Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this 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.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three in our series on the psychology concept known as the illusion of control. This is a cognitive illusion, meaning a common type of error in thinking and judgment that has been studied fairly intensively going back to about the nineteen seventies. So, according to most of the illusion of control literature, humans on average have a tendency too believe we have some level of control over outcomes that are completely outside of our influence, such as the outcome of a lottery and other games of chance. And in situations where we do have some control but not to control, we on average believe that we have more control than we do, according to illusion of control theory. Now, if you haven't heard the other two episodes already, you should probably go back and listen to them first. They'll help bring you up to speed for today. But we'll do a brief recap on what we talked about the last couple of times. First of all, just to illustrate the idea of illution of control, we talked about ways that you might see people expressing or illustrating their illusions of control in everyday life, such as the way we concentrate on a dice throw as if this will increase our chances of hitting the number we want, or maybe pressing the door close button on an elevator after somebody else has already pushed it. Questionable whether the first press actually does anything. The second one's just ridiculous, you know, But sometimes we just feel that way. We're in a hurry, and we feel like this other guy, he couldn't make it happen, couldn't close the doors, but I can.
That's right. I mean these two exams alone, along with the walk button at crosswalks, I think we can all relate to these on one level or another.
But another one that's been observed in research is when driving a car, thinking that you will somehow be able to avoid an auto collision by exerting some vague type of control that other drivers are not capable of.
I mean, I often think that other drivers are incapable of a lot when I'm observing their driving. But we're talking about very specific things here, or we're getting into that realm of control that goes above and beyond just being able to drive your car safely and correctly.
Yeah, I mean, it's true I feel the same way when driving, and yet at the same time, for everybody else in the world, I am one of the other drivers.
I mean, I don't know. I see a lot of not using turn signals, et cetera out there. Some people seem in capable of that. But this need not be a time rate about other people's driving.
Now.
In part two of the series, we talked about a bunch of different types of experiments that have found various sorts of evidence for the illusion of control, and we also talked about factors that tend to influence how much illusory control we experience. Just a few examples that came up last time. One is mood. We apparently experience more illusory control on average when we're in a positive mood. The salience of success or what's called success emphasis. So we tend to experience more illusory control when we have a string of early successful outcomes getting what we want. So maybe if you're doing a coin flip a bunch of times and the coin flip comes up your way several times in a row, might start to make you feel like somehow you're making that happen. Another factor was the need or desire for the outcome. So the more you want an outcome, the more likely you are to overestimate your control over it happening. One example of experiments that showed this was like if the prize of a lottery is a sandwich. On average, hungry people are more likely to show illusions of control over the lottery than people who just stayed, who might have a more realistic idea of their chances. Another interesting one was power. Positions of power or feelings of power are somewhat correlated with illusory control, so maybe having more actual control over real things could also bring about more illusions that you can control things you can't. And another interesting factor was the intrusion of reality. So the illusion of control is fortunately one of the illusions that has been found to be fairly well neutralized or mitigated by giving somebody a reality check, you like, remind them in the moment what the odds on the slot machine actually are, and that seems to somewhat reduce a person's belief that they can somehow get better odds through their behavior. Now, also in the previous episode we talked about in interesting paper I found by Geno at All from twenty eleven somewhat challenging the illusion of control framework by doing experiments showing that illusions of control can go in both directions. So, for example, there's a task where you're trying to solve puzzles on a computer screen, and there's a button you can press that will sometimes work to make the screen easier to read. And maybe the button works fifteen percent of the time you press it, or maybe it works eighty five percent of the time you press it. In this type of experiment, geno at all found that people with little control thought they had more control than they did, but people with a lot of control thought they had less controlled than they actually did. And so the authors of this paper argued that maybe this type of finding should cause us to reevaluate the findings of the illusion of control experiments so that we think of them not as evidence of a systematic human tendency to overestimate our level of control, but that that is just one half of a more general tendency to misjudge our level of control in both directions, So overestimating your control happens more often for outcomes that we, to begin with, have very little or no control over.
Now.
I don't know how well the Geno at All study here challenging the illusion of control framework is held up, but there, from what I can tell, still seems to be a pretty robust research consensus about the illusion of control being basically real. And I guess we should just keep in mind that it does seem to probably be real, but maybe it's only half the picture. Now. Another thing that comes up in this twenty eleven paper by Geno at All is something we haven't really focused on all that much yet. I guess we've generally acknowledged it. But the idea of noting with specifics the ways that false beliefs generated by illusions of control can have real negative consequences, like on our lives and on the world. And the authors here site studies making these connections. So illusions of control, when you think about it, could make you incorrectly imagine that you are influencing other people's behavior. You know, I think we can all remember plenty of scenarios when we got up in our heads imagining that somebody else was doing something or acting in a certain way because of us, or in reaction to something we did. But then later you realize like, oh, actually they were acting that you know, you find you get more information, you find, oh, they were acting that way because of something else going on in their lives. You know, other people are living whole lives of their own, and we often don't know what's happening in their heads and in their lives, and so we can have a kind of very self oriented interpretation of other people's behavior. And one form that might take would be or one reason that might arise is an illusion of control.
Yeah, there's often this self centered nature of modeling out other peace people's intents and mental states.
The authors here also note that people who overestimate their level of control over outcomes might quote make bad decisions about where to direct their efforts. And that totally makes sense, right. You know, imagine you're trying to get something that you want, and whether you get that outcome is influenced by multiple factors. Maybe one factor is something that's amenable to practice and skill, and the other factor is purely luck. If you think that the luck based factor is within your control, you could waste time focused on trying to manipulate that when you should have been focused on, you know, practicing the skill based factor, influencing what you can instead of wasting your efforts trying to influence what you can't. Yeah, they also note research pointing out that illusions of control could cause you to make bad judgments about whether or not to listen to the opinions and input of others. And this just that totally seems true. But it also makes me think about how if you generalize illusions of control beyond the self. It seems to me that illusions of control could potentially overlap with the just world illusion, you know, the belief that people get what they deserve. And I'm sure we can all think of cases where we've, you know, encountered somebody who is inclined to blame other people who are suffering misfortune for their predicament, even if it's clearly due to factors outside of their control. Just the mentality that you must have done something to deserve this. You know, maybe if you had a positive attitude, this wouldn't have happened to you, and so forth. I mean, you can see that even in scenarios where it's logically absurd, there's no reason to think that there would be real causal factors of that sort, and so applying that to other people would almost seem like a sort of universalizing or generalizing of the principle of illusions of control.
Yeah, and you can imagine in these scenarios where I mean, there is kind of a self protective rationale in some of these judgments. So something that is, you know, that random outside of someone's control happens, something negative happens to someone you know or someone like You're just aware of the obvious ramification of that is that something out of my control could happen to me, something just like this or similar, and that puts you in that place of not having control over your events. But if there's a reason for it happening to this other person, then perhaps there is a reason for it to not happen to you, or you know, it puts something conceivably within the realm of your control. If there is this causation you can focus on with this other individual situation.
That's a version of the thing we're talking about with like driving that you know, we believe the auto collisions that you somehow would be able to avoid collisions that other people would be less able to avoid because somehow you can exert a type of control over driving outcomes that other people can't.
Yeah, go to be clear, everyone can use turn signals. I'm just saying, consider turn signals. If you haven't used to turn signal today, treat yourself.
So I think it's pretty clear that having the false belief that you can control outcomes that you actually can't will have negative impacts on your life and on the lives of others. There are like an infinite number of imaginable scenarios where this type of illusion would be harmful, which raises the question, then why do we still experience it? Like why haven't we as creatures gotten a lot better at seeing the difference between things we can influence and things we can't. So to examine this question, I want to come back to a chapter in an academic psychology book that I brought up in the last episode. This is a chapter called Illusions of Control written by a psychologist named Suzanne C. Thompson. This is from a book called Cognitive Illusions from Psychology Press twenty sixteen, edited by Rudiger F. Pohl. So, this book chapter does an overview of illusion of control research, the research that has taken place since the nineteen seventies, comparing different methods of studying the phenomenon and synthesizing the major findings of this subfield.
Now.
Later in this chapter, Thompson does cover some of the main explanations that have been offered in the scientific literature for why illusions of control occur. One explanation she brings up that she ends up not agreeing with is the explanation given in the original paper by Ellen J. Langer from nineteen seventy five. This was the one about where Langer essentially said that illusions of control happen because people literally confuse chance determined outcomes with skilled determined outcomes. So we actually mistakenly believe the slot machine is to some extent a game of se skill, and like elements of the skill game cause us to really think that this connects to the finding that skill based elements like familiarity, involvement, and competition, which we talked about in the other episodes, could actually cause people to have more illusions of control, and Thompson brings up some reasons to doubt that Langer's skill chance confusion explanation is the right one. The main thing she brings up about this theory that resonates with me is she says, you know, this theory doesn't explain some of the secondary factors that change how much illusory control we experience, for example, success emphasis, or the level of need or desire for an outcome, etc. That just doesn't really make sense if this is the reason we have illusions of control. So instead, Thompson and her co authors in previous research have offered an explanation for illusions of control based on what they call a control heuristic. And so, a heuristic generally means a process that people use to try to quickly solve a problem or make a determination, not perfectly, but efficiently. So instead of like doing a full analysis of a situation where you really deliberately think everything out, you can mentally use a heuristic to come to a solution or make a determination that is fast and good enough. So another way to think about a heuristic is a mental shortcut. We use heuristic reasoning all the time. Basically, anytime we're not slowing down to do deliberate analytical thinking, we're probably using various kinds of heuristics.
Yeah, yeah, this has come up on the show a lot because it really is quite revealing about like what we are and how we interact with and to what degree we're aware of our world. You know, like there's just not enough like mental capacity and or energy to do a deep analysis all the time. It's also not helpful. You've got to move through the world. You have objectives to get to and the brain is helping you get there without folks getting lost in all the details.
Yeah, exactly. So Yeah, you might think, well, wouldn't it be better if we tried to do a really deep analysis on everything, But no, it would not. You don't have time to do that like that. That's not a way that you could live a life. You have to do most mental determination fast and cheap. So in judgments of control, Thompson says a control heuristic is quote a shortcut that people use to judge the extent of their personal influence. And Thompson and co authors came up with a model of how this informal heuristic works and they say it as two factors. There are two things that we in theory look at to make this calculation, fast and dirty calculation about whether we are influencing outcomes or not. And those two ingredients are number one, your intention to achieve an outcome and number two a perceived connection in the world between your actions and the desired outcome. And so, in Thompson's own word quote, when one acts with the intention of obtaining a particular outcome and there is a relationship temporal, common meaning, or predictive between one's action and the outcome, people judged that they had control over the outcome. So to connect this to a real world example, you know, imagine you are playing a slot machine. You have the intention of winning a bunch of money, and you play it a bunch and you do have a pretty big win. Maybe it's on the day when you are wearing your lucky underwear. So according to the control heuristic model of Thompson and co authors here, this would be a situation likely to give rise to illusions of control because both conditions here are met the intention you did intend to win the money, and then the connection you did take some action that was connected to you getting the money. So it was in this case you could say wearing the lucky clothing, but in fact you don't even really need the lucky charm to as establish this relationship. You could have an illusion of control simply for playing the machine because in regular play, like you have the intention to win, and then some intermittent winnings occur, and simply the action of playing the machine could also cause illusions that the gambler has some control over getting that outcome of the intermittent winnings, so they believe they have some way to beat the system and win big. So I was thinking about even though this particular connection would be an illusion when it comes to like the slot machine, you don't really control the outcomes, the control heuristic, like many heuristics, would still be very useful because it is good enough most of the time. Most of the time, it does help you accurately determine your influence over all kinds of processes every day. So I was just thinking about cooking. You know, you're cooking in the kitchen. Maybe you're making the tomato basil sauce that you've cooked a bunch of times before, and this time it came out tasting better than it usually does. And then you connect that temporally to an action that you took, like I added more garlic than I usually do, and then you use that to correctly determine that your actions adding the extra garlic influence the desirable outcome of the food tasting good. So you know, for situations like that, this kind of heuristic would work just fine. It's not that the heuristic is bad. We use it all the time, and most of the time it's good enough. You can imagine the alternative of like being frozen in place trying to consider, like what role chance factors outside of your control may also have influenced how much you liked your tomato basil sauce. You know, it's just like not a useful scenario to be in.
And of course the thing about tomato basil sauce is you will, in theory make it again, so this process of testing and learning and making these judgment calls will continue.
That's right. So you could refine your understanding in the future. I mean, maybe make it with more garlic again and you don't like it, you can update your beliefs. But in this situation, a heuristic that says, okay, I combine, I intended for an outcome, I took an action and that outcome occurred. That's good enough. I can say, then, okay, I did have control. My action was what determined the outcome. But of course there are situations in the world that can turn this normally very well functioning heuristic against you. Games of chance are one of them. Remember you know, so you think like I have the intention of winning the slot machine. I take the action of placing the bets and pulling the lever. Sometimes I do get small, intermittent payouts. Therefore I am at least partially in control. I can beat the odds. But it's not just games of chance. It's also everyday scenarios where the amount of control you have over an outcome that you care about is ambiguous. So I was trying to think of some scenarios like this. Here's a very common one. Trying to persuade people to agree with you about something a very very common human activity. It occurs in workplaces and friendships and families and sales. At every level of human life there's persuasion, and so it's happening all the time. And whether you succeed or fail at this task, you never know exactly how much of the outcome was due to factors within your control, like the kind of persuasive case you made, or to other factors outside of your control, like everything else going on in this other person's life and mind. So the level of control that you have is always kind of ambiguous. You will have intermittent successes and failures at persuading people of things, but it's easy to see how illusions of control can arise here. And maybe you can start thinking that you have more influence over people than you actually do, because like, sometimes you're going to win at this game, and you can never really know for sure why you one, if it was because of something you did or because of something else.
Yeah, and I mean the reverse is true as well. Like you often hear it's kind of like the you know, the old thing, little pictures have big ears, right, I mean, you might not think you're having an influence on someone that someone's looking up to you or looking to you or noticing how you're responding to something, but that influence may be in place, So it kind of goes both ways totally.
Yeah. I mean, in fact, that could be the other side of that geno at all study, right that, And sometimes we have a lot of influence and we underestimate the amount we have. Yeah.
Yeah.
But another kind of extremely common human scenario where the feedback is ambiguous would be health outcomes. You know, we do this all the time. It's like I feel some kind of pain or discomfort in my body. I want to feel better. Maybe I do something like I take some kind of me acation, or I do some kind of exercise, and then sometime soon after I do that something, whatever it is, I feel better. Therefore, I'm kind of inclined to conclude that whatever it was I did created the outcome of me feeling better. And maybe it did or maybe it didn't. Like without clear evidence, the kind of clear evidence that we have from like a randomized controlled trial, it's hard to know whether the intervention is what did it or whether you simply started to feel better anyway due to regression to the mean. But you know, according to the control heuristic, you would like you would have a hit on whatever that intervention was, and then therefore it would feel like whatever you did was the decisive factor. You were the controlling factor there.
Yeah, I mean, and even when you're aware of this, you can you're kind of left sometimes. I mean, I speak from my own experience here in a situation where you're like, well, okay, my doctor said to try taking the supplement, and I did, and then I got to feeling better. But I could have just that could have just been at the point at which my body was healing back up again. You know, it's like there might not be a connection there, but maybe I just keep taking them because it you know, like it kind of comes back to, you know, the reduced cost of keeping an ambulant in your pocket. You know, it's not inconvenience me, inconveniencing me to do this, So I guess I'll keep doing it just in case there was some line up between these two things.
Sure, and you never know. So if the feedback is ambiguous, maybe it is doing something. And if it's not like super costly or hurting you in some other way, why not do it?
Yeah, And so it can be frustrating that a lot of things in life end up being like this for sure.
So anyway, I think this control heuristic model makes a lot of sense. I don't think we can say for sure that this is the best explanation for why we experience evolutions of control, but it seems like a good candidate to me. It seems at least to have a pretty to work as a pretty strong working hypothesis. Yeah, and us to the next question addressed in Thompson's chapter, which connects to something we've we've brought up in both directions now, which is what are the implications of illusions of control in our lives? Like how do these illusions affect us? And do they do they ultimately help us more or hurt us more?
Because I think a lot of us here that we'd illusion, and we think of illusion as unreality, and you know, maybe we don't like the idea that we're just wandering about in our daily lives confronted by illusions. But of course there's a lot to our perception of reality that is illusory, you know, as we've discussed many times in the show before. So just because as an illusion doesn't necessarily mean it's bad, but also illusions can be disruptive as well.
Right, So I just think it's worth looking at ways in which illusions of control can be both bad and good. And spoiler alert, it seems that the evidence is that they are both. They both help us and hurt us. So on the pot positive side. One thing that Thompson talks about is, you know, the idea that human beings are clearly motivated to believe that we have agency over outcomes in our lives, and research has found that in general, belief in quote control and a sense of self efficacy the fact that you have agency over your life, you can take actions and they do have an effect. That those things are correlated with desirable outcomes like better coping with stress, better performance on tasks, and some health related outcomes. Sometimes health has been shown to benefit from these feelings. So it seems that in multiple ways, it is good for us to believe that we have the ability to affect what happens in our lives. And you can see how. Of course, in one sense that would be good, because it is actually good to have control over your own life to a certain extent, you know, so like it is good to in reality be in control over your fate. But would the belief in self efficacy itself be beneficial even if it weren't always true, And it seems there is some research indicating the answer to this, at least in some ways is yes. So there are some findings that show that a tendency toward illusions of control might help us avoid discouragement when pursuing a goal. So the illusion of control could help inculcate a sense of persistence in goal attainment behavior, especially when facing difficult conditions or setbacks, and also illusory control seems to help in mitigating disappointment leading to negative mood. It possibly is even protective to some degree against depression. So to the extent that it is able to provide sort of like mood regulation and help maintain motivation and protect against depression, that seems like that would have very clear benefits on well being. Yeah, another thing that's interesting is we talked in the last episode about research finding an association between illusory control and personal power. But the kind of interesting thing is that that causation could go either way or both ways. So it could be that positions of power cause people to have more illusions of control. But it could also be that illusions of control tend to increase the likelihood that somebody ends up in a position of power. So it could literally lead to you being essentially better able to attain goals, or I don't know, maybe having other people view you more positively and wanting to promote you in some way or empower you in some way. So I don't know. When you combine all this together, it looks like there's pretty good reason to think that illusions of control help maintain positive emotions and can help a person maintain a sort of confidence or action orientation, essentially the motivation to keep actively doing things to try to achieve your goals. But it's not all flowers and butterflies. We mentioned earlier that list of negative consequences that have been found to flow from illusions of control, and Thompson mentions a bunch of negative consequences as well. I'm not going to get into all of them here because there's some overlap with what we've already talked about and so forth, but just briefly, a couple of things. One is, remember the study we talked about last time from McKenna from nineteen ninety three, which found the tendency to believe that you would be able to exert more control than other drivers on the road. Subsequent research by Schlehofer from twenty ten. Schlehofer and co authors from twenty ten found that people who show greater illusions of control about driving were also more likely to drive while trying to use a cell phone simultaneously in reality, and you can kind of see how that would extend from the belief that you have more control over chance based outcomes than other people do. But it Actually, in this case, lea leads to a behavior that compromises your control, you know, it compromises your driving ability and makes a fatal crash more likely. And there are apparently a lot of examples like this where people who exhibit greater illusions of control, which might not necessarily be a you know, like a stable feature of a person's personality across their whole life. It could also be situational. But in situations where people show greater illusions of control, it has been linked to taking fewer protective measures against diseases, to making worse decisions as financial traders, and to engaging in problem gambling behaviors. In fact, there was one thing in particular in this part of the chapter Thompson brought up that I thought was an interesting finding. So this was from a paper by Cowley at all in twenty fifteen, and it found that there was a difference in how high illusory control gamblers would review a gambling session after it was over versus people who had low illusory control. So you have gamblers, they go out, they gamble a bunch and then they lose a bunch of money, and then they are asked to reflect back on the gaming session. Apparently, high illusory control gamblers would focus on their highest individual win within the session, whereas low illusory control gamblers would have a more total view of the session and note like their the final outcome, like what were their winnings or losings at the end of it. And so I thought that was really interesting. So, if you're in a condition where you're especially prone to illusions of control about gambling, apparently the salient piece of information to you about the whole session was like your best hand of the night, your best payout at the slot machine, in a single moment, and maybe even though you lost everything overall, the important thing to remember was that moment when everything was looking really good.
And it's kind of twisted, right, because it's in it to a sense, it's looking on the sunny side of life, right, It's being an optimist. It's looking back on your experiences and not focusing on the negatives but focusing on the positives. But and that's great. I mean that to a certain extent, that's what you should do. But also you want to be able to correctly learn from your mistakes and do an accurate postop on things that you've done in life.
That's a great point that this is an instinct that in other context is a very positive one. Like if you can, you know, if you had you know, you had a rough day or something, if you can like step back and focus on the best thing that happened all day, well, you know, that's wonderful. That's like a great thing to be able to do, unless that's like guiding you in how you should invest your money in the future or something.
Yeah, it's interesting that, like the main case we're talking about here gambling, especially with you know, slot machines and whatnot, but just sort of gambling in general. It's basically it's an artific scenario that lines up with a lot of real life survival experiences that are a part of our heritage and a part of our evolutionary development. You know. But you know, there's competition for resources and so forth, the use of skill, or at least a perception of the use of skill in those pursuits. But the world of gambling, the world of games in general, like even if you're not playing for stakes, it is an artificial construct that involves a lot of those survival activities.
Yes, that's right, and in fact interesting thing Thompson brings up in this chapter. She highlights how the gambling industry directly exploits known illusion of control triggers to pull you in that like slot machines, it's almost like they were designed by somebody who read a book chapter on the illusion of control, and they were doing a checklist like okay, familiarity, involvement, success, emphasis, They really like quite fiendishly like hit on all of the things that seem to elicit higher illusions of control. Another interesting thing about illusion of control and gambling brought up in this chapter is a neuroimaging study. This was research done by hudgens Haney at All in twenty thirteen. They're studying real time brain activity of people who had gambling problems versus non problem gamblers when playing games that have some level of control like poker, versus games that are purely chance based like roulette. And the interesting finding was that, Okay, you take people who don't have a history of gambling problems, they show a very different level of neural engagement in skill games versus chance games. So you put them in a game of skill, they're going to be very engaged. You put them in a game of chance, and they will show less activity in the visual and prefrontal cortex than they did in the skill game. People who have a history of gambling problems did not exhibit this same difference, so for them that in chance games the visual and prefrontal cortex was fully engaged as it was in skill games. Which, you know, it's hard to know exactly how to interpret that, but so at least one possible way of thinking about that is that is that when you have high illusions of control, you are looking at a chance based game as if there's like some way that you can engage to do better at it. You're still scanning the table for advantages, but you know, actually, if it's like roulette, there's nothing you can do. Now. One good thing that Thompson mentions is that there's some evidence that problem gamblers illusions of control can be mitigated by interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy, and like we talked about last time, at least in some situations, studies have found that illusions of control seem to be well mitigated by a basic reality check.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and there are a lot of different versions of this, but yeah, like with certain anxieties, issues for example, they're you can be taught to like put your thoughts on trial. I've heard it referred to as such, you know, where you're you're taking something that is just like a almost kind of an ambient thought or way of thinking in your mind, maybe not even expressed verbally or otherwise, but take a moment to collect the thought and then properly analyze it and saying is this likely? Is this reasonable? And so forth? And yeah, and it you know, it can it can work very well with anxiety to you know, within you know limits, And then it makes sense that it would work in these contexts as well, you know, like Okay, let's let's take this impulse, let's slow it down, and let's actually let's look at it from both sides here.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. So I don't know, I think this is this is interesting that the illusion of control is something that is fundamentally objectively an illusion, an illusion like it does generate misperceptions and false beliefs, incorrect judgments, but to some degree it does have a positive side. It seems illusions of control probably do help improve mood and probably do help us persist in attaining difficult goals. Maintain you know, motivation and action orientation while we're trying to implement making positive changes in our lives and so forth. But then again, on the negative side, it, of course, false beliefs can lead to all kinds of problems and negative outcomes in the world, poor choices about how to invest our time and efforts, and in the worst cases can lead to dangerous and destructive behaviors. So it's a complex phenomenon that affects our lives in both directions.
Absolutely.
Now, given all that we've discussed regarding the illusion of control, you know, it should come as no surprise that some have linked the concept to magical thinking in general, to belief in the pairing normal, because you know, what is the gap between some level of belief and say the power of prayer, holy amulets, lucky objects, lucky traditions, and some level of belief and say personal psychic ability or other paranormal concepts. You know, I would even argue that there's there's there's more than a little bit of crossover between these things, in part based on my own experiences, my own observations of my of how I approach certain situations. HU take bowling, for example, Oh boy, So bowling, great game, great fun. I maybe play it two or three times per year. I don't know about you, Joe.
I have not bold in quite some time, but I would love to. I enjoyed bowling a lot when I was a kid. It was like one of my I never did it all that much, but I feel like on those rare occasions when it was like, what would you really like to do today? Would I would request bowling? But of course with the bumpers, please.
Yeah, those bumpers can definitely help. Now, one of the interesting things about bowling is that, unlike a lot of the examples we've been touching on, bowling is a game of skill. So you initially, your initial role directly sets the speed and trajectory of the ball as it heads towards the pins. Now where it gets interesting is, of course, a skilled player, I'm assuming, may feel entirely more in control of what happens than me when eyebowl, though we've plenty of info to suggest that even they, even an expert, even a professional bowler, may feel like they have less control than they do. And obviously plenty of pro athletes engage in some kind of good luck ritual I'd love to hear from sports fans out there if you have some really telling examples of this, But I feel like you kind of hear about them all the time. Like you'll have people that are like literally performing at the very you know, top of their sport and are very competent from a skill and conditioning standpoint. They have all the experience in the world, you know, nobody can touch them, and yet they will perhaps also engage in some level of superstitious you know, ritual luck scenario.
Yeah, that's interesting. That raises a lot of questions in my mind. But continue and maybe we'll come back.
So, whether you are a pro bowler or you know, just a casual bowler like myself, then maybe bowls, you know, a few times a year. The scenario is still the same. Once you send that bowl down the lane, once it has left your hand, it's all set in motion. And yet I certainly have time and time again caught myself in that those moments before it hits trying to nudge the ball with my mind toward the center pin, you know, not not actually you know, rationally believing I have that power to do it, not like turning to everyone and being like all right, watch this, everybody. I'm gonna I'm gonna bowl and then I'm gonna use my telekinesis to get a stride. No, no, no, but I'll catch myself doing something either with my hands or with my will, trying to will the ball towards the pins.
Yes, exactly. You know what can I say something that I think helps influence that? Even though this is a pure misunderstanding, but rob, if you know what I'm talking about, if you watch pro bowlers, they don't just throw the ball straight. They put some kind of spin on it where it like arcs or hooks. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they're a number of those techniques. Yeah, my father in law at one point was showing me some of those and trying to teach me how to do the spin. And also, I mean, a very skilled bowler can do a lot of impressive things. But it doesn't change the fact that once the ball eats their hand, it is set in motion. There's no more that there's no telekinesis involved.
That's right, It's all there in the initial throw. So that was their moment of control was when they were throwing it. It's not you know, they're not using telekinesis afterwards, but it can kind of look like it because it's like hooking in a way we're used to, like the amateurs used to throw, throwing the ball just straight, but when you put the kind of spin on it that makes it curve like that, it encourages the idea that somehow the bowler is continuing to exert control after it has left their hand. Really, sometimes in the throw.
Right, yeah, sometimes there's a flourish or something, and I guess to less experienced bowlers too, like myself is like sometimes there is a real disconnect between what you think you're about to do and what the ball actually does, and that can go either way. You can feel like in the moment you are in a bowling movie and then you get a gutterball, or you can feel like you kind of fumbled it and oh you got a surprise strike out of it. So these sorts of things are possible. So again, I don't actually believe I can mentally manipulate bowling balls from a distance, but in the heat of the moment, there is that feeling that I don't know, it's not even a feeling that I should try to do it. I just catch myself doing it, and I feel like this is also interconnected with the consciously ambiguous notion of intent, aim, and execution. So anyway, this connection isn't just something that I've been thinking about. It's also referenced in the sources I was looking at. I was looking at a couple of different papers. Both of them involve social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner, who of nineteen forty eight through twenty thirteen. I believe he's come up on the show before, so he mentions this connection between magical thinking and the illusion of control in two thousand and eight, self is Magic. And then there's also a paper I was looking at on which he was a co author, Everyday Magical Powers the Role of Apparent mental Causation and the over Estimation of Personal Influence. The lead author on that was psychologist Emily Pronin. This was from two thousand and six. Both of these referenced Thompson, by the way. Now. In the prone and paper, the authors argue that magical thinking may serve a motivational purpose, especially in times of stress and uncertainty, and they point to several different documented cases of this from Arise in Magical thinking among Germans in the interwar period and police officers working in high risk environments. They also point out some health related scenarios that I believe that this is directly from Thompson's research, and then they write, quote, even when people recognize the control over life events may be impossible to achieve, magical beliefs may arise out of a motivation to find meaning in that which they cannot control. So they've gotten to point out that quote, basic cognitive errors involving the perception of causal relationships when only non causal associations are present, along with a need to control things and uncontrollable situations, can lead to these kinds of acts and beliefs. And indeed, they stress that these sorts of acts may occur even when we rationally deny the connection. And this touches on sort of like the dual nature of human cognition and belief that we've touched on many times before. I mean, you can you can have superstitious ideas while also having rational ideas in your head, you know, we can. We can balance these things and switch back and forth between them, and we're not necessarily completely chained to one extreme or the other. Right.
And another way of thinking about it is like we we don't always act on what we know, or we don't always act as if we know what we know right.
One example that that discussed in this paper is okay, thinking ill of someone and then something bad happens to that person you were thinking ill of. They point out that this may well cause feelings of guilt in you, despite the fact that mere feelings cannot hurt someone. Your your thoughts of ill will are not going to actually harm someone without without some other things happening in between. You know that pure thought is not going to do it, But in one of these situations you may feel that guilt. And they stressed that what the quote generating consistent thoughts related to an event just prior to its occurrence may be sufficient to induce feelings of authorship for the event. So they carried out a series of experiments that they discussed this paper involving subjects being told about appeers physical ailments on the on the flip side, being told about a peers athletic success. And they also did a third and a fourth experiment involving real athletic competitions, and they summarized by saying quote. In each study, the relevant outcome occurred regardless of participants thoughts. It was experimentally predetermined in our first two studies, and it was part of a live sporting event in our second two studies. However, in each study, participants were more likely to feel and believe that they were responsible for the relevant outcome if they had generated prior thoughts related to it.
You know, this is interesting because this would almost connect to Thompson's control heuristic model, except it would cut out the need for an external action. It would be kind of the control heuristic model if the only action you really needed was to think about something.
Yeah, yeah, and you know they don't get into this at all, but you know, I can't help but think of, you know, various religious worldviews that some of us may have come up in where there's a lot of emphasis on thought and about like thoughts, having you know, thoughts for instance, themselves being sinful and so forth, you know, and therefore having like this this reality that goes beyond mirror, you know, some mental internalness. But in any area that would have to be something that is explored in another paper, another discussion now in Wagner's self is magic. His words remind me once more of the bowling example. We're just we're just talking about again, there's a disconnect between my muscle memory, my actions, and my perceptions of the ball rolling toward and hopefully hitting the pins. And it's not just me, and it's not just bowling. This exact situation applies to a great deal of the human condition. He points out that our brain only presents us with quote, a relatively impoverished account of its own operations, and our attempt to make sense of the evidence yields the impression that we are freely willing our actions.
Ah.
Yeah, well this is a fantastic point, because I mean it not only you know, can you not understand the difference of why, you know, one time you throw a bowling ball and it was a strike and another time you threw it and it was a gutter ball? It's not like, you know, it can be frustrating that you don't know what made the difference in those two attempts, but it can also like you can take a step further back and try to examine your authorship of all the actions you take, not just like throwing a bowling ball, but every single thing you do throughout the day, and it becomes increasingly unclear what the difference was that made you do anything versus anything else.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He points out there's a certain amount of inference when it comes to connecting our thoughts to our actions in general and magical thinking. He stresses o curs when people quote draw causal inferences relating their thought to their action, so the perception of one's own causality is subject to error, and he uses a great example here in his writing that of turning on a light in your house. Okay, simple thing. We do it all the time. And the thing is, though we may do it with varying degrees of apparent wilfulness. So if you think to yourself, what's dark in here? I should, nay will turn on the light, and then you do it. Well, this act may feel quite wilful.
Right, But sometimes it's not that conscious or not that intentional, is it?
That's right? He says. Sometimes you might think to yourself, man, a cookie sure would be nice right now? So what do you do? You walk into the dark kitchen and absent mindedly turn on the light on the way to the cookie jar. And in this case, the act of turning on the light may quote feel less willed and more like some sort of alien control.
Ah. So the connection between intention and efficacy or cause in the world can be mysterious in multiple ways. If I don't remember willing myself to turn on the light right before I do it, it can seem like some kind of unconscious magic force might have taken over and replaced my conscious will. But at the same time, going back to the previous study you talked about, if I do remember consciously willing something to happen, and then it happens without me taking any apparent action to cause it, I can start to wonder again if there's some mysterious connecting principle at work. Also regarding mysterious unconscious actions we take. I've wanted to mention that as you were talking, Rob, I just realized that I've been fiddling with the coiled cable that connects my headphones to my microphone, like wrapping it around my thumb. I was previously not conscious of doing this. I have no idea why I was doing it, don't know.
Yeah, and there are so many examples of this in our life, and some of them we catch, sometimes some we don't, you know, and it's just a peek into some of the ways that an individual might develop a view that they can exert psychic, magical, or some other form of paranormal control over reality. You know, there are other possibilities, other factors involved in this as well. This is not like, you know, the one recipe for this line of thinking. But and then likewise, going back we were talking about earlier, about people in power and so forth, we might factor it into cases where individuals put faith in another person's supposed powers magical, psychic, etc. Or even you can cut all the way a way that away and get back to just the idea that like, oh, this person's influential, this person can get things done. You know, if they believe it, and you know, tying in their charisma, they're you know, they're seeming authenticity, we might be more likely to buy into that, might buy into the fact that they're a great leader, might buy into the fact that they can move things with their minds, and so forth. So it's it's it's fascinating to take all of this, you know, to take the illusion of control and apply it to this, to some of these scenarios, and think about how it could be a contributing factor to some of these scenarios again where one one believes that they have some sort of a power or feeding into this this individual that other people believe have a power.
Yeah.
Yeah, And and it's really interesting this connection to the idea that really analyzing or interrogating the concept of willful control over things makes it more and more mysterious. Yeah, makes it seem like maybe magic could be involved.
Yeah, and again there are other factors to be sure, kind of going back to the example of like sin and thought. If there is a worldview that one or or you know, some sort of script or programming the one is privy to that encourages an idea of say miracles or psychic powers, you know, be it something that is religious in nature or or or even you know, non religious and more say based in uh you know, conspiracy thinking and so forth.
Uh.
You know, that also could could play a role, among other things. Their whole host of things influencing are our worldview and the way we interact with reality.
Yeah. I have really enjoyed exploring illusion of control with you, Rob, This this has been an interesting one.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely, I mean it's it's it's always fascinating. Sometimes a little haunting when when we start teasing apart these uh, these subjects that involve our outlook on reality and so forth, and especially illusions. Uh, you know, because it's sometimes it's pointed out that you know, we are also an illusion. Our sense of self is an illusion. So you know, it can feel a little a little challenging at times to start pulling the threads, but also rewarding in the end too. All right, we're going to go ahead and close out here, but we'd love to hear from everybody if you have thoughts on the illusion of control some of the specific examples we touched on here, Even something as simple as your favorite example of a professional athlete who has some sort of a ritual that they engage in despite the fact that their skill on their conditioning and so forth is beyond reproach, we'd love to hear from you. We'll throw out that email address here in a minute, but before we do, let's see what else do we need to mention here. Remind everyone, as usual that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Mister Mail on Monday's short form episode on Wednesdays, in a weird house cinemaon Fridays. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird movie. Let's see. Also, we'll point out that other ways you can get in touch with the show and or other listeners of the show. There's a discord group. You can email us and we'll send you that discord link. If you're on Facebook, there is a Facebook group. It's called the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module. Seek it out and you can request access and you just have to answer a very easy trivia question to gain access. So if you want to interact with other listeners, that's a great place to go. And in general, yeah, we thank everyone out there for listening to the show, and if you have time and the power to do so, give us some stars, give us a nice review somewhere that also helps us.
Out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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