In clinical settings, we often think that the pain caused by an action or movement that we caused is "not my fault," or "I have this pain because of that doctor." Sometimes you realize that it wasn't your fault. In this way, the psychological process of linking an event to some cause that is thought to have produced it is called causal attribution, and patients who tend to attribute the cause to others may find it difficult to provide patient education to encourage behavior change. be. However, because causal attribution has many subjective elements, it is difficult to treat it scientifically, and its cognitive mechanism has not been clarified.
This time, visiting researcher Kazuki Hayashida and professor Shu Morioka of the Kio University Neurorehabilitation Research Center and their colleagues investigated the following: when an act is chosen voluntarily (free choice condition) and when it is forced by another person (forced choice condition). We investigated whether causal attributions for nonpredictive negative outcomes change. We asked healthy subjects to perform an experiment in which when they pressed one of three keys on a screen, they were given either sound only, sound and tactile sensation, or sound and pain stimulation after the key press. We examined whether causal attribution differs when pain is inflicted under conditions of being able to freely choose (free-choice condition) or being forced to choose (forced-choice condition).
The results showed that when pain was inflicted along with an action, the attribution of the cause to oneself was significantly reduced under the forced choice condition compared to the free choice condition. In other words, if a negative event occurs when a choice is forced on someone else, the attribution of the cause to the self decreases, and the person may end up blaming the other person.
On the other hand, the results showed that participants felt the same level of pain in the free-choice and forced-choice conditions. These results suggest that whether or not a person chooses to act is more important than the negative event itself in modulating causal attribution.
These results reveal that free choice is an important factor in causal attribution, and demonstrate the importance of ensuring patients' free will during patient education.
