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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 3, 231-245 (1985)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167285113001
© 1985 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Detection of Noncontingency in a Free-Operant Situation

Victor A. Benassi

University of New Hampshire

Russell L. Knoth

University of New Hampshire

Heike I. M. Mahler

University of California, San Diego

Two experiments are presented that demonstrate college students' success at detecting response-noncontingent outcomes. Both experiments used free-operant procedures. In Experiment 1, subjects were randomly assigned to either response-contingent or response-noncontingent outcome conditions that produced the same frequency and temporal distribution of outcomes. The procedures differed only in terms of whether responses produced outcomes. Behavioral and verbal judgment data indicated that subjects in the response-noncontingent outcome condition detected the noncontingency. Experiment 2 investigated the outcome frequency variable. Prior experiments have shown that, under certain conditions, higher frequencies of response-noncontingent outcomes produce higher degrees of perceived control over those outcomes; other experiments have failed to find a similar outcome frequency effect. We gave two groups of subjects different frequencies of response-noncontingent outcomes. Results showed that response rates, but not judgments of control, were reliably influenced by this manipulation. We relate these findings to previous free-operant and trial-by-trial studies of noncontingency detection.


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