review evidence for effects of IND-COL on self-concept, well-being, cognition, and relationality. European Americans were found to be both more individualistic-valuing personal independence more-and less collectivistic-feeling duty to in-groups less-than others. However, European Americans were not more individualistic than African Americans, or Latinos, and not less collectivistic than Japanese or Koreans. Among Asians, only Chinese showed large effects, being both less individualistic and more collectivistic. Moderate IND-COL effects were found on self-concept and relationality, and large effects were found on attribution and cognitive style.

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Rethinking individualism and collectivism: evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses.

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WEIRD languages have misled us, too [Comment on Henrich et al.]

The Social Psychology of Organizations.

Navigating Cultures: The Role of Metacognitive Cultural Intelligence

Most people rate their abilities as better than “average” even though it is statistically impossible for most people to have better-than-median abilities. Some investigators explained this phenomenon in terms of a self-enhancement bias. The present study complements this motivational explanation with the parsimonious cognitive explanation that the phrase “average ability” may be interpreted as below-median ability rather than median ability. We believe people tend to construe an “average” target that is based on the most representative exemplar, and this result in different levels of “average” in different domains. Participants compared their abilities to those of an average person, typical person, and a person whose abilities are at the 40th, 50th, or 60th percentile. We found that participants’ interpretation of “average” ability depended on the perceived difficulty of the ability. For abilities perceived as easy (e.g., spoken and written expression), participants construed an “average” target at the 40th percentile (i.e., below-median ability) and showed a marked better-than-average effect. On the contrary, for abilities perceived to be difficult, participants construed an “average” target at the median or even above the median.

/pdf/the-better-than-average-effect-is-observed-because-average-f7mg1ee5lo.pdf

The Better-Than-Average Effect Is Observed Because “Average” Is Often Construed as Below-Median Ability

What I Know in My Mind and Where My Heart Belongs

In the target paper, Kashima (2014) harvests insights from communication research, shared reality theory in social psychology, diffusionism in cognitive anthropology and connectionism in cognitive psychology to propose a neodiffusionist account of culture. A major contribution of this account is that it offers a social psychological explanation of the formation, maintenance, and transformation of culture over time. According to this account, cultural ideas and practices are those that are widespread within a designated human group; they are ‘generated (largely randomly), socially transmitted, and retained within a human population due to their adaptive advantage’ (p. 81). Communication and context-specific shared reality The focus in Kashima’s analysis is thesocial transmission of knowledge through grounding of meaning in interpersonal communication. Communication is a joint activity through which socially bounded participants negotiate meanings in concrete physical, temporal, and social settings. A primary goal of communication is to attain mutual acceptance of meanings in a conversation at a sufficient level so that the conversation can move forward. Successful grounding requires perspective taking and the coordination of effort and perspectives. As a result, compared to messages intended for the self (e.g. private or internal speeches), messages intended for a social audience typically contain fewer idiosyncratic expressions and more expressions that the communicators assume to be comprehensible to the audience (audience design). Once shared meanings are established through communication, they become part of the intersubjective reality shared among the communicators. From this perspective, grounding is a dynamic, recursive process whereby communicators initiating a new conversation rely on their initial common ground to formulate messages for each other, modify their common ground as the conversation moves forward, and establish mutually accepted meanings at the conclusion of the conversation. The neo-diffusionist account resonates with the postWhorfian approach to communication and culture (Krauss & Chiu, 1998), which argues that ‘through communication, the private cognitions of individuals can be made public and directed toward a shared representation of the referent’ (p. 53). Specifically, using language to describe a state of affairs can evoke or create an internal representation that differs from and may overshadow the internal representations of the same state of affairs evoked or created by other means of encoding. Moreover, how a state of affairs is described in verbal communication is affected by the contexts of language use, including the ground rules and assumptions that govern usage, audience design, and the immediate, ongoing, and emerging properties of the communication situation. Furthermore, the linguistic representations evoked or created in communication can affect a language user’s subsequent cognitions (Chiu, Krauss & Lee, 1999; Chiu, Leung & Kwan, 2007; Lau, Chiu & Lee, 2001; Lau, Lee & Chiu, 2004). Indeed, consistent with the neo-diffusionist account, our research on referential communication shows that in the process of interpersonal communication, each communicator assesses the partner’s view of the referent based on the partner’s community membership, prior communications, the referent context, and the emergent properties of the communication situations, and tailors a message that is appropriate to the common ground (Lau, Chiu & Hong, 2001). Once consensus is reached on the meaning of the referent, the consensual meaning becomes a part of the communicators’ shared reality and may overshadow previous representations of the referent (Chiu, Krauss & Lau, 1998).

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Communication and culture: A complexity theory approach

Neoliberalism asserts that to preserve individual liberty, an effective competitive market must be established to allow individuals to freely choose their economic activities and to reward individuals according to their merits. This ideology has been criticized for condoning social inequality by attributing the presence of social hierarchy to innate or learned personal qualities. We review existing psychological research that has treated neoliberalism as a cluster of personal beliefs and supplement this review with a cross-cultural analysis of 40 societies that differ along two dimensions of neoliberalism: presence of economic freedom and believing in meritocracy. At the individual level, subscription to neoliberalism is positively associated with confidence in personal control, endorsement of system justification, social exclusion of disadvantaged groups, and reluctance to take remedial collective actions that would reduce social inequality. At the society level, the presence of economic freedom and popular support for meritocracy in prototypic neoliberal societies jointly predict greater acceptance of unequal power distribution in these societies, even after controlling for the actual level of economic inequality.

Chi-Yue Chiu

Papers

Navigating Cultures: The Role of Metacognitive Cultural Intelligence

The Better-Than-Average Effect Is Observed Because “Average” Is Often Construed as Below-Median Ability

What I Know in My Mind and Where My Heart Belongs

Communication and culture: A complexity theory approach

The merciless mind in a dog-eat-dog society: neoliberalism and the indifference to social inequality