The Effect Of Order And Disorder On Individual Inhibitory Control

Order and disorder are two common condition which exist both in nature and our human culture. In recent years, researchers in the field of psychology and sociology gradually focus their attention to the effect of order or disorder to individual psychology and behavior. Previous research demonstrated that both order and disorder were able to generate a very psychological state and then result to different psychological and behavioral consequence. Specifically, order would always promote a mind-set of tradition and convention, which would encourage healthy behavior, charitable donations, and upholding the status quo whereas disorder would promote a mind-set of unconventionality, leading to enhanced creativity and an appreciation for novelty. However, previous study mostly paid attention to the description of the related phenomenon. Study which tried to investigate the underlying mechanism wasvery scarce, let alone evidence from empirical research. There is a theory called world-is-random(WIR), which argues that order and disorder affect people’s self-control and then impact human’s psychology and behavior. Therefore, based on this theory, the present research attempts to concentrate to explore whether order and disorder would influence individual self-control.Inhibitory control, the ability to suppress inappropriate behaviors, is an essential component of executive control which is the representation of self-control in the field of cognition. If order and disorder affect human behaviors via self-control, as WIR said, they would also affect individual inhibitory control. Therefore, the present research tried to mainly investigate if order and disorder would affect individual inhibitory control and explore its neuro mechanism via event related potential. Then, to some extent, this research would test the rationality of the theory named WIR.Thereby we tried to carry our point via 4 experiments. In our experiments, we took advantage of the stop signal task to test ones inhibitory control and inspected whether the performance of the task would be different when participants were in order or disorder situation. Specifically, experiment 1 arranged participants in real order or disorder situation, i.e. in tiny or chaos environment and then investigate whether environment would make a difference to individual inhibitory control, which was a 2×2 between subjects experiment. In experiment 2-3 we replaced the real environment into pictures in order to increase the internal validity of our experiments. For making sure which presenting time was the best time, we conducted a preparing experiment firstly in experiment 2. Based on the former preparing experiment, we explored the effect of different kinds of pictures on individual inhibitory control via a 2×2 within subjects experiment. Finally in experiment 3, we made use of EPR and explored the neuro-mechanism of the effect of order or disorder on individual inhibitory control via a 2×2 within subjects experiment. We adapted N2 and P3 as index to measure individual inhibitory control.Experiments showed that compared with order stimulus, disorder stimulus would tend to hinder individual inhibitory control. In particular, in behavioral index, disorder stimulus would lengthen participants’ SSRT which was the most important index in stop signal task. In ERP index, compared with order stimulus, the amplitude of P3 difference wave was smaller(t=4.750, p=0.000) and its latency was marginally shorter(t=1.970, p=0.062), which indicated that individual inhibitory control was weakened indeed. However, we did not observe any difference on other compositions of ERP, which indicated that order or disorder did not act on early cognitive processing stage. The results above manifest that disorder inclines to impair human inhibitory control, which partly demonstrates the rationality of WIR and would explain a lot of behavior in human daily life like impulse buying.