February 15, 2025 • 40 mins
In 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 2/8/2024, part 1 of 3)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Today's Saturday, so we are venturing
into the vault for an older episode of the show.
This is part one of our series on the illusion
of control, a very interesting psychological phenomenon. I think you're
going to enjoy this series, and heads up that we
(00:26):
will be airing.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The series over the course of our core episode slots
for the next week, because Rob and I are going
to be out this week, but then we will be
back the following week with all new content. So this
episode originally aired February eighth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We hope you enjoy the rerun.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And to begin today's episode, I want to start by
sketching out a little scenario to help you imagine something
and investigate your intuitions. So I want you to imagine
you are waiting on a friend in the lobby of
a casino hotel. Maybe you're in Las Vegas, and you
realize you've got some time to kill maybe fifteen minutes
(01:19):
before your friend gets there, and you've got a few
spare bucks in your pocket, you kind of get the
itch to go blow it on one of the slot
machines that keeps making all these exciting noises nearby. And
by the way, this is just to illustrate a point.
This is not behavior that we're necessarily advising, because, oh,
I don't know, we've done episodes on slot machines before,
and you know, even if you plan to lose all
(01:41):
the money you bet, there's always the chance that you
just might have too much fun with them. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Back in twenty fifteen, we did an episode titled One
arm Bandits The Science of Slot Machines, and I found
it rather illuminating myself. So I'd recommend anyone who's interested
and just just to what extent these are fair or unfair,
I recommend go back and listen to that episode. Spoiler
the House always wins.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah. I haven't been to Vegas, but from what I understand,
there's a lot of fun stuff to do other than gambling.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Oh yeah, Vegas is great. My family and I went
out there for the first time a few months back,
and yeah, there's some great restaurants. You see the Hoover
Dam not too far away, and they have a tremendous
maw wolf, so lot to see.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
There is that one Omega Mart.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
That's Omega Mart. Yeah it's special. It's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But anyway, so back to the scenario. So you decide
you're gonna blow some money at a slot machine. You
go up to the machine, you put your money in,
but you're new to this and you don't see the
button that spins the digital wheel. So you start looking
around and there's a lady sitting at the slot machine
next to you, and she plays these things all the time.
She sees you scanning the machine in confusion, and she
(02:56):
leans over and says, it's right here, and she reaches
across and presses the button for you, and then you
see the wheel spin on the digital screen. It slows down,
there's a ding, and it's a bus. Do you lose
your bet? Now? Everybody's reaction to the scenario might be
somewhat different, but I think an extremely common reaction for
(03:17):
people to have would be annoyance and a feeling of
having been wronged by the woman who pushed the button
for you. And this could be for a number of reasons.
Some of those reasons might be purely social, like it
might feel like a violation of your personal space by
a stranger. You might be upset that somebody robbed you
of the fun of pressing a button, because sometimes it
(03:38):
can be fun to press a button. But beyond all that,
I think a very common reaction, even among people who
rationally know better, would be a feeling of having been cheated.
This random stranger didn't just invade your personal space and
interrupt your fun. She lost your money for you. It's
her fault you lost that much and did not win.
(04:01):
At the same time, you would probably realize correctly that
a slot machine is not a game of skill. It's
a game of chance, and thus it literally makes no
difference whatsoever to your probability of winning whether you push
the button or someone else does. It is not as
if you placed a bet on, you know, throwing darts
at a dartboard or something where conceivably you might be
(04:24):
better at hitting the center than the person who throws
the dart for you. Everybody knows that with the slot machine,
it truly does not matter who presses the button. And yet,
even though we know this rationally, I think. I think
if I personally were in this situation, it would be
really hard for me to shake the feeling that this
stranger had cheated me out of possible winnings. So I
(04:47):
would know it's not true, but it would just be
an extremely tenacious illusion that whoever presses the button really matters.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Yeah, this is interesting to think about it. I hadn't
really thought about it. You know, we'll get into the
idea of other rituals associated with the sort of behavior, like,
you know, am I wearing my lucky shirt or not?
When I go to gamble, or when I go to
watch my favorite sports team or take a test, et cetera.
So it's interesting to think about how this scenario I
(05:18):
push the button versus a stranger pushes the button, how
that compares or doesn't compare to the luck related scenario
of I push the button with my lucky shirt on
or I push the button without my lucky shirt on.
Are we more likely to disregard the logic of the latter.
What have we left the stranger wear our lucky shirt
(05:38):
that still doesn't steem right?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Well?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, these are all you know, who presses the button,
whether they're wearing their lucky charm or not. These are
all variations on the idea that there is something you
can do to increase or decrease your chance of winning
at the slot machine. And it's just not true, Like,
none of these things influence what your chances of winning are.
Your chances are equally low no matter what.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Yeah, your chances are all locked up in that machine already,
they are programmed into it. And who pushes that button?
Who actually ends up executing the final the final button push,
whatever form that takes in a given gambling machine, it's
already been figured out by the.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Machine, right, And so I sketched out this scenario to
illustrate a concept in psychology called the illusion of control.
So the illusion of control refers to a common type
of cognitive illusion, a mistaken pattern of reasoning in which
we overestimate the extent to which our choices or behavior
(06:42):
can affect outcomes, even totally random or uncontrollable outcomes. So,
according to illusion of control theory, either we think we
have control over an outcome when we have no control
at all, or we do have some control, but we
think we have more control than we actually do. So
(07:02):
today we're kicking off a series where we're going to
take a look at research on the illusion of control,
to what extent the concept is a valid description of
how we think, what the evidence for it is, some
criticisms of the concept, how it works in theory and practice,
and why we might experience it to the extent that
we do.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Yeah, and it's going to be interesting to talk about
this and think about it, especially in a world that
can very often feel rather out of our control, and
that well discuss plays into the whole scenario.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
That's right. But before we dive into the research on
this subject, I thought it would be good to kick
off with some just classic examples that we can think
of from day to day life stuff you don't even
need an experiment to see. You can just you know,
it happens to us all the time we do it.
You already mentioned Rob the idea of lucky rituals that
people put in place to help steer the outcome of
(07:55):
a public event on which the ritual has no rational
reason to have any influence. So whether your football team
wins that, you know, does that depend on whether you're
wearing your lucky shirt? And people might participate in lucky
rituals like this for a number of different reasons. Not
all of those reasons would be a genuine expectation that
(08:17):
it will help influence the outcome of the event, But
to the extent that someone does feel it will actually
change the probability of you getting the outcome you want,
that would be an example of the illusion of control.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Yeah. Yeah, because sometimes these activities, you know, various lucky items.
Sometimes it's probably more in the fun category than anything.
You know, you wear your lucky scarf to go enjoy
a football game with other football fans, you know. Yeah,
it's just a fun thing to.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Do, or just to regulate your own emotions. Like it
might be literally functional, but operating on the self instead
of on the external world.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
Yeah yeah. And as always, you know, to what degree
does something become maladaptive or a hindrance? I mean, you
do hear cases of Okay, someone's wearing their their lucky
shirt to a game. Okay, fair, someone's wearing their lucky
underwear to a game. Fair, someone's wearing their lucky underwear
to this game and they wore it to last game
(09:13):
and hasn't been washed since last game. You hear about
cases like that as well, And I don't know, I
think maybe in some of those cases there's another discussion
to have there, But I don't know sports and their rituals.
There's a lot going on here.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, that's the version that's truly maladaptive.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Now. Other times, you know, I think we shouldn't dismiss
the importance of religious faith in all of this, particularly
regarding amulets. Various traditions, various religions out there have some
sort of an amulant tradition, some sort of essentially a
lucky charm tradition, be it a you know, a crucifix
or a small statue of a deity that you may
carry around with you and that may be used casually
(09:54):
or you know, very devotedly. They're different approaches to that
as well. There's a old spectrum in that area of
religious faith as well. Well.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, and I'd say that might well be one of
those things that is literally efficacious in some way. Maybe
not in the sense of changing the outcome of a
game or something, but it does change something about you
and is helpful in that way.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah. Yeah, And then there's the notion that a lot
of times the addition of a lucky totem or a
lucky practice of some sort very often does not necessarily
induce added cost or burden. You know, even if we're
mostly dismissive of the idea that said item or said
activity will enhance our luck or will make some sort
(10:38):
of experience, you know, pass us by with more ease.
Even if we're not we don't have a huge investment
in that idea. It kind of comes down to, well,
why not, right, is it going to hurt? I might
as well have the amulet on me. Maybe it will
help if there's a one percent chance it helps. Great,
because all it is setting in my pocket.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Right, And you know, I'd plan to get into this
more in one of the later episodes in the series,
maybe in part two. But there is a question of
to the extent that we experience an illusion of control,
why do we experience one? Are there ways in which
it might actually be beneficial to human life even if
it's generating false beliefs?
Speaker 4 (11:19):
Yeah, I mean we kind of get into that basic
area of like, yeah, and it makes life a little easier,
and it's not hurting you, it's not hurting other people,
then why not?
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Okay? I want to mention another example from everyday life.
This one comes up a lot when people think about
illusion of control the closed door button on an elevator.
Does that button actually do anything? I think this example
actually has two levels of possible illusion of control. The
first one and we can quibble with whether this counts
(11:48):
as illusion of control or not, But the first level
is the question of whether the closed door button actually
closes the door. I was reading some articles about this
and was getting some contradictconclusions from them, but like according
to there was an article in the New York Times
that cited some people in the elevator industry who says
who say that in most cases the button actually does
(12:11):
not change how fast the door closes. Maybe it does
in some percentage of elevators, but in the majority, at
least within the United States, it doesn't. I was reading
in another article that lifts in the UK are more
likely to have a fully functional closed door button that
does accelerate how fast the door shut. Elevators in the
US most of the time close on a timer, and
(12:34):
even when the closed door button is functional, it probably
works on a delay from when you press it instead
of immediately, So it's really questionable how much faster, if
at all, the doors will close after the button is pressed.
So I think the answer is not totally clear on
how often the closed door button does anything in the States,
But many people consider these buttons in the US just
(12:56):
a placebo. It does nothing except maybe makes the passengers
feel better.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Sometimes I feel like the closed door button exists mostly
to enhance the awkwardness of reaching for the open door button.
When someone tries to catch the elevator behind you on
the door to close closing, will they correctly assume that
you were trying to help them, or will they think
that you were desperately trying to keep them from boarding
the elevator like close fasted. No one else on this
elevator with me.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
That's a good point. Now. On the other hand, I
think you could make a good case that the closed
door button shouldn't count as illusion of control because there
is genuine ambiguity about whether it does something or not. Like,
people really don't have information that should tell them whether
or not it works, and there's a reasonable assumption that
it should work. So pressing it is rational even whether
(13:43):
or not it works, because you have a reasonable expectation
that it would.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Yeah, it says it works. What you're just doing? What
the button is inviting you to do exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
But there's the second level of door closed button that
I think is definitely illusion of control, which is, have
you ever seen somebody who's in a hurry they get
in an elevator, they not only press the button, which
may or may not work, they press the button after
watching somebody else press it already, like, oh, the other
guy didn't press it, right, I need to press it
(14:14):
to make sure it'll work.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean sometimes you get on board an
elevator and there's this moment of uncertainty did the other
person press it. You didn't see them press it, you
would maybe assume they did, And it might be a
little awkward if you press it now, because then you're
saying like, I'm not sure you did this right, I'm
not sure you did it. I'm going to press it,
but yeah, if you see them do it, that is
an extra level of social awkwardness right there. And I
(14:41):
guess you're leaning into the idea that, Okay, if I
press it more, then it will be more likely to
comply exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Yeah, maybe there is reasoning of that sort, Like I
wonder if button presses are cumulative.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Yeah, I often fall into this as well. I mean,
I'll do this thing where I go to use the
click to lock the car, and I won't press it once.
I'll press it two or three times, which confounds members
of my family when I do this, But for some reason,
like it just feels like three is more certain, even
though there's no cumulative effect there. There's not like, Okay,
(15:15):
if you press it three times to lock, you have
to press it three times to unlock it, which I
don't know. I'd kind of like that feature personally, but
that's just not how it works. One click should do it,
but my mind thinks additional clicks would be necessary.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Triples is best. Then you know it's safe.
Speaker 4 (15:30):
That's true, but it's not true. It's it's just one
of those things we do. Another thing, another like clear
example of this one that I think a lot of
us encounter rather frequently, and another potential PLACEIBO button is
the crosswalk button, and a lot of the same situations
apply here. You know, you get up there to the crosswalk,
(15:51):
there's someone else already standing there. You assume they pressed
it already, but you're gonna press it as well, or
you're waiting on it seems to be taking forever. You
know it's been pressed. You've pressed it once, maybe press
it two or three more times to let it know
that you mean business. You need to get across the street,
throw up the red light, throw up the little green
walking or white or the light up walking man.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Also, as with the elevator button, there's legitimate question over
whether the button does anything or not.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
That's right. I was looking into this a little bit,
and the broad answer on whether the cross button works
at all seems to be a resounding It depends so
different countries, different city traffic systems, They're gonna have the
button function differently. Sometimes it actually speeds up crossings, other
times it doesn't. But what do we do? We push
(16:40):
it anyway, And part of that is, again, you're standing there,
you probably don't have anything else to do. Push it
a few more times, see if it works.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
As we already established, Sometimes it's just fun to push
a button.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Yeah, I mean, you're in a situation where you either
have no control or you realize you have a limited
amount of control. What can you do. You can't get
out there and stop cars, you can't stop traffic, But
you can press the button again and again, and it
feels like, at least you're doing something now. The illusion
(17:17):
of control also applies to situations in which we know
experience anxiety due to perceived lack of control. And one
of these, and I can relate to this a bit,
is flying. Two examples I've read about with this scenario,
or of course there's of course pre enduring flight routines.
Many of these are so slight that we might not
even think about them as being pre flight rituals having
(17:41):
to do with an illusion of control. The examples given
in the Air Travel Design Guide include things like wearing
comfy clothing or brushing one's teeth before a flight. I
don't know, those just sound like good things to do
before along flight. Yeah, but they.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Also controlling an outcome. I mean that just seems like
that's what you do to feel good.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Yeah, But I mean, I guess, and I can relate
to this a bit. It's like, maybe like feeling good
is that thing you have control over, and so maybe
you've become more indulgent of those in a way to
sort of, you know, to make something that can be
uncomfortable more comfortable, which just obviously you want to do that,
but also it's like so many things are out of
my control here. But the exact headpillow have I have
(18:24):
is in my control. The exact playlist I download ahead
of time is in my control. How you know which
movie I downloaded my phone prior to the flight. That's
within my control. I will do that, and I'll put
a lot of effort into.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
That, and maybe from all of that effort at control,
there could be some conceptual creep where actually it makes
you feel like the plane is less likely to crash.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Yeah, I mean, and I don't even know if necessarily
everyone's mind directly goes there, you know. But it's like,
you know, you're you're dealing with one thing that they
when I was reading this ear Travel Design guide website
that they pointed out, you know, it's like there's a
lot going on when you fly. Obviously, you know, you're
you're traveling, You're you're your your circadian rhythms are are interrupted,
(19:06):
you may eat lunch three times in a given day,
that sort of thing, and then there are all these
other constraints. So there's a lot going on in the
mind and in the body. Uh. They also cite gamification
as a as a way that we interact with this
illusion of control. I found this bit interesting. This is
a quote. The airport is a unique type of architectural
(19:26):
typology where the spaces are subdivided and arranged to usher
large groups of people to move uni directionally. This encourages
people to develop strategies to gain the system and to
feel competitive with other passengers moving through the airport.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Oh my god, that's right. I feel seen that. That.
That's like I do not. I'm not normally a competitive walker,
like trying to get ahead of people walking, you know,
around me on the sidewalk. The only scenario in which
I catch myself doing that is at the airport, and
I want, yeah, that may be right that it's like
because it's funneling, you know, structured to have everybody moving
(20:03):
in the same direction, and it's so yeah, controlled like that.
It's some for some reason, makes you feel like I've
got to get in front of this guy here, you know,
I've got Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
So it's interesting to think about it from a design standpoint,
where a lot of control needs to be taken away
from people going through this system, but you also need
to give them a sense of control, control over little things,
and also realize that there's going to be this illusion
of control in place as well. But you have another
example to bring up here, and this one is even
(20:37):
more fun than flying.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Oh, I wonder if you had the same experience. So
I was thinking back to childhood, and this may be
an embarrassing admission, but I'm thinking about the illusory functionality
of objectively non responsive video game controls. A couple of
examples here. I am at the Pizza Hut. I'm a
little kid. I desperately want to play the Neogos or
(21:00):
the X Men Arcade Cabinet, but I have no quarters,
so I can't play. But while these machines are idle,
there is a kind of pre recorded gameplay demo that
loops on the screen, so it looks like somebody's playing.
You know, the characters are walking around fighting the bad
guys and stuff. And according to vague memories, I can't
be sure I'm right about this, but I think I
(21:22):
would sometimes go up to the machine and falsely believe
that I was maybe somewhat partially controlling the gameplay in
this demo by moving the joystick around without putting money in.
Or maybe what I'm remembering is that I would stare
at the machine while the demo's going and I would
not be touching it, but I would be imagining that
(21:44):
this were possible. Another variation is a trick sometimes. I
think people would play on their little siblings with home
video game consoles, So instead of fighting over whose turn
it is to play Mario, maybe the big sister actually
plays Mario and gives the little sister another controller which
is not plugged in to make her think she's playing,
(22:06):
while actually she's just watching the big sister play on
the screen and pressing buttons that do nothing. I recalled
this happening around me and being surprisingly convincing.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I guess maybe he's more convincing with some games than others.
But I remember I did this as well with arcade
games when I was a little kid, and arguably with
the I mean the X Men Arcade Cabinet that was
That was a pretty great game. But on the other hand,
you're probably better off just thinking you were playing it.
Looking back at it from a modern standpoint.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I really liked being Colossus and doing the roar.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Oh yeah, the yeah, it's funny. I had an experience
with this just the other day. We were out to
eat at a place that had arcade machines, and they
were old arcade machines, and my son and one of
his friends and my son's eleven. Now, they went up
to these machines and I hadn't given them any quarters,
(23:01):
and I think I shuld give them some quarters so
they can play these machines. But they're over there moving
the sticks around, watching the screen, and I was like, oh,
I think they're just pretending to play. Oh, And then
I was like, I think maybe they're a little too
old to be doing that. And then I asked them,
do you guys want some real quarters? They're like, oh,
these machines are free, so it was a non issue.
But yeah, yeah, the reaches you reach a point where
(23:23):
you outgrow it for sure, where you don't just want
to watch the games. You don't just want to watch
other people play these games. You want to get in there,
even if you are going to fail miserably and just
have to sing more quarters in the thing.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I will pay the endless tax to be Colossus. Yeah. Wait,
what was your X Men arcade game character? Oh?
Speaker 4 (23:42):
You know, oftentimes when I would play, there were like
a lot of people, so it's like whoever you could get.
But you know, obviously Colossus will Cyclops was pretty great.
He had the ibam attack, you know, that would really
tear up the screen.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
I remember Colossus was my first pick and night Crawler
was my second.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Oh yeah, he had a good attack as well. I mean, really,
I would just be happy. I was happy to be
playing the X Men arcade game.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
All right, Well, I think maybe we should talk about
some of the research history on the illusion of control,
some of the papers that have explored this topic in
the past. And though this phenomenon had been I think
noticed previously in a variety of ways. It gets the
name illusion of control from important research by the American
(24:25):
psychologist Ellen J. Langer, who published a paper in nineteen
seventy five called the Illusion of Control in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
Langer was born in nineteen forty seven. She's also known
for her work on aging and mindfulness theory. I also
want to call out that she was a series consultant
on a BBC series title The Young Ones. But this
is not the classic comedy series, but rather a documentary
that explored reminiscence therapy.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
I'm not familiar either way. What's the comedy series?
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Oh? The Young Ones? Oh? It is a This is
a classic British comedy series about these young men living
in a like a dormitory house type situation. Yeah, and
they would also have musical guests on the show, like
Motorhead was on one of the episodes.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Yeah, so yeah, classic classic series. I'm sure it may
have come up in passing on Weird House Cinema before,
but I have a feeling in the future we'll probably
touch on some films on Weird House Cinema that include
actors from that show. All right, But the Young Ones
series that she was associated this is a documentary series
that came like decades later.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Okay, okay, But in the nineteen seventy five paper The
Illusion of Control, Langer defined the phenomenon somewhat more narrowly
than we've been talking about. She defined the illusion of
control as quote, an expectancy of a personal success probability
inappropriately higher than the objective probability would warrant. So I'm
(25:56):
not going to do a detailed breakdown of Langer's full
paper here, because there are like six experiments total a
lot of variables being tested, but I'll summarize the main
idea and a couple of highlights that stuck out to me.
So her intro mentions a bunch of different reasons for
thinking that. In her words, quote, while people may pay
lip service to the concept of chance, they behave as
(26:20):
though chance events are subject to control. And she produces
a lot of examples given to to provide prima facie
evidence of this idea before the experiments are carried out.
And one of these examples that I thought was interesting
was a sociological observation of how people treat dice when gambling.
(26:42):
She mentions particularly behavior observed by Hinslin in nineteen sixty seven.
So the idea is, if you watch people playing a
dice based game, maybe you're in a casino in Vegas again,
and you go up to a craps table, whatever their
true beliefs about chance or or skill being involved in
this game, and it is a game of chance, their
(27:04):
externally visible behavior implies that they think they have some
degree of control over the numbers they roll with the dice.
Examples here would include that people tend to roll dice
more softly if they want to roll low numbers, and
throw the dice hard if they want to roll high numbers.
They appear to concentrate in preparation for the dice throw,
(27:28):
the same way a person would concentrate before like doing
a skill based throw, like an aimed throw if they're
playing darts or something. And this belief in dice rolls
as a skilled activity also seem to be present in observers,
because other people at the table would tend to bet
with a person who appeared to be exerting more control
(27:50):
in this way.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Oh, that's fascinating. You know, I don't gamble with the dice,
but I do throw some D twenties pretty much every
week in Dungeons and Dragons, and I know that I
do catch myself. I hadn't really thought about it before,
but like, if I'm rolling, especially an important D twenty,
I'm gonna I'm gonna put a little time and effort
into it, and there's gonna be a pause. I'm gonna
(28:13):
make sure my form is right. I'm gonna make sure
I get an appropriate clatter, you know, from that from
that that twenty.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
As I give it a roll, I do exactly the
same thing. And I it feels like I can roll
the dice better or worse. I know that I can't.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
Yeah, I'm still gonna get a natural one here and there,
but but it feels better for some reason.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
And to be fair, dice rolls in reality are probably
not perfectly random like I think. I've read about gambling
cheats who with a lot of training claim that they
can learn ways to like hold or toss the dice
so as to increase the chances of getting the roll
they want. I think, especially if they do things you're
not allowed to do, like sliding the dice on the
(28:54):
on the velvet instead of actually throlling it, throwing them
so they tumble. But anyway, for the vast vast majority
of regular gamblers, this is not the case. People cannot
do this most for the most part, and dice can
be treated as effectively random. If they weren't effectively random,
casinos would not use them, That's right. Anyway. To come
(29:24):
back to Langer's paper from seventy five, so to test
for an illusion of control, which she hypothesized, she did
six experiments in which chance based games had various elements
that we would associate with skill based games introduced and
this was her idea. It was that if you make
(29:46):
a game feel like it is skill based even though
it's clearly not, people will be confused into thinking that
they have control over outcomes that they actually don't. For
one aga example, one variable that is explored in this
paper is the variable of competition. If you are competing
(30:08):
against an opponent in a skill based game, the ability
of your opponent determines your likelihood of winning. Therefore, if
you're placing bets on whether or not you're going to win,
how much you bet will in part depend on how
good your opponent is at the game. So you know,
if you're playing chess against a chess pro, you're probably
going to bet less or maybe bet nothing. If you're
(30:30):
playing chess against somebody you perceive as worse than you
at chess, you will probably bet more. Of course, if
it's a purely chance based game, there is no relevant
skill variable. So if you're offered the chance to bet
on outcomes, your betting behavior should be based on something else,
maybe social factors, maybe just baseline appetite for risk, maybe
(30:51):
a desire to be seen by others as taking risks, etc.
It should be based on something other than your perception
of whether you're likely to win based on how good
your opponent is. That doesn't make any difference in a
chance based game. So, in the first experiment described in
the study, Langer had people play a purely chance based
(31:12):
card game. The game was high card draw between two players,
no skill involved, pure luck of the draw. You pick
a card out of the deck. Is your card higher
than the other person's. Is there any room in looking
at that game to think I'm better than other people
at this There shouldn't be. But the independent variable manipulated
(31:34):
by the experimenters here was the behavior and appearance of
your opponent. Do they seem confident and self assured or
do they seem awkward and nervous and prepared to lose?
In other words, are you playing against somebody who feels
like a winner or not? And remember, there's no logical
(31:54):
reason anybody should be a winner at this game. There's
zero skill involved. And yet the experiment did find that
people were willing to bet significantly more against a competitor
who seemed awkward and nervous than they were against a
competitor who seemed outgoing and confident. Now, I think this
is a really interesting result, but it's important to note
(32:16):
the limitations of this experimental design, and Langer herself flags
some of these limitations in the paper, so they didn't
go unnoticed by the authors here. So it seems like this.
It seems likely that this result could be caused by
a mistaken perception that skill or control would somehow factor
(32:36):
into this random game. But you can't be sure that's
the cause guiding the differences in how people bet. Maybe
other variables are operating here in response to the behavior
and appearance of the competitor. Maybe they have to do
with how the subject wants to be perceived in terms
of taking risks or not. Who knows. There could be
(32:56):
other things at work here. So that's the competition element,
which Liner concludes could make a chance based game have
illusory qualities of a skill based game. Other elements like
this explored in the paper are choice. So the idea
is if you give people a choice over, say, which
lottery ticket they receive, of course, it makes no difference
(33:18):
in the probability of winning, it increases their feeling of
the likelihood of winning, though with the choice element in particular,
there's a study I came across from twenty twenty one.
I might get into this more in the second episode,
but that study undercuts specifically the choice variable in particular,
so whether or not choice has this effect is up
(33:41):
for debate. But other ones explored in this paper are
familiarity with the game or with elements of the game.
So familiarity would be associated with a better chance of
winning a skill based game. Right, if you've played the
game before, you're probably better at it. You're more likely
to win in a chance game, it doesn't matter, but
this he found that familiarity made people more confident in
(34:02):
their ability to win.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
Okay, I mean I could see where like, if you
know that what the odds are, even if you know
the odds are slim, like you do the math, You're like,
all right, I have a five percent chance of pulling
the right card. You know you could Still there's still
plenty of room in the human psyche to lean into
that and think I've got a five percent shot. That's
that's a non zero percent chance of winning this game.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Well, and there are games that have that are largely
determined by chance, but also have skill elements where familiarity
can make a big difference. Like I would say familiarity
with playing poker probably makes a big difference in how
well you do, because how well you do in poker
is a mix of chance and skill. You know, it's
the chance of what cards you draw, but also the
(34:48):
skill of like your betting strategy and all that.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Yeah, I guess it also comes down to, like, what
does it mean to lose in a given game. I
haven't played much in the way of poker, but it's
my understanding, like a game like poker gambling games where
actual money of any value is involved, losing just sucks.
There's no fun in losing. If you're losing at the game,
you're not having a good time. Whereas, and certainly you
can take that attitude, unfortunately into any gaming scenario. But
(35:14):
if you're doing it right, losing or rolling poorly, whatever
the exact form this takes in say, Dungeons and Dragons
is not necessarily bad. It can be a great moment
for character development, storytelling, and so forth. Likewise, just for
fun games like I'll play a bit of this, this
little phone game called Marvel Snap. It's pretty fun. You're
(35:36):
not betting any real money on it, and sometimes like losing,
Sometimes losing is likely irritating, but other times it's amusing
to see how the other person beats you. And then
sometimes you know, you know, Okay, I've got a very
slim chance of pulling this combo off or you know
this real hail Mary maneuver to use a sports term.
But sometimes you go for it because you don't have
(35:58):
money on the line. It's not the the world. If
you lose, you're likely to lose. But if there's a
small chance you're going to pull off something amazing, you
go for it. And you do that in games like
Dungeons and Dragons as well.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
That's right, and this highlights that. I mean a big
thing about studying games is that there are different reasons
people play games, and not all games are just about winning.
I think one reason that games like this, if you're
going to study them in terms of trying to find
people's real motivation to win, you need things like cash
prizes because that makes the winning condition really meaningful. Yeah,
(36:35):
because yeah, if there's not money involved, I'm just like,
I don't know, it's fun to just play a weird
game and lose and not know what you're doing.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
I mean, whereas saying a game like high card draw,
it's only going to be interesting if there's money involved
on missum exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
But anyway, coming back, so this study found in its
experiments that familiarity with a game, even a game purely
of chance, where familiarity would actually not make any difference
at all, people still seem to behave as if they
thought it made a difference. Another variable looked at in
these experiments was the subject's level of involvement. You know,
how involved or hands on are you with the process
(37:13):
that decides the winner. So, in general, this original nineteen
seventy five paper found that, yes, experiments do find that
adding in elements that superficially remind people of skill based
games increases the illusion of control. And the research did
not stop there. There have been many, many studies on
the illusion of control in the decade since this paper
(37:36):
from nineteen seventy five. There have been sort of three
major branches of investigatory methods to look into the evidence
for the illusion of control and to understand what variables
influence when and the extent to which it occurs. There's
also been some criticism of the idea and maybe looking
(37:57):
at different theoretical ways to make sense of the results
of these kinds of experiments. And so I think maybe
in the next episode we're going to talk a bit
more about the research history, talk about what some variables
are that determine when people experience an illusion of control,
and look at criticisms of the concept.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
All right, so join us next time as we'll continue
this look at the illusion of control. In the meantime,
we'd love to hear from everyone out out there, because
you know, we've touched on some very basic ideas about
human nature here and specific examples of gameplay and gambling
and so forth, and so I know you're gonna have
(38:37):
a lot of thoughts and we'd love to hear from you,
so write in. We'll have that email address here at
the end of the episode. A couple other ways to
interact with the show. I haven't no think I've mentioned
these recently, but if you are on the Facebook, there
is a Facebook group for Stuff to Blow your Mind.
It is the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module.
You just go there, you ask to be admitted, and
if I think you have to answer a question, that's
(38:59):
a very easy one you should be able to get
if you listen to the show. Also, there is a
discord server room what have you for Stuff to Blow
your Mind? If you want to join that, email us
and we'll send you the link It's that simple. And
let's see what else do we mention? Oh yeah, thanks
to everyone out there who jumped in and give us
(39:20):
a nice rating and review on the various places where
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Speaker 1 (39:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Joe McCormick. Today's Saturday, so we are venturing
into the vault for an older episode of the show.
This is part one of our series on the illusion
of control, a very interesting psychological phenomenon. I think you're
going to enjoy this series, and heads up that we
(00:26):
will be airing.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
The series over the course of our core episode slots
for the next week, because Rob and I are going
to be out this week, but then we will be
back the following week with all new content. So this
episode originally aired February eighth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
We hope you enjoy the rerun.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And to begin today's episode, I want to start by
sketching out a little scenario to help you imagine something
and investigate your intuitions. So I want you to imagine
you are waiting on a friend in the lobby of
a casino hotel. Maybe you're in Las Vegas, and you
realize you've got some time to kill maybe fifteen minutes
(01:19):
before your friend gets there, and you've got a few
spare bucks in your pocket, you kind of get the
itch to go blow it on one of the slot
machines that keeps making all these exciting noises nearby. And
by the way, this is just to illustrate a point.
This is not behavior that we're necessarily advising, because, oh,
I don't know, we've done episodes on slot machines before,
and you know, even if you plan to lose all
(01:41):
the money you bet, there's always the chance that you
just might have too much fun with them. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:47):
Back in twenty fifteen, we did an episode titled One
arm Bandits The Science of Slot Machines, and I found
it rather illuminating myself. So I'd recommend anyone who's interested
and just just to what extent these are fair or unfair,
I recommend go back and listen to that episode. Spoiler
the House always wins.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah. I haven't been to Vegas, but from what I understand,
there's a lot of fun stuff to do other than gambling.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
Oh yeah, Vegas is great. My family and I went
out there for the first time a few months back,
and yeah, there's some great restaurants. You see the Hoover
Dam not too far away, and they have a tremendous
maw wolf, so lot to see.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
There is that one Omega Mart.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
That's Omega Mart. Yeah it's special. It's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But anyway, so back to the scenario. So you decide
you're gonna blow some money at a slot machine. You
go up to the machine, you put your money in,
but you're new to this and you don't see the
button that spins the digital wheel. So you start looking
around and there's a lady sitting at the slot machine
next to you, and she plays these things all the time.
She sees you scanning the machine in confusion, and she
(02:56):
leans over and says, it's right here, and she reaches
across and presses the button for you, and then you
see the wheel spin on the digital screen. It slows down,
there's a ding, and it's a bus. Do you lose
your bet? Now? Everybody's reaction to the scenario might be
somewhat different, but I think an extremely common reaction for
(03:17):
people to have would be annoyance and a feeling of
having been wronged by the woman who pushed the button
for you. And this could be for a number of reasons.
Some of those reasons might be purely social, like it
might feel like a violation of your personal space by
a stranger. You might be upset that somebody robbed you
of the fun of pressing a button, because sometimes it
(03:38):
can be fun to press a button. But beyond all that,
I think a very common reaction, even among people who
rationally know better, would be a feeling of having been cheated.
This random stranger didn't just invade your personal space and
interrupt your fun. She lost your money for you. It's
her fault you lost that much and did not win.
(04:01):
At the same time, you would probably realize correctly that
a slot machine is not a game of skill. It's
a game of chance, and thus it literally makes no
difference whatsoever to your probability of winning whether you push
the button or someone else does. It is not as
if you placed a bet on, you know, throwing darts
at a dartboard or something where conceivably you might be
(04:24):
better at hitting the center than the person who throws
the dart for you. Everybody knows that with the slot machine,
it truly does not matter who presses the button. And yet,
even though we know this rationally, I think. I think
if I personally were in this situation, it would be
really hard for me to shake the feeling that this
stranger had cheated me out of possible winnings. So I
(04:47):
would know it's not true, but it would just be
an extremely tenacious illusion that whoever presses the button really matters.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Yeah, this is interesting to think about it. I hadn't
really thought about it. You know, we'll get into the
idea of other rituals associated with the sort of behavior, like,
you know, am I wearing my lucky shirt or not?
When I go to gamble, or when I go to
watch my favorite sports team or take a test, et cetera.
So it's interesting to think about how this scenario I
(05:18):
push the button versus a stranger pushes the button, how
that compares or doesn't compare to the luck related scenario
of I push the button with my lucky shirt on
or I push the button without my lucky shirt on.
Are we more likely to disregard the logic of the latter.
What have we left the stranger wear our lucky shirt
(05:38):
that still doesn't steem right?
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Well?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Yeah, these are all you know, who presses the button,
whether they're wearing their lucky charm or not. These are
all variations on the idea that there is something you
can do to increase or decrease your chance of winning
at the slot machine. And it's just not true, Like,
none of these things influence what your chances of winning are.
Your chances are equally low no matter what.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Yeah, your chances are all locked up in that machine already,
they are programmed into it. And who pushes that button?
Who actually ends up executing the final the final button push,
whatever form that takes in a given gambling machine, it's
already been figured out by the.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Machine, right, And so I sketched out this scenario to
illustrate a concept in psychology called the illusion of control.
So the illusion of control refers to a common type
of cognitive illusion, a mistaken pattern of reasoning in which
we overestimate the extent to which our choices or behavior
(06:42):
can affect outcomes, even totally random or uncontrollable outcomes. So,
according to illusion of control theory, either we think we
have control over an outcome when we have no control
at all, or we do have some control, but we
think we have more control than we actually do. So
(07:02):
today we're kicking off a series where we're going to
take a look at research on the illusion of control,
to what extent the concept is a valid description of
how we think, what the evidence for it is, some
criticisms of the concept, how it works in theory and practice,
and why we might experience it to the extent that
we do.
Speaker 4 (07:22):
Yeah, and it's going to be interesting to talk about
this and think about it, especially in a world that
can very often feel rather out of our control, and
that well discuss plays into the whole scenario.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
That's right. But before we dive into the research on
this subject, I thought it would be good to kick
off with some just classic examples that we can think
of from day to day life stuff you don't even
need an experiment to see. You can just you know,
it happens to us all the time we do it.
You already mentioned Rob the idea of lucky rituals that
people put in place to help steer the outcome of
(07:55):
a public event on which the ritual has no rational
reason to have any influence. So whether your football team
wins that, you know, does that depend on whether you're
wearing your lucky shirt? And people might participate in lucky
rituals like this for a number of different reasons. Not
all of those reasons would be a genuine expectation that
(08:17):
it will help influence the outcome of the event, But
to the extent that someone does feel it will actually
change the probability of you getting the outcome you want,
that would be an example of the illusion of control.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
Yeah. Yeah, because sometimes these activities, you know, various lucky items.
Sometimes it's probably more in the fun category than anything.
You know, you wear your lucky scarf to go enjoy
a football game with other football fans, you know. Yeah,
it's just a fun thing to.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Do, or just to regulate your own emotions. Like it
might be literally functional, but operating on the self instead
of on the external world.
Speaker 4 (08:53):
Yeah yeah. And as always, you know, to what degree
does something become maladaptive or a hindrance? I mean, you
do hear cases of Okay, someone's wearing their their lucky
shirt to a game. Okay, fair, someone's wearing their lucky
underwear to a game. Fair, someone's wearing their lucky underwear
to this game and they wore it to last game
(09:13):
and hasn't been washed since last game. You hear about
cases like that as well, And I don't know, I
think maybe in some of those cases there's another discussion
to have there, But I don't know sports and their rituals.
There's a lot going on here.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, that's the version that's truly maladaptive.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
Now. Other times, you know, I think we shouldn't dismiss
the importance of religious faith in all of this, particularly
regarding amulets. Various traditions, various religions out there have some
sort of an amulant tradition, some sort of essentially a
lucky charm tradition, be it a you know, a crucifix
or a small statue of a deity that you may
carry around with you and that may be used casually
(09:54):
or you know, very devotedly. They're different approaches to that
as well. There's a old spectrum in that area of
religious faith as well. Well.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Yeah, and I'd say that might well be one of
those things that is literally efficacious in some way. Maybe
not in the sense of changing the outcome of a
game or something, but it does change something about you
and is helpful in that way.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah. Yeah, And then there's the notion that a lot
of times the addition of a lucky totem or a
lucky practice of some sort very often does not necessarily
induce added cost or burden. You know, even if we're
mostly dismissive of the idea that said item or said
activity will enhance our luck or will make some sort
(10:38):
of experience, you know, pass us by with more ease.
Even if we're not we don't have a huge investment
in that idea. It kind of comes down to, well,
why not, right, is it going to hurt? I might
as well have the amulet on me. Maybe it will
help if there's a one percent chance it helps. Great,
because all it is setting in my pocket.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Right, And you know, I'd plan to get into this
more in one of the later episodes in the series,
maybe in part two. But there is a question of
to the extent that we experience an illusion of control,
why do we experience one? Are there ways in which
it might actually be beneficial to human life even if
it's generating false beliefs?
Speaker 4 (11:19):
Yeah, I mean we kind of get into that basic
area of like, yeah, and it makes life a little easier,
and it's not hurting you, it's not hurting other people,
then why not?
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Okay? I want to mention another example from everyday life.
This one comes up a lot when people think about
illusion of control the closed door button on an elevator.
Does that button actually do anything? I think this example
actually has two levels of possible illusion of control. The
first one and we can quibble with whether this counts
(11:48):
as illusion of control or not, But the first level
is the question of whether the closed door button actually
closes the door. I was reading some articles about this
and was getting some contradictconclusions from them, but like according
to there was an article in the New York Times
that cited some people in the elevator industry who says
who say that in most cases the button actually does
(12:11):
not change how fast the door closes. Maybe it does
in some percentage of elevators, but in the majority, at
least within the United States, it doesn't. I was reading
in another article that lifts in the UK are more
likely to have a fully functional closed door button that
does accelerate how fast the door shut. Elevators in the
US most of the time close on a timer, and
(12:34):
even when the closed door button is functional, it probably
works on a delay from when you press it instead
of immediately, So it's really questionable how much faster, if
at all, the doors will close after the button is pressed.
So I think the answer is not totally clear on
how often the closed door button does anything in the States,
But many people consider these buttons in the US just
(12:56):
a placebo. It does nothing except maybe makes the passengers
feel better.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
Sometimes I feel like the closed door button exists mostly
to enhance the awkwardness of reaching for the open door button.
When someone tries to catch the elevator behind you on
the door to close closing, will they correctly assume that
you were trying to help them, or will they think
that you were desperately trying to keep them from boarding
the elevator like close fasted. No one else on this
elevator with me.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
That's a good point. Now. On the other hand, I
think you could make a good case that the closed
door button shouldn't count as illusion of control because there
is genuine ambiguity about whether it does something or not. Like,
people really don't have information that should tell them whether
or not it works, and there's a reasonable assumption that
it should work. So pressing it is rational even whether
(13:43):
or not it works, because you have a reasonable expectation
that it would.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Yeah, it says it works. What you're just doing? What
the button is inviting you to do exactly.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
But there's the second level of door closed button that
I think is definitely illusion of control, which is, have
you ever seen somebody who's in a hurry they get
in an elevator, they not only press the button, which
may or may not work, they press the button after
watching somebody else press it already, like, oh, the other
guy didn't press it, right, I need to press it
(14:14):
to make sure it'll work.
Speaker 4 (14:16):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean sometimes you get on board an
elevator and there's this moment of uncertainty did the other
person press it. You didn't see them press it, you
would maybe assume they did, And it might be a
little awkward if you press it now, because then you're
saying like, I'm not sure you did this right, I'm
not sure you did it. I'm going to press it,
but yeah, if you see them do it, that is
an extra level of social awkwardness right there. And I
(14:41):
guess you're leaning into the idea that, Okay, if I
press it more, then it will be more likely to
comply exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
Yeah, maybe there is reasoning of that sort, Like I
wonder if button presses are cumulative.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
Yeah, I often fall into this as well. I mean,
I'll do this thing where I go to use the
click to lock the car, and I won't press it once.
I'll press it two or three times, which confounds members
of my family when I do this, But for some reason,
like it just feels like three is more certain, even
though there's no cumulative effect there. There's not like, Okay,
(15:15):
if you press it three times to lock, you have
to press it three times to unlock it, which I
don't know. I'd kind of like that feature personally, but
that's just not how it works. One click should do it,
but my mind thinks additional clicks would be necessary.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Triples is best. Then you know it's safe.
Speaker 4 (15:30):
That's true, but it's not true. It's it's just one
of those things we do. Another thing, another like clear
example of this one that I think a lot of
us encounter rather frequently, and another potential PLACEIBO button is
the crosswalk button, and a lot of the same situations
apply here. You know, you get up there to the crosswalk,
(15:51):
there's someone else already standing there. You assume they pressed
it already, but you're gonna press it as well, or
you're waiting on it seems to be taking forever. You
know it's been pressed. You've pressed it once, maybe press
it two or three more times to let it know
that you mean business. You need to get across the street,
throw up the red light, throw up the little green
walking or white or the light up walking man.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Also, as with the elevator button, there's legitimate question over
whether the button does anything or not.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
That's right. I was looking into this a little bit,
and the broad answer on whether the cross button works
at all seems to be a resounding It depends so
different countries, different city traffic systems, They're gonna have the
button function differently. Sometimes it actually speeds up crossings, other
times it doesn't. But what do we do? We push
(16:40):
it anyway, And part of that is, again, you're standing there,
you probably don't have anything else to do. Push it
a few more times, see if it works.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
As we already established, Sometimes it's just fun to push
a button.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Yeah, I mean, you're in a situation where you either
have no control or you realize you have a limited
amount of control. What can you do. You can't get
out there and stop cars, you can't stop traffic, But
you can press the button again and again, and it
feels like, at least you're doing something now. The illusion
(17:17):
of control also applies to situations in which we know
experience anxiety due to perceived lack of control. And one
of these, and I can relate to this a bit,
is flying. Two examples I've read about with this scenario,
or of course there's of course pre enduring flight routines.
Many of these are so slight that we might not
even think about them as being pre flight rituals having
(17:41):
to do with an illusion of control. The examples given
in the Air Travel Design Guide include things like wearing
comfy clothing or brushing one's teeth before a flight. I
don't know, those just sound like good things to do
before along flight. Yeah, but they.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Also controlling an outcome. I mean that just seems like
that's what you do to feel good.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Yeah, But I mean, I guess, and I can relate
to this a bit. It's like, maybe like feeling good
is that thing you have control over, and so maybe
you've become more indulgent of those in a way to
sort of, you know, to make something that can be
uncomfortable more comfortable, which just obviously you want to do that,
but also it's like so many things are out of
my control here. But the exact headpillow have I have
(18:24):
is in my control. The exact playlist I download ahead
of time is in my control. How you know which
movie I downloaded my phone prior to the flight. That's
within my control. I will do that, and I'll put
a lot of effort into.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
That, and maybe from all of that effort at control,
there could be some conceptual creep where actually it makes
you feel like the plane is less likely to crash.
Speaker 4 (18:46):
Yeah, I mean, and I don't even know if necessarily
everyone's mind directly goes there, you know. But it's like,
you know, you're you're dealing with one thing that they
when I was reading this ear Travel Design guide website
that they pointed out, you know, it's like there's a
lot going on when you fly. Obviously, you know, you're
you're traveling, You're you're your your circadian rhythms are are interrupted,
(19:06):
you may eat lunch three times in a given day,
that sort of thing, and then there are all these
other constraints. So there's a lot going on in the
mind and in the body. Uh. They also cite gamification
as a as a way that we interact with this
illusion of control. I found this bit interesting. This is
a quote. The airport is a unique type of architectural
(19:26):
typology where the spaces are subdivided and arranged to usher
large groups of people to move uni directionally. This encourages
people to develop strategies to gain the system and to
feel competitive with other passengers moving through the airport.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Oh my god, that's right. I feel seen that. That.
That's like I do not. I'm not normally a competitive walker,
like trying to get ahead of people walking, you know,
around me on the sidewalk. The only scenario in which
I catch myself doing that is at the airport, and
I want, yeah, that may be right that it's like
because it's funneling, you know, structured to have everybody moving
(20:03):
in the same direction, and it's so yeah, controlled like that.
It's some for some reason, makes you feel like I've
got to get in front of this guy here, you know,
I've got Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
So it's interesting to think about it from a design standpoint,
where a lot of control needs to be taken away
from people going through this system, but you also need
to give them a sense of control, control over little things,
and also realize that there's going to be this illusion
of control in place as well. But you have another
example to bring up here, and this one is even
(20:37):
more fun than flying.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
Oh, I wonder if you had the same experience. So
I was thinking back to childhood, and this may be
an embarrassing admission, but I'm thinking about the illusory functionality
of objectively non responsive video game controls. A couple of
examples here. I am at the Pizza Hut. I'm a
little kid. I desperately want to play the Neogos or
(21:00):
the X Men Arcade Cabinet, but I have no quarters,
so I can't play. But while these machines are idle,
there is a kind of pre recorded gameplay demo that
loops on the screen, so it looks like somebody's playing.
You know, the characters are walking around fighting the bad
guys and stuff. And according to vague memories, I can't
be sure I'm right about this, but I think I
(21:22):
would sometimes go up to the machine and falsely believe
that I was maybe somewhat partially controlling the gameplay in
this demo by moving the joystick around without putting money in.
Or maybe what I'm remembering is that I would stare
at the machine while the demo's going and I would
not be touching it, but I would be imagining that
(21:44):
this were possible. Another variation is a trick sometimes. I
think people would play on their little siblings with home
video game consoles, So instead of fighting over whose turn
it is to play Mario, maybe the big sister actually
plays Mario and gives the little sister another controller which
is not plugged in to make her think she's playing,
(22:06):
while actually she's just watching the big sister play on
the screen and pressing buttons that do nothing. I recalled
this happening around me and being surprisingly convincing.
Speaker 4 (22:16):
I guess maybe he's more convincing with some games than others.
But I remember I did this as well with arcade
games when I was a little kid, and arguably with
the I mean the X Men Arcade Cabinet that was
That was a pretty great game. But on the other hand,
you're probably better off just thinking you were playing it.
Looking back at it from a modern standpoint.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
I really liked being Colossus and doing the roar.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Oh yeah, the yeah, it's funny. I had an experience
with this just the other day. We were out to
eat at a place that had arcade machines, and they
were old arcade machines, and my son and one of
his friends and my son's eleven. Now, they went up
to these machines and I hadn't given them any quarters,
(23:01):
and I think I shuld give them some quarters so
they can play these machines. But they're over there moving
the sticks around, watching the screen, and I was like, oh,
I think they're just pretending to play. Oh, And then
I was like, I think maybe they're a little too
old to be doing that. And then I asked them,
do you guys want some real quarters? They're like, oh,
these machines are free, so it was a non issue.
But yeah, yeah, the reaches you reach a point where
(23:23):
you outgrow it for sure, where you don't just want
to watch the games. You don't just want to watch
other people play these games. You want to get in there,
even if you are going to fail miserably and just
have to sing more quarters in the thing.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I will pay the endless tax to be Colossus. Yeah. Wait,
what was your X Men arcade game character? Oh?
Speaker 4 (23:42):
You know, oftentimes when I would play, there were like
a lot of people, so it's like whoever you could get.
But you know, obviously Colossus will Cyclops was pretty great.
He had the ibam attack, you know, that would really
tear up the screen.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
I remember Colossus was my first pick and night Crawler
was my second.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Oh yeah, he had a good attack as well. I mean, really,
I would just be happy. I was happy to be
playing the X Men arcade game.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
All right, Well, I think maybe we should talk about
some of the research history on the illusion of control,
some of the papers that have explored this topic in
the past. And though this phenomenon had been I think
noticed previously in a variety of ways. It gets the
name illusion of control from important research by the American
(24:25):
psychologist Ellen J. Langer, who published a paper in nineteen
seventy five called the Illusion of Control in the Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
Langer was born in nineteen forty seven. She's also known
for her work on aging and mindfulness theory. I also
want to call out that she was a series consultant
on a BBC series title The Young Ones. But this
is not the classic comedy series, but rather a documentary
that explored reminiscence therapy.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
I'm not familiar either way. What's the comedy series?
Speaker 4 (24:58):
Oh? The Young Ones? Oh? It is a This is
a classic British comedy series about these young men living
in a like a dormitory house type situation. Yeah, and
they would also have musical guests on the show, like
Motorhead was on one of the episodes.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Yeah, so yeah, classic classic series. I'm sure it may
have come up in passing on Weird House Cinema before,
but I have a feeling in the future we'll probably
touch on some films on Weird House Cinema that include
actors from that show. All right, But the Young Ones
series that she was associated this is a documentary series
that came like decades later.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Okay, okay, But in the nineteen seventy five paper The
Illusion of Control, Langer defined the phenomenon somewhat more narrowly
than we've been talking about. She defined the illusion of
control as quote, an expectancy of a personal success probability
inappropriately higher than the objective probability would warrant. So I'm
(25:56):
not going to do a detailed breakdown of Langer's full
paper here, because there are like six experiments total a
lot of variables being tested, but I'll summarize the main
idea and a couple of highlights that stuck out to me.
So her intro mentions a bunch of different reasons for
thinking that. In her words, quote, while people may pay
lip service to the concept of chance, they behave as
(26:20):
though chance events are subject to control. And she produces
a lot of examples given to to provide prima facie
evidence of this idea before the experiments are carried out.
And one of these examples that I thought was interesting
was a sociological observation of how people treat dice when gambling.
(26:42):
She mentions particularly behavior observed by Hinslin in nineteen sixty seven.
So the idea is, if you watch people playing a
dice based game, maybe you're in a casino in Vegas again,
and you go up to a craps table, whatever their
true beliefs about chance or or skill being involved in
this game, and it is a game of chance, their
(27:04):
externally visible behavior implies that they think they have some
degree of control over the numbers they roll with the dice.
Examples here would include that people tend to roll dice
more softly if they want to roll low numbers, and
throw the dice hard if they want to roll high numbers.
They appear to concentrate in preparation for the dice throw,
(27:28):
the same way a person would concentrate before like doing
a skill based throw, like an aimed throw if they're
playing darts or something. And this belief in dice rolls
as a skilled activity also seem to be present in observers,
because other people at the table would tend to bet
with a person who appeared to be exerting more control
(27:50):
in this way.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
Oh, that's fascinating. You know, I don't gamble with the dice,
but I do throw some D twenties pretty much every
week in Dungeons and Dragons, and I know that I
do catch myself. I hadn't really thought about it before,
but like, if I'm rolling, especially an important D twenty,
I'm gonna I'm gonna put a little time and effort
into it, and there's gonna be a pause. I'm gonna
(28:13):
make sure my form is right. I'm gonna make sure
I get an appropriate clatter, you know, from that from
that that twenty.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
As I give it a roll, I do exactly the
same thing. And I it feels like I can roll
the dice better or worse. I know that I can't.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
Yeah, I'm still gonna get a natural one here and there,
but but it feels better for some reason.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
And to be fair, dice rolls in reality are probably
not perfectly random like I think. I've read about gambling
cheats who with a lot of training claim that they
can learn ways to like hold or toss the dice
so as to increase the chances of getting the roll
they want. I think, especially if they do things you're
not allowed to do, like sliding the dice on the
(28:54):
on the velvet instead of actually throlling it, throwing them
so they tumble. But anyway, for the vast vast majority
of regular gamblers, this is not the case. People cannot
do this most for the most part, and dice can
be treated as effectively random. If they weren't effectively random,
casinos would not use them, That's right. Anyway. To come
(29:24):
back to Langer's paper from seventy five, so to test
for an illusion of control, which she hypothesized, she did
six experiments in which chance based games had various elements
that we would associate with skill based games introduced and
this was her idea. It was that if you make
(29:46):
a game feel like it is skill based even though
it's clearly not, people will be confused into thinking that
they have control over outcomes that they actually don't. For
one aga example, one variable that is explored in this
paper is the variable of competition. If you are competing
(30:08):
against an opponent in a skill based game, the ability
of your opponent determines your likelihood of winning. Therefore, if
you're placing bets on whether or not you're going to win,
how much you bet will in part depend on how
good your opponent is at the game. So you know,
if you're playing chess against a chess pro, you're probably
going to bet less or maybe bet nothing. If you're
(30:30):
playing chess against somebody you perceive as worse than you
at chess, you will probably bet more. Of course, if
it's a purely chance based game, there is no relevant
skill variable. So if you're offered the chance to bet
on outcomes, your betting behavior should be based on something else,
maybe social factors, maybe just baseline appetite for risk, maybe
(30:51):
a desire to be seen by others as taking risks, etc.
It should be based on something other than your perception
of whether you're likely to win based on how good
your opponent is. That doesn't make any difference in a
chance based game. So, in the first experiment described in
the study, Langer had people play a purely chance based
(31:12):
card game. The game was high card draw between two players,
no skill involved, pure luck of the draw. You pick
a card out of the deck. Is your card higher
than the other person's. Is there any room in looking
at that game to think I'm better than other people
at this There shouldn't be. But the independent variable manipulated
(31:34):
by the experimenters here was the behavior and appearance of
your opponent. Do they seem confident and self assured or
do they seem awkward and nervous and prepared to lose?
In other words, are you playing against somebody who feels
like a winner or not? And remember, there's no logical
(31:54):
reason anybody should be a winner at this game. There's
zero skill involved. And yet the experiment did find that
people were willing to bet significantly more against a competitor
who seemed awkward and nervous than they were against a
competitor who seemed outgoing and confident. Now, I think this
is a really interesting result, but it's important to note
(32:16):
the limitations of this experimental design, and Langer herself flags
some of these limitations in the paper, so they didn't
go unnoticed by the authors here. So it seems like this.
It seems likely that this result could be caused by
a mistaken perception that skill or control would somehow factor
(32:36):
into this random game. But you can't be sure that's
the cause guiding the differences in how people bet. Maybe
other variables are operating here in response to the behavior
and appearance of the competitor. Maybe they have to do
with how the subject wants to be perceived in terms
of taking risks or not. Who knows. There could be
(32:56):
other things at work here. So that's the competition element,
which Liner concludes could make a chance based game have
illusory qualities of a skill based game. Other elements like
this explored in the paper are choice. So the idea
is if you give people a choice over, say, which
lottery ticket they receive, of course, it makes no difference
(33:18):
in the probability of winning, it increases their feeling of
the likelihood of winning, though with the choice element in particular,
there's a study I came across from twenty twenty one.
I might get into this more in the second episode,
but that study undercuts specifically the choice variable in particular,
so whether or not choice has this effect is up
(33:41):
for debate. But other ones explored in this paper are
familiarity with the game or with elements of the game.
So familiarity would be associated with a better chance of
winning a skill based game. Right, if you've played the
game before, you're probably better at it. You're more likely
to win in a chance game, it doesn't matter, but
this he found that familiarity made people more confident in
(34:02):
their ability to win.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
Okay, I mean I could see where like, if you
know that what the odds are, even if you know
the odds are slim, like you do the math, You're like,
all right, I have a five percent chance of pulling
the right card. You know you could Still there's still
plenty of room in the human psyche to lean into
that and think I've got a five percent shot. That's
that's a non zero percent chance of winning this game.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Well, and there are games that have that are largely
determined by chance, but also have skill elements where familiarity
can make a big difference. Like I would say familiarity
with playing poker probably makes a big difference in how
well you do, because how well you do in poker
is a mix of chance and skill. You know, it's
the chance of what cards you draw, but also the
(34:48):
skill of like your betting strategy and all that.
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Yeah, I guess it also comes down to, like, what
does it mean to lose in a given game. I
haven't played much in the way of poker, but it's
my understanding, like a game like poker gambling games where
actual money of any value is involved, losing just sucks.
There's no fun in losing. If you're losing at the game,
you're not having a good time. Whereas, and certainly you
can take that attitude, unfortunately into any gaming scenario. But
(35:14):
if you're doing it right, losing or rolling poorly, whatever
the exact form this takes in say, Dungeons and Dragons
is not necessarily bad. It can be a great moment
for character development, storytelling, and so forth. Likewise, just for
fun games like I'll play a bit of this, this
little phone game called Marvel Snap. It's pretty fun. You're
(35:36):
not betting any real money on it, and sometimes like losing,
Sometimes losing is likely irritating, but other times it's amusing
to see how the other person beats you. And then
sometimes you know, you know, Okay, I've got a very
slim chance of pulling this combo off or you know
this real hail Mary maneuver to use a sports term.
But sometimes you go for it because you don't have
(35:58):
money on the line. It's not the the world. If
you lose, you're likely to lose. But if there's a
small chance you're going to pull off something amazing, you
go for it. And you do that in games like
Dungeons and Dragons as well.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
That's right, and this highlights that. I mean a big
thing about studying games is that there are different reasons
people play games, and not all games are just about winning.
I think one reason that games like this, if you're
going to study them in terms of trying to find
people's real motivation to win, you need things like cash
prizes because that makes the winning condition really meaningful. Yeah,
(36:35):
because yeah, if there's not money involved, I'm just like,
I don't know, it's fun to just play a weird
game and lose and not know what you're doing.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
I mean, whereas saying a game like high card draw,
it's only going to be interesting if there's money involved
on missum exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
But anyway, coming back, so this study found in its
experiments that familiarity with a game, even a game purely
of chance, where familiarity would actually not make any difference
at all, people still seem to behave as if they
thought it made a difference. Another variable looked at in
these experiments was the subject's level of involvement. You know,
how involved or hands on are you with the process
(37:13):
that decides the winner. So, in general, this original nineteen
seventy five paper found that, yes, experiments do find that
adding in elements that superficially remind people of skill based
games increases the illusion of control. And the research did
not stop there. There have been many, many studies on
the illusion of control in the decade since this paper
(37:36):
from nineteen seventy five. There have been sort of three
major branches of investigatory methods to look into the evidence
for the illusion of control and to understand what variables
influence when and the extent to which it occurs. There's
also been some criticism of the idea and maybe looking
(37:57):
at different theoretical ways to make sense of the results
of these kinds of experiments. And so I think maybe
in the next episode we're going to talk a bit
more about the research history, talk about what some variables
are that determine when people experience an illusion of control,
and look at criticisms of the concept.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
All right, so join us next time as we'll continue
this look at the illusion of control. In the meantime,
we'd love to hear from everyone out out there, because
you know, we've touched on some very basic ideas about
human nature here and specific examples of gameplay and gambling
and so forth, and so I know you're gonna have
(38:37):
a lot of thoughts and we'd love to hear from you,
so write in. We'll have that email address here at
the end of the episode. A couple other ways to
interact with the show. I haven't no think I've mentioned
these recently, but if you are on the Facebook, there
is a Facebook group for Stuff to Blow your Mind.
It is the Stuff to Blow your Mind discussion module.
You just go there, you ask to be admitted, and
if I think you have to answer a question, that's
(38:59):
a very easy one you should be able to get
if you listen to the show. Also, there is a
discord server room what have you for Stuff to Blow
your Mind? If you want to join that, email us
and we'll send you the link It's that simple. And
let's see what else do we mention? Oh yeah, thanks
to everyone out there who jumped in and give us
(39:20):
a nice rating and review on the various places where
you can do that, and yeah, continue to ask for that.
If you haven't rated the show and given us a
sprinkling of stars, go ahead and do that because that
helps us out. And likewise, if you listen to the
show on an Apple device, Apple Podcasts and so forth,
maybe pop in and just make sure that you're still
subscribed and that you were receiving downloads.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:03):
Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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