The Effect Of Regulatory Focus On Escalation Of Commitment: Illusion Of Control As A Mediator

Self-regulation refers to one's attempts to alter or steer thoughts and responses in an effort to achieve a goal. One will appears certain tendencies in the process of self regulation, which is termed Regulatory Focus(RF)。Regulatory Focus Theory distinguished two kinds of regulatory systems-promotion focus and prevention focus. Regulatory focus is one of the new view in self-regulation for these years, it is a general motivation principle and it had been studied in many fields,especially, there is more and more attention about it in consuming domain and decision-making domain. Researches in decision-making domain suggests that promotion-focused individuals are more inclined to use approach eagerness means to attain task goals, insure hits and insure against errors of omission and should have a "risky" bias whereas prevention-focused individuals are more inclined to use avoidance vigilance means to attain task goals, insure correct rejections and insure against errors of commission and should have a "conservative" bias. Decision makers often face the dilemma of whether to withdraw from a failing course of action (e.g., when a prior decision receives negative feedback) or to invest more resources to turn the current losses around. This situation has been termed an escalation situation. Escalation of commitment (EOC) refers to the phenomenon whereby, in the face of negative consequences, decision-makers increase resource commitment and risk further losses. As promotion focus and prevention focus have different decision bias, will RF affect EOC? Illusion of control (IOC) refers to an expectancy of a personal success probability inappropriately higher than the objective probability would warrant. Existing researches suggest that promotion-focused individuals report higher IOC than prevention-focused individuals, and IOC is positively correlated with EOC. In that case, will IOC partly explain the effect of RF on EOC?As there has been no systematic research about that two questions above, this research tries to explore whether and how the RF effect EOC, and explore the mechanism of the effect Combining with IOC.Concretely, this research contains two studys:1.revised the regulatory focus strategies scale; 2.examine how the regulatory focus affect escalation of commitment and the mediating effect of the illusion of control. In study one, the Chinese revision of Regulatory Focus Strategies Scale was formed base on the primary revise, trial-test, results analysis and revise again,it boasts excellent reliability and validity. Study two contains two experiments. In experiment one, we measured individual chronic regulatory focus with RFSS to further test how it affect escalation of commitment and the mediating role of illusion of control. Results show that choric regulatory focus has a notable effect on escalation of commitment, the escalating tendency of promotion-focused individuals is stronger than it of prevention-focused individuals and illusion of control is partial mediator between regulatory focus and escalation of commitment. In experiment two,we manipulated temporary regulatory focus with instructions to examine how the temporary regulatory focus affect escalation of commitment. And test the mediating role of illusion of control. The findings show that temporary regulatory focus significantly affect EOC. And IOC mediated the relationship between them.Finally, we summarized the main conclusions of this research, probed into the theoretical progresses, practical implications, and pointed out the research limitations of this research and the direction for future research.