Do Difficult Decisions Motivate Belief in Fate? A Test in the Context of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

Study 1

Participants were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk 1 week before the election (N = 202). Participants were explicitly asked to choose “strongly disagree” as their response to one of the items, and 13 participants who failed this attention check or who were ineligible to vote were excluded. This left 189 participants (45% female, 55% male; mean age = 33.24 years, SD = 11.57 years).

First, participants completed nine items assessing the perceived difficulty of deciding between candidates Obama and Romney (e.g., “both candidates seem equally good,” “I am not sure how to compare the candidates’ plans”) by rating each item on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much). Responses to these items were averaged to create a measure of decision difficulty (α = .84). Next, participants completed three items assessing their belief in fate regarding the election (e.g., “Fate will make sure that the candidate that eventually gets elected is the right one”); each item was rated on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Responses to these items were averaged to create a measure of belief in fate (α = .86). Finally, demographic information was collected. (For experimental materials and complete demographic data, see the Supplemental Material available online.)

As predicted, greater decision difficulty was related to greater belief in fate, r(187) = .19, p = .01.

Study 2

In Study 2, we experimentally investigated the link between decision difficulty and belief in fate by manipulating the ease of distinguishing between two options, a known component of decision difficulty. Participants read real policy statements from the two presidential candidates; the statements were chosen to make the candidates appear either more distinguishable or less distinguishable. We then measured decision difficulty and beliefs in fate.

Data were collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk 2 days before the election (N = 200). Eighteen participants were excluded (1 experienced a computer error; 1 was ineligible to vote; 13 failed an attention check, as described for Study 1; and 3 reported suspicion about the purpose of the study). This left 182 participants (29% female, 71% male; mean age = 28.97 years, SD = 9.89 years).

Participants viewed a Web site that presented real quotes from the two candidates on six issues. To manipulate decision difficulty, we asked participants to read quotes that emphasized either the candidates’ similarities or their differences. A manipulation check confirmed that participants in the similar-candidates condition saw the candidates as more similar (M = 4.41, SD = 0.80) than did participants in the different-candidates condition (M = 3.24, SD = 0.76), t(180) = 10.14, p < .001.

Next, participants completed the fate items from Study 1, along with an additional item (“Everything happens for a reason, and the results of the election will, too”; α = .88). (The results remained the same when this additional item was excluded from analyses.) Finally, three items measured decision difficulty (e.g., “I am not sure how to compare the candidates’ plans”); the participants rated these items on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much; α = .85). (For experimental materials and complete demographic data, see the Supplemental Material available online.)

As predicted, participants in the similar-candidates condition reported greater belief in fate (M = 3.45, SD = 1.46) than did those in the different-candidates condition (M = 3.04, SD = 1.44), t(180) = 1.92, p = .057. Mediation analyses confirmed that this effect was driven by corresponding changes in perceived decision difficulty: Participants in the similar-candidates condition viewed the decision as more difficult (M = 2.15, SD = 0.99) than did those in the different-candidates condition (M = 1.47, SD = 0.75), t(180) = 5.29, p < .001. Perceived decision difficulty predicted belief in fate, r = .23, p < .01. We used the PROCESS macro for SPSS (Hayes, 2013) to test the indirect pathway from condition to perceived decision difficulty to belief in fate (Model 4) and found a significant indirect path, 95% confidence interval = [0.44, 0.07] (Fig. 1).

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Fig. 1.

Results from Study 2: effect of candidate similarity (condition) on belief in fate as mediated by perceived decision difficulty. On the lower path, the value above the arrow refers to the mediated pathway, and the value below the arrow refers to the unmediated pathway. Asterisks indicate significant coefficients (*p < .06, **p < .01).

Discussion

The two studies presented here provide consistent and converging evidence that decision difficulty can motivate increased belief in fate. These results offer a new understanding of a ubiquitous and consequential belief system. They also generate a number of important new questions. Will belief in fate increase when people make difficult decisions that are not societally significant (e.g., the presidential election studied here) but are more personally significant (e.g., where to invest one’s money)? Does this effect extend to related but conceptually distinct constructs, such as belief in luck or other forms of supernatural worldviews? Does this phenomenon impair decision making?

When our voters found it harder to choose between Obama and Romney, they perceived a greater role for fate in the election. Belief in fate may ease the psychological burden of a difficult decision, but whether that comes at the cost of short-circuiting an effective decision-making process is an important question for future research.