Internality and the internalisation of failure: Evidence from a novel task.

A critical facet of adjusting one's behaviour after succeeding or failing at a task is assigning responsibility for the ultimate outcome. Humans have trait- and state-like tendencies to implicate aspects of their own behaviour (called 'internal' ascriptions) or facets of the particular task or Lady Luck ('chance'). However, how these tendencies interact with actual performance is unclear. We designed a novel task in which subjects had to learn the likelihood of achieving their goals, and the extent to which this depended on their efforts. High internality (Levenson I-score) was associated with decision making patterns that are less vulnerable to failure. Our computational analyses suggested that this depended heavily on the adjustment in the perceived achievability of riskier goals following failure. We found beliefs about chance not to be explanatory of choice behaviour in our task. Beliefs about powerful others were strong predictors of behaviour, but only when subjects lacked substantial influence over the outcome. Our results provide an evidentiary basis for heuristics and learning differences that underlie the formation and maintenance of control expectations by the self. Author summary: How success in tasks depends on our efforts is largely a feature of what is known as the controllability of the situation or environment. This quantity should determine the way we approach, adapt to, and perform tasks. In novel settings, it can only be our expectations about controllability that exert an effect, for instance determining the balance of our focus between features of achievability and potential reward; or affecting prior notions about what exactly is achievable or what we can or cannot do. All of these might be different between aversive and appetitive domains. To study these issues, we designed a novel task in which subjects have to learn about a new environment, and analyzed their behavior using a rich computational model. We found that expectations about controllability played a particularly important role in influencing learning, but in a way that differed between positive and negative outcomes. In particular, high expectations about controllability were tied to higher learning rates of unachievability given negative outcomes, guarding subjects from further loss, and preserving their subjective optimistic expectations about control. Our findings can be interpreted within a theoretical framework which implicates control expectations in individual learning differences, and fit well within modern theories of learning in aversive contexts and serotonergic function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]