Corrigendum: Are There Advantages to Believing in Fate? The Belief in Negotiating With Fate When Faced With Constraints.

[This corrects the article on p. 2354 in vol. 10, PMID: 31780977.

Are There Advantages to Believing in Fate? The Belief in Negotiating With Fate When Faced With Constraints.

Is cultural knowledge unique to a culture and inaccessible to other cultures, or is it a tool that can be recruited by individuals outside of that culture when the situation renders it relevant? As one test of this idea, we explored whether the applicability and benefits of a lay belief that originated from Chinese collective wisdom extends beyond cultural boundaries: . Negotiating with fate postulates that fate imposes boundaries within which people can shape their outcomes through their actions. This belief contrasts fatalism, which has been traditionally interpreted as believing that fate dictates people's life outcomes and renders their actions largely irrelevant.

Seeing the forest and not the trees: When impact uncertainty heightens causal complexity.

This study attempts to isolate the effects of experiencing uncertainty on people's cognitive processes. I argue that people can believe that their actions affect the outcome (i.e.

Locus of control, self-efficacy, and the mediating effect of outcome control: predicting course-level and global outcomes in an academic context.

Background And Objectives: The current study utilizes Skinner's framework to examine the unique contributions of internal locus of control, self-efficacy, and perceived outcome control over course performance on students' academic experiences.

Method: Undergraduate students (N = 225) took part in a longitudinal study and completed two surveys (Time 1: just before their mid-term exams; Time 2: just before their final exam in the same semester).

Results: Both locus of control and self-efficacy at Time 1 predicted course-level perceived control over course performance at Time 2.

Personal choice: a blessing or a burden, or both? A cross-cultural investigation on need for closure effects in two Western and two East-Asian societies.

The present study investigates the role of dispositional need for closure (NFC) in how individuals within a particular culture perceive and appreciate choice. Data sets from the US (283 adults), Europe (263 adults and 427 students), China (218 adults and 309 students) and Singapore (258 students) were collected. The results showed that in Western cultures, people perceived choice in a linear way as either a burden or a blessing, whereas in Chinese culture, such opposition between perspectives did not appear, and individuals generally saw choice as both burden and blessing simultaneously.

Maintaining faith in agency under immutable constraints: cognitive consequences of believing in negotiable fate.

Negotiable fate refers to the idea that one can negotiate with fate for control, and that people can exercise personal agency within the limits that fate has determined. Research on negotiable fate has found greater prevalence of related beliefs in Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe and English-speaking countries. The present research extends previous findings by exploring the cognitive consequences of the belief in negotiable fate.