Can You Take Back Control? A Conceptual Replication Attempt of Balancing a Lack of Trust of Victim Sensitivity Through Compensatory Control (Buchholz et al., 2023)

In social dilemmas, individuals’ outcomes are not only contingent on their own, but also on other persons’ actions. Since other persons’ actions are often unpredictable, social dilemmas inherently involve some degree of uncertainty and, thus, imply a loss of control for each actor. This loss of control can be particularly aversive for individuals who harbor a latent fear of being exploited, such as people with a disposition to be “victim-sensitive”, leading to pre-emptively uncooperative behavior in social dilemmas. Recent theorizing and findings by Buchholz and colleagues (2023) suggest that a brief control affirmation manipulation can alleviate the negative correlation between victim sensitivity (VS) and cooperation. In the present research, we aim to replicate and expand on Buchholz et al.’s (2023) study. In two studies ( n 1 = 336, n 2 = 385), participants played an online trust game with a fictitious partner. Affirming control did not reduce the negative effect of VS on behavioral trust in both studies. In addition, the manipulation did not work as intended and failed to generate a sense of control. We discuss our findings with regard to their implications for research on victim sensitivity and on compensatory control.