We've (not) lost control
The demand for autonomy over how one's life turns out is fundamental - and pretty unchanging.
Humans like being in control. Some analyses of human psychology (like this one from the American journal, Trends in Cognitive Science) suggest that it is “not only desirable, but it is likely a psychological and biological necessity”. People like the idea, philosophically and ideologically, of self-determination and freedom. Entire nations are built on these ideals.
More parochially, people want to be able to control their environment. Workplace productivity studies (like this one) have found that employees receive a significant boost when they are given control over their working environment – for example, by having desk lamp that only they can turn on and off.
Control is something we measure very closely. Every month we ask a representative sample of UK adults (as part of our Optimism Index barometer) how much freedom of choice and control they feel they have over the way their life turns out. We interpret this as a eudemonic measure of wellbeing, allowing us to understand how much autonomy people feel they have.
There is movement in this data over time but generally it’s incredibly stable. Below is the chart, compiling data from three nationally representative surveys of British adults (the World Values Survey, Trajectory Global Foresight and the Trajectory Optimism Index).
It is not an exciting chart.
While long term levels of control are pretty unchanging, we have seen some movement in the data since we started measuring it on a monthly basis in 2018. Levels of control have suffered over the past 18 months as financial stress has left people worrying more than usual about keeping their heads above water. It also suffered in late 2020 as we slid inexorably into more restrictions, with people confused by the tiers system and unsure what to expect from the future. This was in sharp contrast to the first lockdown, in spring 2020, when autonomy rose – with less going on, people felt more in control.
That really surprised us – at the outset of the pandemic in March 2020 we predicted that autonomy would suffer as restrictions removed autonomy from people. Quite the opposite. There was lots that people couldn’t do, but this gave some people more autonomy over their immediate environment.
What’s interesting is that although most measures of wellbeing are very stable over time, not all play by the rules. Since the mid-1990s, the same social attitudes surveys that give us a pretty consistent read on control paint a picture of long, slow decline for life satisfaction.
So, three conclusions from all of this:
The demand for control is a fundamental human demand. It’s existed forever, and isn’t going away any time soon.
There are short term, sometimes counterintuitive, trends in levels of autonomy that reflect a population’s wider environment. But the long term trend in how much control people feel they have over their lives is very stable.
The thing that is changing is satisfaction as a measure of wellbeing. The last few decades suggest a long, slow decline in how satisfied we are with our lives.