Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss our psychological tendency to overestimate our control over events, with implications for everything from gambling and paranormal beliefs to our movements through everyday life. (originally published 2/10/2024, part 2 of 3)
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Joe McCormick. This week Rob and I are out, so in our Tuesday and Thursday slots, we are bringing you a couple of older episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, episodes from the vault, continuing the series we started this past Saturday. Today's episode is part two of our series on the illusion of control. This originally aired on February tenth, twenty twenty four.
We hope you enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and today we are back to continue our series on the psychology concept known as the illusion of control. This is a cognitive illusion, or a common error in thinking and judgment, in which we overestimate the amount of control we have over outcomes in the world, even outcomes that are in no way determined by our actions. So if you haven't heard part one, you should probably go back and listen to that first. But for a brief recap, we talked about some examples last time of the illusion of control. One would be the belief that you can control your chances of winning at a slot machine based on you know, who presses the button and how, and actually you know, it's a purely random process.
There's no like.
You know, you can't be like better at working a slot machine. But other examples would include like the belief that you can improve your chances of hitting a desired number on a dice throw by concentrating before the throw.
I do this, yeah, yeah, and yeah. I was going to save this for a listener mail, but I go ahead mention it now heard from a listener on Discord who pointed out, this is I believe it's passy cish. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, so you use your name. But anyway. They pointed out that in Dungeons and Dragons there's an additional element here that we didn't touch on, and that's the drama of rolling your dice, of rolling that d twenty, doing that saving throw. You may put some concentration into it, not because not as much because you're hoping to influence the role, but because this matters, This is an important role. Perhaps the life or death of your character may hinge on the outcome, and you're going to play it up a little bit. Yeah, it's a socially performative drum roll, but I think undeniably there's off also that sense of like, all right, NAT twenty, let's do it.
I can do this.
Yeah.
Other examples would be like the belief that you can influence the outcome of a sporting event hundreds of miles away by wearing a lucky charm. We talked about the childhood belief that you can control gameplay on video game with like a controller that's not plugged in, or by moving the joystick on a on an arcade cabinet you haven't put any quarters in. Yeah, yeah, And we also ended up talking about an influential early paper on the illusion of control from nineteen seventy five called the Illusion of Control in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by the American psychologist Ellen J. Langer. And for a quick summary of this paper, it used experiments involving games of chance with superficial elements inserted from games of skill to see if people would behave consistent with a belief that they had impossible levels of control over chance outcomes, and this study found that yes. In its experiments people did behave in a way that was consistent with overestimating their level of control over chance determined outcomes. However, the thing about this paper was the experiments did use indirect methods of studying the phenomenon, so these results came with some limitations that I'll describe in just a minute. I wanted to learn some more about the history of how the illusion of control has been studied, because there have been tons of papers on this, tons of experiments, and I wanted to kind of general overview, so I turned to a very helpful book chapter by a psychologist named Suzanne C. Thompson. The chapter is called Illusions of Control and it appears in a book called Cognitive Illusions, edited by Rudiger F. Pohl, published by Psychology Press twenty sixteen, though the version I read seems to have been an updated edition because it included references to more recent studies, such as one paper from twenty twenty one. So in this overview, Thompson uses a broader definition of the illusion of control than Langer did. Langer's definition was specifically about seeking desired outcomes in chance determined events, to Thompson says, instead, quote illusions of control occur when individuals overestimate their personal influence over an outcome, So that that's a more general way of stating it. You know, maybe your influence could be good or bad. It could be in getting something you want or in something you don't want.
Yeah, so this broader definition could apply to like various games that have some sort of random element that you truly can't control. For you may be really great at the game, but you have this added level of illusion of control that thinks that you can you can definitely navigate any random occurrence. And I guess you could also apply it even to interpersonal relationships, you know, thinking that you have more control over other people in your circle than you do.
Right, because this idea would also apply to things where you do have some control, but you're imagining you have more control than you actually do. And Thompson says that since the origins of this research in the nineteen seventies, there have been basically three different ways of experimentally demonstrating that people experience or control. There's like three branches of experiments on this tree. So approach number one that she outlines is the main example. Here is the original research by Ellen Langer, which we already described in the last episode. This general strategy involves gauging people's guesses about their likelihood of success in chance games that have superficial elements of skill games introduced. So to emphasize again, this approach does not actually directly measure people's perceptions of control. Instead, these experiments would kind of infer it from their behavior in a game. So you see that people bet more money. That suggests they think they have more control over the outcome, But it's possible there's another factor operating there, so there's less certainty that you're testing for the variable you're actually looking for. And Thompson explains some other ways of doing these kind of tests apart from like Langer's original experimental design. One thing she talks about is a type of study that you could call observer participant discrepancies. So an example of this would be you get a test group, you know, maybe a classroom of students or whatever, and you split them up into pairs, and you give each pair of subjects a random number generating apparatus, maybe a die that's a simple one. So in each pair, there's one person who gets to roll the die and the other person records all the numbers that they roll, and participants do this like twenty times, and then across the whole test group, whichever pair in the group has the highest total sum of rolls wins a cash prize, and both subjects in each pair guess their likelihood of winning before the game. Thompson says that if you try to replicate this sort of experiment with students, you will usually find that subjects, on average rate their chance of winning a little bit higher if they're the one rolling the die than if they're the one recording the roles. Again, that should not make a difference. So even though we both rationally know that the outcome is random, it just feels a little luckier if I'm the one doing it. However, and I thought this was interesting. Thompson says that some research has found that this effect can be reduced or even neutralized completely by the context of the game, for example, if it takes place in a classroom that has previously discussed the correct way to estimate probability on games like this. And that was interesting to me because it made me think about how people overcome cognitive biases and cognitive illusions. You know, sometimes the unfortunate fact is that simply being aware of a cognitive illusion, like knowing that sometimes our brains have a certain kind of bias, is not sufficient to keep us from falling for that bias. So you can know about the tricks your brain plays, and you can fall for them anyway. It happens to all of us, but in a case.
And this obviously applies to many other aspects of the human psyche as well. I mean awareness, self awareness is often the first step, but that doesn't mean you've completely defeated the illusion or illusion that you are having to deal with.
Exactly. This is true for everybody, but in other cases, and it varies from case to case. So in some cases, research has shown that we can be successfully inoculated mentally from certain irrational tendencies by being made aware of them, and this seems to be one of those cases. You can sometimes neutralize illusions of control just by like having a context in which people have already been reminded about how probabilities work. And I think that's interesting because you might naturally assume that the variable in resistance to cognitive illusions like the illusion of control is the person you know, like permanent features of a person's personality, and you might be inclined to think like well, a more rational person is better able to overcome their biases and think clearly. But I don't know if that's always the case. I wonder if it's really more about setting and context. Maybe setting and context are equally, if not more, powerful predictors of how well people overcome cognitive illusions. In other words, does like currently being in the setting of a statistics class inoculate you against the illusion of control better than being a person who is generally aware of cognitive illusions. I don't know the answer for sure there, but it seems worth considering rather than just defaulting to the explanation of permanent internal personality based differences. But anyway, so to move on, That was approach number Experimental approach number two is different. In this type of experiment, you give subjects a laboratory task where researchers can program exactly how much control the subject actually has. And in many of these experiments the subject has zero control. Sometimes they have more control, and then you ask the subject how much control they think they had. So an experiment typical of this type is one that was done by Alloy and Abrahamson in nineteen seventy nine, in which subjects would be given a button to press and they're told to see if they can use that button to control whether or not a light comes on, and then they're asked to judge at the end what amount of control they think the button had over the light. In reality, the light had no relationship to whether the button was pressed or not. It was simply programmed to come on at some fixed percentage of the trials with each subject, and unsurprisingly, even though it had nothing to do with whether the button was pushed or not or when subjects broadly thought they had some amount of control, and experiments when the light came on more frequently but again unconnected to the button, caused people to believe that they had more control over the light. So, at least in some cases, it seems like success at getting a desired outcome makes people more likely to believe they have control over that outcome, whether or not they do. And while at the risk of over extrapolating from a very contained laboratory outcome, this does sort of suggest to me connections to behaviors in the world, Like you know, when somebody has very good fortune at a particular juncture, they're like, yep, that was all me. Later, Thompson describes another version of this kind of test. This one is called the computer screen on set task. And so in this test, like you sit in front of a computer and you're looking at a screen, and the screen will sequentially produce a series of forty images, and all of these images are either a green X or a red O. And with each new screen, you can choose to press a button or not press a button, and your goal is to make the green X appear as many times as possible. So people will be trying to figure out if there's some pattern like pressing the button or not, you know, pressing it or not in what sequence, et cetera that'll make the green exes appear. Actually, once again, the button has no relation whatsoever to whether the symbols appear on the screen. The button doesn't do anything. And you can vary what percentage of each symbol the subjects get. At the end of the test, you have them rate, on a scale of zero to one hundred how much control they think they had over what appeared on the screen. People who got the green X seventy five percent of their random screens believed that they had a lot of control over the display.
This is also interesting to think of in terms of the sample we discussed in the last episode about as a child thinking you had control over a video game. Yeah, maybe this doesn't play out. I'd be interested to hear from folks much younger than me. But looking back on the video games that I was doing this on, like these were the old school arcade games, where it was maybe a little more directly comparable to just pressing a button and seeing a random O or an AX on the screen, Like, there is a lot more room to ask the question, am I controlling it? I have fifty percent chance I am.
In a way, I'm almost nostalgic for that mindset, Like there's something kind of beautiful about the ambiguity of wondering if you're controlling what's happening on the screen. I feel like maybe I'm wrong about this. I feel like I wouldn't fall for that now, but I kind of wish I could, because it suggests a more I don't know, just kind of like totally radically opened state of mind in which anything is possible, a more magical way of relating to the world.
It's a cheaper way to go about going to the arcade. You know, I wonder what they would think if there was an adult who regularly came into the arcade and they're like, oh, man, he never spends anything. He just stands at the machines and pretends to play.
Yeah, just toggling the joystick at the demo.
It's great. You gotta sell this guy's nachos or something.
Okay, anyway, that's approach number two, these very tightly controlled laboratory experiments. Approach number three is different. Once again, you get people to report their judgments of control in real life scenarios. An example here is a study by McKenna in nineteen ninety three. Not that McKenna different, Chaya, I think this is Frank P.
McKenna.
Yeah. Ask participants to rate the likelihood that, compared to other drivers, they would experience an auto collision, and they were asked to judge this when imagining themself as the driver versus imagining themselves as the passenger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most people thought that accidents would be relatively less likely if they were the driver.
This absolutely matches up with my experience. You know, even when I'm in the car with a driver that I definitely trust and even know that they are a better driver than me. You know, maybe they have more experience or they've undergone training. They're still like that gut feeling of like I'm not actually in control. I can't hit the brake when I see the brake lights ahead getting closer, and therefore I feel like a little more anxious about the whole scenario oftentimes, like realizing that this is irrational, but feeling it.
Nonetheless, I totally relate to that. I feel that too, the same thing. It's not like I actually think this other person is a more dangerous driver than me. I just it's just hard to get over that feeling.
Yeah.
In the second study in this mckinna paper, participants were asked about specific types of collisions, those that would seem to involve either more or less driver control. So they were talking about like rear ending someone versus being rear ended versus having a tire blowout, And the idea was rear ending someone is generally thought to be largely subject to driver control. Of course, we know that there are factors that other factors that can intervene breaks could fail whatever, whereas getting rear ended seems to be out of the driver's hands, and people were highly likely to say that they were less likely to have the type of collision in which the driver was in control. Has high control, So I am much less likely than other people to rear end someone. Whether it's me or someone else, makes less difference in getting rear ended. Quote. Thus, people show illusory control over avoiding an accident by assuming that they will be able to exert control that others cannot.
And I guess this is what's in play when you see drivers, so many drivers just riding bumpers through terrifyingly fast traffic all the time, like they just maybe they have just heightened control over things. I would tend to doubt it.
Yeah, that would be dangerous if someone else did it, But I can handle it.
I alone can weave in and out of traffic and make it to my destination two minutes ahead of schedule.
So this type of experiment is taken to show that people have an illusion of control when they consider themselves relative to other people. A driver has some degree of control over whether they end up in a collision. On average, people think that they are better able to avoid that outcome than other people are, and so looking back over these three methodologies, Thompson says, you know, each of them have strengths and weaknesses. So approach number one kind of the Langer approach. The pros are that it uses realistic situations that people engage in every day, like lottery drawings and games and stuff. And also it has the pro that the indirect measure can help detect an illusory belief in control that does in reality guide behavior, but which people might resist admits if they were asked directly, and that does seem big to me. It helps avoid like people tailoring their answers to avoid embarrassment. Cons on the other hand, are it's indirect, so it doesn't test whether control is really the deciding factor. You kind of have to infer that and wonder if other factors could be contributing as well. Approach number two the laboratory experiments like Alloy and Abramson with like you know, the light coming on or the greenexes and red o's on the computer screen. The pros of that are that the dependent variable is definitely judgment of control, like it's a very tightly controlled experiment. Cons would be that these tasks do not have what psychologists call external validity, So they're like weird tasks with no close analogy in our day to day lives, so they might not be telling us how people would actually behave in reality. They might just be like producing a weird kind of behavior that's specific to the lab task. Approach Number three the self reporting of control judgments about everyday activities like driving. Ala McKenna pros this does have external validity cons are it relies on reflective self reporting, which can be subject to all kinds of biases you know when you're trying to when you ask people to self report on their own judgments about their lives. However, Thompson says that a strength of illusion of control research is that even though these methodologies all have their strengths and weaknesses, they mostly point to a similar conclusion, which is the fact that on average, people believe we have more control over outcomes than we actually do. And there do seem to be some doubts about in exactly what scenarios this applies and what causes it, but the core finding seems fairly robust. Though I'm going to talk about one paper later in this episode that has some theoretical criticisms of how this research and how the experimental findings are framed. So it seems there probably is an illusion of control, especially for outcomes that we have very little control over. But it would be very surprising if people showed an illusory belief in control over all variables in all situations equally. So there has to be some more granular research on like when illusions of control happen, Like what are the kinds of things that we think we have more control of than others, more illusory control over than others, And what kind of situations or states can we be in that heighten this illusion? And to continue with Thompson's overview, Thompson highlights seven variables that have been studied and found to affect the illusion of control. This list does not mean that these are the only factors influencing it. It's just that these have been studied well enough to discuss in this book chapter. So the first one is skill related factors. Now, this was a major part of the original nineteen seventy five paper by Langer. A lot of studies have found that if a situation has features we associate with with dependence on skill, we're more likely to experience an illusion of control and Examples of these features could include quote, familiarity, making choices, active engagement with the material, competition, and four knowledge. So we talked about several of these in the previous episode. For example, familiarity, you know you might be more inclined to think you have control over the outcome of a chance game if you are familiar with the game, or if there are elements of the game that are familiar to you. And this is generally true of skill based games, but wouldn't affect chance based games. One of these variables though, Actually there was a twenty twenty one paper that casts some doubt over whether it affects illusions of control, and that variable is choice. So the original idea is that if you have a choice to make that gives you illusions of control. An example would be a lottery type game. So imagine a game where you buy a lottery ticket. The ticket has a random series of numbers on it, and you win a prize if the winning number matches your ticket. Now consider the same game, except you get to pick your ticket numbers. Maybe you can use your lucky number, which of course is the ISBN. For the novelization of Halloween three season of the Witch by Jack Martin.
To your number, that's the one you play.
It's got to be what could be a luckier number? Happy, Happy Halloween. Now, of course, in a fair lottery like, whatever the number is, it makes no difference whatsoever to your chance of winning. Winning numbers are selected randomly. No number has a higher chance of victory than any other. And yet the fact that you get to choose your number might make it seem like there's some element of skill involved in this game, and thus increases your illution of control. Langer did find this kind of result in the nineteen seventy five paper. However, Thompson mentions that this particular metric of choice specifically has been contradicted by recent research, a paper by Klousowski at All in twenty twenty one, which found that choice did not reliably cause an illusion of control.
Okay, Like the scenario I'm instantly thinking of would be like the classic magician game of Like, Okay, draw a card from this deck, and now I'm going to guess it. Assuming in this case that you are the magician, but you have actually absolutely no magic up your sleeve, no trick. You're just going completely off of chance. You know, you have a certain percentage chance of guessing it right because there are only so many cards in that deck versus, Okay, you draw a card at random from this deck. I'll draw a card at random from this deck. Do you think we're going to have the same card like by being able to pick a car by saying I believe you have the Ace of Spades in your hand when it's just completely random, would you feel confident in making that choice now? I feel like you would be more confident in making that choice if the other person picked their card, because then you can potentially overestimate your ability to guess the mind of the individual. Okay, this is the kind of person's going to choose a king or a queen, or they can try and outsmart me by, you know, choosing a two or three something that isn't superficially interesting.
I guess that would introduce other elements because it would introduce, like, I don't know if the other person picking a card in the scenario is technically a competitor. But we did talk last time about how like competition in some experiments seem to increase the illusion of control. And I don't know. That's an interesting scenario because it adds these other variables too. My intuition is that that would increase illusions of control. It feels like it would for me, it would it would falsely increase my belief that I could control the outcome even though I can't. And just to go again on my intuitions, it would seem to me that the choices could increase illusions of control, like if I get to pick the lottery numbers, it would feel more likely like I had a better chance of winning. But again, this twenty twenty one study found that in some circumstances, no, that's not the case. So it might It might have to do with just like how people are primed to think about the task they're about to do, you know, like you say, as we talked about earlier, like, are you given some kind of hint of remembering how probabilities actually work as you're engaging in the task.
Yeah, okay, I don't know.
But anyway, So to come back to more factors that can apparently influence it. According to experiments, one factor is success or failure emphasis. This is the second thing Thompson lists. So does the task or the context highlight the idea of success or failure? One example, here would be early streaks in a game where you repeatedly guess or draw something. So experiments have found if you let somebody gamble on calling coin tosses again, coin tosses something that in reality might not be truly perfectly random, it is close enough to random. It's basically random, so you should not have any skill at calling a coin toss. But if people are gambling on coin tosses and they have an early string of successes at making the right call, this will apparently increase the illusion of control relative to subjects who have an early string of failures. So if you lose a lot at the beginning, outcomes feel random. If you win a lot at the beginning, you think I'm doing this. In reality, it's equally random either way. But we can get tricked into thinking that we have control because we've been winning and it just seems like winning is happening, so somehow I must be making it happen.
See feel rather opposite in Dungeons and Dragons. If like the first couple of D twenty rolls of the night are really high for me, or or heaven forbid their natural twenties on things that don't matter, I have this sinking suspicion that I'm just doomed when we get to actual combat because that's when the ones are going to come out.
That is really funny. I've had the same feeling before. It's almost as bad as like rolling a critical fail on something important is rolling a critical success on something that doesn't matter at all? Ye feel like I've wasted it?
Yeah, decks, check to see if you can pick up a stick and it's a natural twenty. It's like, all right, I needed to get like a three on that probably.
Yeah. So on the other hand, though, in this success failure thing, failure apparently sometimes neutralizes illusory beliefs of control. So in some studies they have found this is only true if failure is clear and explicit. If there's like ambiguity and the feedback and it's not one hundred percent clear whether you have failed or not, the illusion of control can persist.
All right, Yeah, a natural one on your D twenty row Definitely, I think we'll knock that illusion out of place.
Yeah, yeah, okay. Third factor that seems to influence it need or desire for outcome. So evidence shows that how much you want an outcome can increase the illusion of control over the process of getting it. So an example would be in a computer screen on set task. So we talked about that earlier. That's the one with the green exes and the red o's where people are pressing a button trying to figure out if they can control making the green exes appear on the screen. In this kind of experiment, people believed that they had more They had significantly more control if they received cash payments proportional to the number of greenexes that appeared compared to people who did the same task but did not get a cash reward. There was no cash involve And remember in this experiment either way, subjects have zero control at all. A study by Buyer at All in nineteen ninety five found a similar kind of thing that the illusion of control was increased for a random lottery with a food reward if people getting a hamburger if the subject was hungry, compared to subjects who were not hungry. So like, if the reward is food and you are currently hungry, you have more illusions of control over a chance outcome than if you're not hungry.
All right, well, that makes sense. I mean the scenario, I mean the outcome, not so much the Hamburger lottery. I don't think I've encountered one of those in real life. But yeah, the more desirable the outcome, the more acceptable the gambling risk becomes, the more confident you are that you can pull it off. I think I've felt this way in the past, regarding things like DVD giveaways and all, you know, where it's like, oh, I'd like to win that. Sure, it's worth worth my time to go ahead and and enter, because uh yeah, I can imagine that on my shelf.
Do you have a specific disc in mind here?
Yeah? Yeah, I uh. Ages ago, I entered a contest and won DVD copies of The Fly and The Fly Too, and and it was like and it was it was like magic, you know, because I'm like, yeah, I would mind winning that, and bam I won it. And in a way it kind of like ruined it. It ruined things for me moving forward because then anytime there's like a DVD giveaway, I'm like, well, I won this, I won this once before it could happen again. I'm good at this. Apparently.
Oh so you apparently had an early success that increased the success salience of that kind of lottery for you.
Yeah, I had a similar scenario happened with my son. I took him to local bowling alleys for years and years ago when he was much younger. And you know the claw machines. We've talked about claw machines before. Oh yeah, the show. You know, they're they're they're tricky if you're predatory, if you want to describe them as such. You know, it seems like an easy thing. You just put in a quarter of claw grabs a toy, you get the toy, but there are a number of additional tricks in play that that enable the house to win. And you know, of course he was interested in trying out his claw machine, and I was like, well, this is a teaching moment. I'd say, tell him, all right, I'm going to give you, give you one quarter or whatever it took to use the machine, but I want you to know that these machines are tricky. They are made to trick you. You're not going to win anything. And then then I'm like, go forth and lose, you know, learn this lesson immediate jackpot. He got some stuffy out of that, and I think he still has that stuffy that I occasionally see in his room. And it mocks me because I'm like, you were never supposed to come out of that machine, and you you gave him too much confidence in these claw machines.
Oh that's terrible, though, I would say at least the claw machine is not a slot machine because there is some minor amount of skill involved.
Minor, yes, and if memory serves like we'd have to go deeper in. But I believe there's some some additional Shenanigan's going on with those machines that enable occasional win because that's the thing. People need to occasionally win those toys out of those machines. Otherwise people will realized that, Okay, there's just a bunch of dust covered stuff. He's in there. Nobody's getting anything out of there.
I'm very sorry your son had an early success emphasis on claw machines. That is an unfortunate fate.
Well, I let him have a number of failures after that on other visits, so I think the lesson finally hammered him. Oh.
But the flip side of the success failure emphasis is that research has also found that there are increased illusions of control in a situation where somebody is trying to avoid an outcome they find extremely undesirable. Don't worry, these experiments didn't have actual torture or anything. The really undesirable conditions things like having to speak in front of a group, which is a very terrifying prospect to many of us, including myself, even though I speak into a microphone for a living. So let that be a comfort to you out there who have this same fear.
Yeah, I mean it's a different scenario, to be sure.
Another one was like having to put your hand in cold water. That's another common thing tested here. So people who strongly wanted to avoid these outcomes mistakenly believed they had more agency in the task that determined whether they would have to do.
Them or not.
So it's just a flip side of the thing, like, if you really want that hamburger, you have more illusion of control over the chance process of getting it. If you really want to avoid speaking in front of a group, apparently you have more illusions of control in avoiding that fade. Another interesting thing noted here is that some studies have found a greater illusion of control when people are experiencing heightened stress. I thought that was interesting. Fourth factor is mood. This is pretty straightforward, But studies have found on average, people experience more illusory control when they're in a better mood, and people with a negative mood showed less illusions of control on average. Of course, this is probably not a reason to try to be in a bad mood. But you know, one advantage if you're currently feeling down is that in this state of being in a bad mood, you might be less likely to think you can control things you can.
Yeah. Yeah, though, of course, like we've been saying, it's complex anything human psyche's doing. So on the flip side, you might find yourself more inclined to go after a quick dopamine hit of initiating a gamble if you're in a bad mood. So you know a lot going on there.
Okay, fifth factor We sort of already alluded to this one, but this is what Thompson calls the intrusion of reality. This basically means giving people a reality check. Illusion of control is one type of cognitive illusion that seems pretty easy to overcome in the moment by simply reminding people what the probabilities actually are. So if you remind people of the objective probability of winning a gambling task before they place their bets. The illusion of control can be significantly reduced or neutralized completely.
Yeah, and you see this a lot with coverage of lottery odds, you know, the advertisements for the lottery and like general buzz for the lottery make it seem like anything is possible. You know, the winning ticket might be you know, it might have been sold to the gas station down the street. But then oftentimes news reporting on these situations will often drive home like, no, you have like this astronomically small chance of winning if you enter.
Yeah, here's your reality check. And it seems like with illusions of control, a simple reality check is quite useful to people. Next factor I thought was quite interesting Thompson mentions power. Apparently, people in positions of power and authority. Of course, they do have more actual control over many situations. That's what power means. But it seems power also correlates with increased illusions of control. So if you like, do an experiment where you assign someone a position of power over others in the experiment, or you prime them to remember times in their life when they were in a position of power, this seems to come with an increased tendency toward the illusion of control. And that seemed very interesting to me because you might imagine that it would work the opposite way that you know, it's when you feel disempowered that you dream of having more control. Maybe, But the way this is framed actually does gel with my experience. Like people who get to be the boss or get to be the leader in some way seem more susceptible than regular people to thinking they can, like magically will a dice roll to come out the way they wanted.
Yeah, yeah, it's easy to apply this to various like you well known scenarios contemporary and historic. You know, you look to some person in a position of power who ends up in a situation where like clearly the odds are stacked against them, but they they continue on with like a seeming overconfidence that we we often just attribute to you just to pure ego and so forth. But yeah, the illusion of control could also play a huge part in it.
I wonder if there's actually some overlap with the idea of success emphasis here, because like, if you are in a position of power, you've had some reinforcement already of like in some scenario where you didn't know what the outcome was like you got what you wanted, Like you've got you know, promotion or increased status or whatever, and you're in this position of power now, so you've sort of been trained to think like, oh, yeah, I can make things happen for me, and that could be that could lead to illusions that you can do that in scenarios when you can't.
Yeah, okay.
Another thing Thompson mentions that can affect it is what she calls regulatory focus. This basically hinges on a theory of motivation that distinguishes between situations where you have a focus on getting an outcome you do want, versus situations where you have a focus on avoiding an outcome you don't want. And research by Langans in two thousand and seven found that when you're in the mindset of getting an outcome you do want, that was more associated with illusions of control than the other mindset.
That's interesting, But I guess, on the other hand, like we shouldn't then desire a life where we're just focusing on avoiding negative outcomes, because right that sounds pretty dreadful. I guess in reality, you'd want some sort of healthy balance of the two without too much tendency towards either illusion exactly.
I mean in the same way that you might be less prone to illusions of control if you're in a negative mood, but that probably shouldn't make you want to be in a negative mood. Another one I just happened to come across. This is not on Thompson's list, but another paper mentioned it, so I thought i'd take a look. Is the idea of what's called deliberative versus implemental mindset. So this is the effect of what kind of frame of mind you're in when approaching a control judgment. So this was a paper by Galwitzer and Kinney in nineteen eighty nine called Effects of Deliberative and Implemental mindsets on the Illusion of control. This is a paper that used a light onset experiment like the kinds we've talked about before, where you know you're trying to turn on a light by figuring out, you know, if pressing a button turns it on or not. And this experiment had two different experimental groups doing the same task, but they were separated by the independent variable of a mental exercise. Before making their judgments, one group was asked to quote deliberate on an unresolved personal problem, so you know, thinking about a problem considering various solutions. The other group was asked to plan the implementation of a personal goal, so you come up with the plan of action to get what you want. And this study found that the deliberation group experienced less illusory control on the unrelated light onset task. So quote overall finding suggests that people who are trying to make decisions develop a deliberative mindset that allows for a realistic view of action outcome expectancies, whereas people who try to act on a decision develop an implemental mindset that promotes illusory optimism. And that was to the extent that this is a valid finding that that was illuminating to me because it's like, Okay, if you're more just sort of exploring ideas, thinking about different contingencies and all that, you apparently might be more realistic about how much control you have. But once you get into thinking about how to get something done, then you're more prone to illusions of control, which might actually be useful even though it's just as we said last time, the illusion of control could be useful even though it generates false beliefs, because maybe it maybe those false beliefs could be motivating, could help you, you know, spur you to action.
Yeah yeah, I mean you're working on something that's going to be entered in a contest. Let's say, you know, your chances of actually winning that contest may be too small due to you know, various various factors that have nothing to do with the quality of the work. But you may be inspired to put more work into that, into into the quality, you know, to put more effort into the creation of whatever it is you're making. And you know, you know, we knew that that first prize ribbon, but it could result in a better product overall.
Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about in this part of our series is I mentioned there are some criticisms of the concept of the illusion of control. Uh. There is one really interesting compleating result I found concerning when the illusion of control manifests, and that was in a paper by Francesca Gino, Zachariah Sharrek, and Don A. Moore published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in twenty eleven. The paper was called keeping the Illusion of control under control, Ceilings, floors and imperfect Calibration and So this paper offers a critique of illusion of control research by suggesting that maybe it's better to think about this as a general tendency to make incorrect estimates of our level of control over things, and this would include both overestimating and underestimating our level of control in situations where the evidence is somewhat ambiguous. So, according to these authors, the literature appears to support a general overestimation of control merely because so many of these studies focus on games of chance and other purely random outcomes, things that we have zero control over, and thus belief in any amount of control in these experiments will be factually mistaken. But the authors of this paper basically they accept that pattern is valid. But they also say, if you give people tasks where they have a high level of control, sometimes you should expect to see subjects systematically underestimate how much control they have on those things. So the authors performed several experiments to test this, and they found that across three experiments, indeed, there is a corresponding illusory lack of control in some cases where people have a high degree of control over outcomes. So I want to describe just one example of the kinds of experiments they did. Subjects would be asked to do a kind of word search puzzle on computer screens. They're looking for like patterns of repeating letters in a jumble of letters, and occasionally, at random time intervals, the background of the screens they're looking at would change color, maybe making it harder to pick out the letters and solve the puzzle. Participants could press a button to make the background revert to its original color and make the game easier again. And so the independent variable here was how responsive the background was to presses of the button. The button could be set to zero percent control, fifteen percent, fifty percent, and eighty five percent. And then after this puzzle search game was over, subjects were asked what level of control they thought they had over the background color with the button, And as predicted in this experiment, the authors found in the low control conditions, like if you have zero percent or fifteen percent of control over the background, there was an illusion of control, same kind of thing you would expect based on these previous experiments. But in the high control conditions, where players had like eighty five percent control over the background, they thought they had less control than they actually did, so they did three experiments in total, and in the end, the authors here say that this raises doubts about whether people actually do systematically overestimate their control, and instead, what might be more accurate to say is that people overestimate their control when they have little and underestimate their control when they have much. And so they they offer this as a critique of the sort of theoretical framework of the illusion of control, because they say, really that that's only half of the picture, and that it's more accurate probably to say that we have a general tendency to make mistaken judgments about the level of control we have over events, and that goes both ways.
Interesting, Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of various discussions we've had about occasional, occasionally beneficial errors in cognition. You know, sometimes overconfidence pays off, like we were just saying, sometimes overconfidence just gives you confidence you need to do something, and sometimes an abundance of caution pays off. And then, of course, in either case, sometimes it doesn't work out well for the individual. Either. Overconfidence can screw you up, and so can being too cautious, And I guess you need to some degree a little bit of both to sort of balance out these illusions.
Yeah, is it all right to have one type of illusion pretty consistently if you have like a compensating illusion that sort of like steers you toward the middle.
I don't know, maybe. I mean I feel like a lot of our world views are kind of arranged like this. There are the things that we are unreasonably anxious about and unreasonably cautious about perhaps or at least have a heightened level of caution, and then there are other areas where we may kind of have blinders on and we're just kind of like babes in the woods with those particular threats. And yeah, at the end of the day, like you can't be over confident about everything. You can get plowed over on the butt. You've got to do things like leave the house, So you have to have some level of confidence, even in cases where the confidence is outpacing the actual chances a little bit.
All right, Well, I think maybe we should call it there for part two on the illusion of control.
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