February 18, 2025 • 49 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 2/10/2024, part 2 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. This week Rob and I are out,
so in our Tuesday and Thursday slots, we are bringing
you a couple of older episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, episodes from the vault, continuing the series we
started this past Saturday. Today's episode is part two of
our series on the illusion of control. This originally aired
(00:30):
on February tenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
We hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
And I am Joe McCormick, and today we are back
to continue our series on the psychology concept known as
the illusion of control. This is a cognitive illusion, or
a common error in thinking and judgment, in which we
overestimate the amount of control we have over outcomes in
(01:11):
the world, even outcomes that are in no way determined
by our actions. So if you haven't heard part one,
you should probably go back and listen to that first.
But for a brief recap, we talked about some examples
last time of the illusion of control. One would be
the belief that you can control your chances of winning
(01:31):
at a slot machine based on you know, who presses
the button and how, and actually you know, it's a
purely random process.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
There's no like.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
You know, you can't be like better at working a
slot machine. But other examples would include like the belief
that you can improve your chances of hitting a desired
number on a dice throw by concentrating before the throw.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I do this, yeah, yeah, and yeah. I was going
to save this for a listener mail, but I go
ahead mention it now heard from a listener on Discord
who pointed out, this is I believe it's passy cish.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, so you
use your name. But anyway. They pointed out that in
Dungeons and Dragons there's an additional element here that we
(02:14):
didn't touch on, and that's the drama of rolling your dice,
of rolling that d twenty, doing that saving throw. You
may put some concentration into it, not because not as
much because you're hoping to influence the role, but because
this matters, This is an important role. Perhaps the life
or death of your character may hinge on the outcome,
and you're going to play it up a little bit. Yeah,
(02:36):
it's a socially performative drum roll, but I think undeniably
there's off also that sense of like, all right, NAT twenty,
let's do it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I can do this.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Other examples would be like the belief that you can
influence the outcome of a sporting event hundreds of miles
away by wearing a lucky charm. We talked about the
childhood belief that you can control gameplay on video game
with like a controller that's not plugged in, or by
moving the joystick on a on an arcade cabinet you
haven't put any quarters in. Yeah, yeah, And we also
(03:10):
ended up talking about an influential early paper on the
illusion of control from nineteen seventy five called the Illusion
of Control in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by the American psychologist Ellen J. Langer. And for a
quick summary of this paper, it used experiments involving games
of chance with superficial elements inserted from games of skill
(03:35):
to see if people would behave consistent with a belief
that they had impossible levels of control over chance outcomes,
and this study found that yes. In its experiments people
did behave in a way that was consistent with overestimating
their level of control over chance determined outcomes. However, the
thing about this paper was the experiments did use indirect
(03:58):
methods of studying the phenomenon, so these results came with
some limitations that I'll describe in just a minute. I
wanted to learn some more about the history of how
the illusion of control has been studied, because there have
been tons of papers on this, tons of experiments, and
I wanted to kind of general overview, so I turned
to a very helpful book chapter by a psychologist named
(04:22):
Suzanne C. Thompson. The chapter is called Illusions of Control
and it appears in a book called Cognitive Illusions, edited
by Rudiger F. Pohl, published by Psychology Press twenty sixteen,
though the version I read seems to have been an
updated edition because it included references to more recent studies,
(04:43):
such as one paper from twenty twenty one. So in
this overview, Thompson uses a broader definition of the illusion
of control than Langer did. Langer's definition was specifically about
seeking desired outcomes in chance determined events, to Thompson says, instead,
quote illusions of control occur when individuals overestimate their personal
(05:06):
influence over an outcome, So that that's a more general
way of stating it. You know, maybe your influence could
be good or bad. It could be in getting something
you want or in something you don't want.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, so this broader definition could apply to like various
games that have some sort of random element that you
truly can't control. For you may be really great at
the game, but you have this added level of illusion
of control that thinks that you can you can definitely
navigate any random occurrence. And I guess you could also
apply it even to interpersonal relationships, you know, thinking that
you have more control over other people in your circle
(05:39):
than you do.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Right, because this idea would also apply to things where
you do have some control, but you're imagining you have
more control than you actually do. And Thompson says that
since the origins of this research in the nineteen seventies,
there have been basically three different ways of experimentally demonstrating
that people experience or control. There's like three branches of
(06:03):
experiments on this tree. So approach number one that she
outlines is the main example. Here is the original research
by Ellen Langer, which we already described in the last episode.
This general strategy involves gauging people's guesses about their likelihood
of success in chance games that have superficial elements of
(06:25):
skill games introduced. So to emphasize again, this approach does
not actually directly measure people's perceptions of control. Instead, these
experiments would kind of infer it from their behavior in
a game. So you see that people bet more money.
That suggests they think they have more control over the outcome,
(06:45):
But it's possible there's another factor operating there, so there's
less certainty that you're testing for the variable you're actually
looking for. And Thompson explains some other ways of doing
these kind of tests apart from like Langer's original experimental design.
One thing she talks about is a type of study
(07:06):
that you could call observer participant discrepancies. So an example
of this would be you get a test group, you know,
maybe a classroom of students or whatever, and you split
them up into pairs, and you give each pair of
subjects a random number generating apparatus, maybe a die that's
a simple one. So in each pair, there's one person
(07:28):
who gets to roll the die and the other person
records all the numbers that they roll, and participants do
this like twenty times, and then across the whole test group,
whichever pair in the group has the highest total sum
of rolls wins a cash prize, and both subjects in
(07:48):
each pair guess their likelihood of winning before the game.
Thompson says that if you try to replicate this sort
of experiment with students, you will usually find that subjects,
on average rate their chance of winning a little bit
higher if they're the one rolling the die than if
they're the one recording the roles. Again, that should not
(08:08):
make a difference. So even though we both rationally know
that the outcome is random, it just feels a little
luckier if I'm the one doing it. However, and I
thought this was interesting. Thompson says that some research has
found that this effect can be reduced or even neutralized
completely by the context of the game, for example, if
(08:31):
it takes place in a classroom that has previously discussed
the correct way to estimate probability on games like this.
And that was interesting to me because it made me
think about how people overcome cognitive biases and cognitive illusions.
You know, sometimes the unfortunate fact is that simply being
(08:54):
aware of a cognitive illusion, like knowing that sometimes our
brains have a certain kind of bias, is not sufficient
to keep us from falling for that bias. So you
can know about the tricks your brain plays, and you
can fall for them anyway. It happens to all of us,
but in a case.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
And this obviously applies to many other aspects of the
human psyche as well. I mean awareness, self awareness is
often the first step, but that doesn't mean you've completely
defeated the illusion or illusion that you are having to
deal with.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Exactly. This is true for everybody, but in other cases,
and it varies from case to case. So in some cases,
research has shown that we can be successfully inoculated mentally
from certain irrational tendencies by being made aware of them,
and this seems to be one of those cases. You
can sometimes neutralize illusions of control just by like having
(09:49):
a context in which people have already been reminded about
how probabilities work. And I think that's interesting because you
might naturally assume that the variable in resistance to cognitive
illusions like the illusion of control is the person you know,
like permanent features of a person's personality, and you might
(10:11):
be inclined to think like well, a more rational person
is better able to overcome their biases and think clearly.
But I don't know if that's always the case. I
wonder if it's really more about setting and context. Maybe
setting and context are equally, if not more, powerful predictors
of how well people overcome cognitive illusions. In other words,
(10:33):
does like currently being in the setting of a statistics
class inoculate you against the illusion of control better than
being a person who is generally aware of cognitive illusions.
I don't know the answer for sure there, but it
seems worth considering rather than just defaulting to the explanation
of permanent internal personality based differences. But anyway, so to
(10:58):
move on, That was approach number Experimental approach number two
is different. In this type of experiment, you give subjects
a laboratory task where researchers can program exactly how much
control the subject actually has. And in many of these
experiments the subject has zero control. Sometimes they have more control,
(11:21):
and then you ask the subject how much control they
think they had. So an experiment typical of this type
is one that was done by Alloy and Abrahamson in
nineteen seventy nine, in which subjects would be given a
button to press and they're told to see if they
can use that button to control whether or not a
(11:42):
light comes on, and then they're asked to judge at
the end what amount of control they think the button
had over the light. In reality, the light had no
relationship to whether the button was pressed or not. It
was simply programmed to come on at some fixed percentage
of the trials with each subject, and unsurprisingly, even though
it had nothing to do with whether the button was
(12:05):
pushed or not or when subjects broadly thought they had
some amount of control, and experiments when the light came
on more frequently but again unconnected to the button, caused
people to believe that they had more control over the light. So,
at least in some cases, it seems like success at
getting a desired outcome makes people more likely to believe
(12:28):
they have control over that outcome, whether or not they do.
And while at the risk of over extrapolating from a
very contained laboratory outcome, this does sort of suggest to
me connections to behaviors in the world, Like you know,
when somebody has very good fortune at a particular juncture,
they're like, yep, that was all me. Later, Thompson describes
(12:52):
another version of this kind of test. This one is
called the computer screen on set task. And so in
this test, like you sit in front of a computer
and you're looking at a screen, and the screen will
sequentially produce a series of forty images, and all of
these images are either a green X or a red O.
And with each new screen, you can choose to press
(13:13):
a button or not press a button, and your goal
is to make the green X appear as many times
as possible. So people will be trying to figure out
if there's some pattern like pressing the button or not,
you know, pressing it or not in what sequence, et
cetera that'll make the green exes appear. Actually, once again,
the button has no relation whatsoever to whether the symbols
(13:34):
appear on the screen. The button doesn't do anything. And
you can vary what percentage of each symbol the subjects get.
At the end of the test, you have them rate,
on a scale of zero to one hundred how much
control they think they had over what appeared on the screen.
People who got the green X seventy five percent of
their random screens believed that they had a lot of
(13:55):
control over the display.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
This is also interesting to think of in terms of
the sample we discussed in the last episode about as
a child thinking you had control over a video game. Yeah,
maybe this doesn't play out. I'd be interested to hear
from folks much younger than me. But looking back on
the video games that I was doing this on, like
these were the old school arcade games, where it was
(14:21):
maybe a little more directly comparable to just pressing a
button and seeing a random O or an AX on
the screen, Like, there is a lot more room to
ask the question, am I controlling it? I have fifty
percent chance I am.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
In a way, I'm almost nostalgic for that mindset, Like
there's something kind of beautiful about the ambiguity of wondering
if you're controlling what's happening on the screen. I feel
like maybe I'm wrong about this. I feel like I
wouldn't fall for that now, but I kind of wish
I could, because it suggests a more I don't know,
just kind of like totally radically opened state of mind
(14:56):
in which anything is possible, a more magical way of
relating to the world.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
It's a cheaper way to go about going to the arcade.
You know, I wonder what they would think if there
was an adult who regularly came into the arcade and
they're like, oh, man, he never spends anything. He just
stands at the machines and pretends to play.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, just toggling the joystick at the demo.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
It's great. You gotta sell this guy's nachos or something.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Okay, anyway, that's approach number two, these very tightly controlled
laboratory experiments. Approach number three is different. Once again, you
get people to report their judgments of control in real
life scenarios. An example here is a study by McKenna
in nineteen ninety three. Not that McKenna different, Chaya, I
think this is Frank P.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
McKenna.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah. Ask participants to rate the likelihood that, compared to
other drivers, they would experience an auto collision, and they
were asked to judge this when imagining themself as the
driver versus imagining themselves as the passenger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most
people thought that accidents would be relatively less likely if
(16:01):
they were the driver.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
This absolutely matches up with my experience. You know, even
when I'm in the car with a driver that I
definitely trust and even know that they are a better
driver than me. You know, maybe they have more experience
or they've undergone training. They're still like that gut feeling
of like I'm not actually in control. I can't hit
the brake when I see the brake lights ahead getting closer,
(16:24):
and therefore I feel like a little more anxious about
the whole scenario oftentimes, like realizing that this is irrational,
but feeling it.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Nonetheless, I totally relate to that. I feel that too,
the same thing. It's not like I actually think this
other person is a more dangerous driver than me. I
just it's just hard to get over that feeling.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
In the second study in this mckinna paper, participants were
asked about specific types of collisions, those that would seem
to involve either more or less driver control. So they
were talking about like rear ending someone versus being rear
ended versus having a tire blowout, And the idea was
rear ending someone is generally thought to be largely subject
(17:07):
to driver control. Of course, we know that there are
factors that other factors that can intervene breaks could fail whatever,
whereas getting rear ended seems to be out of the
driver's hands, and people were highly likely to say that
they were less likely to have the type of collision
in which the driver was in control. Has high control,
(17:28):
So I am much less likely than other people to
rear end someone. Whether it's me or someone else, makes
less difference in getting rear ended. Quote. Thus, people show
illusory control over avoiding an accident by assuming that they
will be able to exert control that others cannot.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
And I guess this is what's in play when you
see drivers, so many drivers just riding bumpers through terrifyingly
fast traffic all the time, like they just maybe they
have just heightened control over things. I would tend to
doubt it.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, that would be dangerous if someone else did it,
But I can handle it.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
I alone can weave in and out of traffic and
make it to my destination two minutes ahead of schedule.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So this type of experiment is taken to show that
people have an illusion of control when they consider themselves
relative to other people. A driver has some degree of
control over whether they end up in a collision. On average,
people think that they are better able to avoid that
outcome than other people are, and so looking back over
these three methodologies, Thompson says, you know, each of them
(18:34):
have strengths and weaknesses. So approach number one kind of
the Langer approach. The pros are that it uses realistic
situations that people engage in every day, like lottery drawings
and games and stuff. And also it has the pro
that the indirect measure can help detect an illusory belief
in control that does in reality guide behavior, but which
(18:58):
people might resist admits if they were asked directly, and
that does seem big to me. It helps avoid like
people tailoring their answers to avoid embarrassment. Cons on the
other hand, are it's indirect, so it doesn't test whether
control is really the deciding factor. You kind of have
to infer that and wonder if other factors could be
(19:21):
contributing as well. Approach number two the laboratory experiments like
Alloy and Abramson with like you know, the light coming
on or the greenexes and red o's on the computer screen.
The pros of that are that the dependent variable is
definitely judgment of control, like it's a very tightly controlled experiment.
Cons would be that these tasks do not have what
(19:42):
psychologists call external validity, So they're like weird tasks with
no close analogy in our day to day lives, so
they might not be telling us how people would actually
behave in reality. They might just be like producing a
weird kind of behavior that's specific to the lab task.
Approach Number three the self reporting of control judgments about
(20:04):
everyday activities like driving. Ala McKenna pros this does have
external validity cons are it relies on reflective self reporting,
which can be subject to all kinds of biases you
know when you're trying to when you ask people to
self report on their own judgments about their lives. However,
Thompson says that a strength of illusion of control research
(20:27):
is that even though these methodologies all have their strengths
and weaknesses, they mostly point to a similar conclusion, which
is the fact that on average, people believe we have
more control over outcomes than we actually do. And there
do seem to be some doubts about in exactly what
scenarios this applies and what causes it, but the core
(20:49):
finding seems fairly robust. Though I'm going to talk about
one paper later in this episode that has some theoretical
criticisms of how this research and how the experimental findings
are framed. So it seems there probably is an illusion
(21:14):
of control, especially for outcomes that we have very little
control over. But it would be very surprising if people
showed an illusory belief in control over all variables in
all situations equally. So there has to be some more
granular research on like when illusions of control happen, Like
what are the kinds of things that we think we
(21:35):
have more control of than others, more illusory control over
than others, And what kind of situations or states can
we be in that heighten this illusion? And to continue
with Thompson's overview, Thompson highlights seven variables that have been
studied and found to affect the illusion of control. This
list does not mean that these are the only factors
(21:57):
influencing it. It's just that these have been studied well
enough to discuss in this book chapter. So the first
one is skill related factors. Now, this was a major
part of the original nineteen seventy five paper by Langer.
A lot of studies have found that if a situation
has features we associate with with dependence on skill, we're
(22:19):
more likely to experience an illusion of control and Examples
of these features could include quote, familiarity, making choices, active
engagement with the material, competition, and four knowledge. So we
talked about several of these in the previous episode. For example, familiarity,
you know you might be more inclined to think you
(22:41):
have control over the outcome of a chance game if
you are familiar with the game, or if there are
elements of the game that are familiar to you. And
this is generally true of skill based games, but wouldn't
affect chance based games. One of these variables though, Actually
there was a twenty twenty one paper that casts some
doubt over whether it affects illusions of control, and that
(23:03):
variable is choice. So the original idea is that if
you have a choice to make that gives you illusions
of control. An example would be a lottery type game.
So imagine a game where you buy a lottery ticket.
The ticket has a random series of numbers on it,
and you win a prize if the winning number matches
your ticket. Now consider the same game, except you get
(23:26):
to pick your ticket numbers. Maybe you can use your
lucky number, which of course is the ISBN. For the
novelization of Halloween three season of the Witch by Jack Martin.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
To your number, that's the one you play.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
It's got to be what could be a luckier number? Happy,
Happy Halloween. Now, of course, in a fair lottery like,
whatever the number is, it makes no difference whatsoever to
your chance of winning. Winning numbers are selected randomly. No
number has a higher chance of victory than any other.
And yet the fact that you get to choose your
number might make it seem like there's some element of
(23:58):
skill involved in this game, and thus increases your illution
of control. Langer did find this kind of result in
the nineteen seventy five paper. However, Thompson mentions that this
particular metric of choice specifically has been contradicted by recent research,
a paper by Klousowski at All in twenty twenty one,
(24:18):
which found that choice did not reliably cause an illusion
of control.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Okay, Like the scenario I'm instantly thinking of would be
like the classic magician game of Like, Okay, draw a
card from this deck, and now I'm going to guess it.
Assuming in this case that you are the magician, but
you have actually absolutely no magic up your sleeve, no trick.
You're just going completely off of chance. You know, you
have a certain percentage chance of guessing it right because
(24:44):
there are only so many cards in that deck versus, Okay,
you draw a card at random from this deck. I'll
draw a card at random from this deck. Do you
think we're going to have the same card like by
being able to pick a car by saying I believe
you have the Ace of Spades in your hand when
it's just completely random, would you feel confident in making
(25:06):
that choice now? I feel like you would be more
confident in making that choice if the other person picked
their card, because then you can potentially overestimate your ability
to guess the mind of the individual. Okay, this is
the kind of person's going to choose a king or
a queen, or they can try and outsmart me by,
you know, choosing a two or three something that isn't
superficially interesting.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
I guess that would introduce other elements because it would introduce, like,
I don't know if the other person picking a card
in the scenario is technically a competitor. But we did
talk last time about how like competition in some experiments
seem to increase the illusion of control. And I don't know.
That's an interesting scenario because it adds these other variables too.
(25:50):
My intuition is that that would increase illusions of control.
It feels like it would for me, it would it
would falsely increase my belief that I could control the
outcome even though I can't. And just to go again
on my intuitions, it would seem to me that the
choices could increase illusions of control, like if I get
(26:11):
to pick the lottery numbers, it would feel more likely
like I had a better chance of winning. But again,
this twenty twenty one study found that in some circumstances, no,
that's not the case. So it might It might have
to do with just like how people are primed to
think about the task they're about to do, you know,
like you say, as we talked about earlier, like, are
you given some kind of hint of remembering how probabilities
(26:34):
actually work as you're engaging in the task.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, okay, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
But anyway, So to come back to more factors that
can apparently influence it. According to experiments, one factor is
success or failure emphasis. This is the second thing Thompson lists.
So does the task or the context highlight the idea
of success or failure? One example, here would be early
(27:00):
streaks in a game where you repeatedly guess or draw something.
So experiments have found if you let somebody gamble on
calling coin tosses again, coin tosses something that in reality
might not be truly perfectly random, it is close enough
to random. It's basically random, so you should not have
any skill at calling a coin toss. But if people
(27:23):
are gambling on coin tosses and they have an early
string of successes at making the right call, this will
apparently increase the illusion of control relative to subjects who
have an early string of failures. So if you lose
a lot at the beginning, outcomes feel random. If you
win a lot at the beginning, you think I'm doing this.
(27:46):
In reality, it's equally random either way. But we can
get tricked into thinking that we have control because we've
been winning and it just seems like winning is happening,
so somehow I must be making it happen.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
See feel rather opposite in Dungeons and Dragons. If like
the first couple of D twenty rolls of the night
are really high for me, or or heaven forbid their
natural twenties on things that don't matter, I have this
sinking suspicion that I'm just doomed when we get to
actual combat because that's when the ones are going to
come out.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
That is really funny. I've had the same feeling before.
It's almost as bad as like rolling a critical fail
on something important is rolling a critical success on something
that doesn't matter at all? Ye feel like I've wasted it?
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, decks, check to see if you can pick up
a stick and it's a natural twenty. It's like, all right,
I needed to get like a three on that probably.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah. So on the other hand, though, in this success
failure thing, failure apparently sometimes neutralizes illusory beliefs of control.
So in some studies they have found this is only
true if failure is clear and explicit. If there's like
ambiguity and the feedback and it's not one hundred percent
(29:02):
clear whether you have failed or not, the illusion of
control can persist.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
All right, Yeah, a natural one on your D twenty
row Definitely, I think we'll knock that illusion out of place.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yeah, yeah, okay. Third factor that seems to influence it
need or desire for outcome. So evidence shows that how
much you want an outcome can increase the illusion of
control over the process of getting it. So an example
would be in a computer screen on set task. So
(29:34):
we talked about that earlier. That's the one with the
green exes and the red o's where people are pressing
a button trying to figure out if they can control
making the green exes appear on the screen. In this
kind of experiment, people believed that they had more They
had significantly more control if they received cash payments proportional
to the number of greenexes that appeared compared to people
(29:56):
who did the same task but did not get a
cash reward. There was no cash involve And remember in
this experiment either way, subjects have zero control at all.
A study by Buyer at All in nineteen ninety five
found a similar kind of thing that the illusion of
control was increased for a random lottery with a food
(30:16):
reward if people getting a hamburger if the subject was hungry,
compared to subjects who were not hungry. So like, if
the reward is food and you are currently hungry, you
have more illusions of control over a chance outcome than
if you're not hungry.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
All right, well, that makes sense. I mean the scenario,
I mean the outcome, not so much the Hamburger lottery.
I don't think I've encountered one of those in real life.
But yeah, the more desirable the outcome, the more acceptable
the gambling risk becomes, the more confident you are that
you can pull it off. I think I've felt this
way in the past, regarding things like DVD giveaways and all,
you know, where it's like, oh, I'd like to win that. Sure,
(30:56):
it's worth worth my time to go ahead and and enter,
because uh yeah, I can imagine that on my shelf.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Do you have a specific disc in mind here?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah? Yeah, I uh. Ages ago, I entered a contest
and won DVD copies of The Fly and The Fly Too,
and and it was like and it was it was
like magic, you know, because I'm like, yeah, I would
mind winning that, and bam I won it. And in
a way it kind of like ruined it. It ruined
things for me moving forward because then anytime there's like
a DVD giveaway, I'm like, well, I won this, I
(31:27):
won this once before it could happen again. I'm good
at this. Apparently.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Oh so you apparently had an early success that increased
the success salience of that kind of lottery for you.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, I had a similar scenario happened with my son.
I took him to local bowling alleys for years and
years ago when he was much younger. And you know
the claw machines. We've talked about claw machines before. Oh yeah,
the show. You know, they're they're they're tricky if you're predatory,
if you want to describe them as such. You know,
it seems like an easy thing. You just put in
a quarter of claw grabs a toy, you get the toy,
(32:00):
but there are a number of additional tricks in play
that that enable the house to win. And you know,
of course he was interested in trying out his claw machine,
and I was like, well, this is a teaching moment.
I'd say, tell him, all right, I'm going to give you,
give you one quarter or whatever it took to use
the machine, but I want you to know that these
(32:23):
machines are tricky. They are made to trick you. You're
not going to win anything. And then then I'm like,
go forth and lose, you know, learn this lesson immediate jackpot.
He got some stuffy out of that, and I think
he still has that stuffy that I occasionally see in
his room. And it mocks me because I'm like, you
were never supposed to come out of that machine, and
you you gave him too much confidence in these claw machines.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Oh that's terrible, though, I would say at least the
claw machine is not a slot machine because there is
some minor amount of skill involved.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Minor, yes, and if memory serves like we'd have to
go deeper in. But I believe there's some some additional
Shenanigan's going on with those machines that enable occasional win
because that's the thing. People need to occasionally win those
toys out of those machines. Otherwise people will realized that, Okay,
there's just a bunch of dust covered stuff. He's in there.
(33:13):
Nobody's getting anything out of there.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I'm very sorry your son had an early success emphasis
on claw machines. That is an unfortunate fate.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Well, I let him have a number of failures after
that on other visits, so I think the lesson finally
hammered him. Oh.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
But the flip side of the success failure emphasis is
that research has also found that there are increased illusions
of control in a situation where somebody is trying to
avoid an outcome they find extremely undesirable. Don't worry, these
experiments didn't have actual torture or anything. The really undesirable
conditions things like having to speak in front of a group,
(34:02):
which is a very terrifying prospect to many of us,
including myself, even though I speak into a microphone for
a living. So let that be a comfort to you
out there who have this same fear.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, I mean it's a different scenario, to be sure.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Another one was like having to put your hand in
cold water. That's another common thing tested here. So people
who strongly wanted to avoid these outcomes mistakenly believed they
had more agency in the task that determined whether they
would have to do.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Them or not.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
So it's just a flip side of the thing, like,
if you really want that hamburger, you have more illusion
of control over the chance process of getting it. If
you really want to avoid speaking in front of a group,
apparently you have more illusions of control in avoiding that fade.
Another interesting thing noted here is that some studies have
found a greater illusion of control when people are experiencing
(34:56):
heightened stress. I thought that was interesting. Fourth factor is mood.
This is pretty straightforward, But studies have found on average,
people experience more illusory control when they're in a better mood,
and people with a negative mood showed less illusions of
control on average. Of course, this is probably not a
(35:16):
reason to try to be in a bad mood. But
you know, one advantage if you're currently feeling down is
that in this state of being in a bad mood,
you might be less likely to think you can control
things you can.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah. Yeah, though, of course, like we've been saying, it's
complex anything human psyche's doing. So on the flip side,
you might find yourself more inclined to go after a
quick dopamine hit of initiating a gamble if you're in
a bad mood. So you know a lot going on there.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Okay, fifth factor We sort of already alluded to this one,
but this is what Thompson calls the intrusion of reality.
This basically means giving people a reality check. Illusion of
control is one type of cognitive illusion that seems pretty
easy to overcome in the moment by simply reminding people
what the probabilities actually are. So if you remind people
(36:08):
of the objective probability of winning a gambling task before
they place their bets. The illusion of control can be
significantly reduced or neutralized completely.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, and you see this a lot with coverage of
lottery odds, you know, the advertisements for the lottery and
like general buzz for the lottery make it seem like
anything is possible. You know, the winning ticket might be
you know, it might have been sold to the gas
station down the street. But then oftentimes news reporting on
these situations will often drive home like, no, you have
(36:39):
like this astronomically small chance of winning if you enter.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, here's your reality check. And it seems like with
illusions of control, a simple reality check is quite useful
to people. Next factor I thought was quite interesting Thompson
mentions power. Apparently, people in positions of power and authority.
Of course, they do have more actual control over many situations.
(37:04):
That's what power means. But it seems power also correlates
with increased illusions of control. So if you like, do
an experiment where you assign someone a position of power
over others in the experiment, or you prime them to
remember times in their life when they were in a
position of power, this seems to come with an increased
(37:25):
tendency toward the illusion of control. And that seemed very
interesting to me because you might imagine that it would
work the opposite way that you know, it's when you
feel disempowered that you dream of having more control. Maybe,
But the way this is framed actually does gel with
my experience. Like people who get to be the boss
or get to be the leader in some way seem
(37:48):
more susceptible than regular people to thinking they can, like
magically will a dice roll to come out the way
they wanted.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yeah, yeah, it's easy to apply this to various like
you well known scenarios contemporary and historic. You know, you
look to some person in a position of power who
ends up in a situation where like clearly the odds
are stacked against them, but they they continue on with
like a seeming overconfidence that we we often just attribute
(38:16):
to you just to pure ego and so forth. But yeah,
the illusion of control could also play a huge part
in it.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
I wonder if there's actually some overlap with the idea
of success emphasis here, because like, if you are in
a position of power, you've had some reinforcement already of
like in some scenario where you didn't know what the
outcome was like you got what you wanted, Like you've
got you know, promotion or increased status or whatever, and
you're in this position of power now, so you've sort
(38:44):
of been trained to think like, oh, yeah, I can
make things happen for me, and that could be that
could lead to illusions that you can do that in
scenarios when you can't.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Another thing Thompson mentions that can affect it is what
she calls regulatory focus. This basically hinges on a theory
of motivation that distinguishes between situations where you have a
focus on getting an outcome you do want, versus situations
where you have a focus on avoiding an outcome you
don't want. And research by Langans in two thousand and
(39:18):
seven found that when you're in the mindset of getting
an outcome you do want, that was more associated with
illusions of control than the other mindset.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
That's interesting, But I guess, on the other hand, like
we shouldn't then desire a life where we're just focusing
on avoiding negative outcomes, because right that sounds pretty dreadful.
I guess in reality, you'd want some sort of healthy
balance of the two without too much tendency towards either
illusion exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
I mean in the same way that you might be
less prone to illusions of control if you're in a
negative mood, but that probably shouldn't make you want to
be in a negative mood. Another one I just happened
to come across. This is not on Thompson's list, but
another paper mentioned it, so I thought i'd take a look.
Is the idea of what's called deliberative versus implemental mindset.
(40:09):
So this is the effect of what kind of frame
of mind you're in when approaching a control judgment. So
this was a paper by Galwitzer and Kinney in nineteen
eighty nine called Effects of Deliberative and Implemental mindsets on
the Illusion of control. This is a paper that used
a light onset experiment like the kinds we've talked about before,
(40:31):
where you know you're trying to turn on a light
by figuring out, you know, if pressing a button turns
it on or not. And this experiment had two different
experimental groups doing the same task, but they were separated
by the independent variable of a mental exercise. Before making
their judgments, one group was asked to quote deliberate on
(40:51):
an unresolved personal problem, so you know, thinking about a
problem considering various solutions. The other group was asked to
plan the implementation of a personal goal, so you come
up with the plan of action to get what you want.
And this study found that the deliberation group experienced less
(41:12):
illusory control on the unrelated light onset task. So quote
overall finding suggests that people who are trying to make
decisions develop a deliberative mindset that allows for a realistic
view of action outcome expectancies, whereas people who try to
act on a decision develop an implemental mindset that promotes
(41:33):
illusory optimism. And that was to the extent that this
is a valid finding that that was illuminating to me
because it's like, Okay, if you're more just sort of
exploring ideas, thinking about different contingencies and all that, you
apparently might be more realistic about how much control you have.
(41:53):
But once you get into thinking about how to get
something done, then you're more prone to illusions of control,
which might actually be useful even though it's just as
we said last time, the illusion of control could be
useful even though it generates false beliefs, because maybe it
maybe those false beliefs could be motivating, could help you,
(42:15):
you know, spur you to action.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah yeah, I mean you're working on something that's going
to be entered in a contest. Let's say, you know,
your chances of actually winning that contest may be too
small due to you know, various various factors that have
nothing to do with the quality of the work. But
you may be inspired to put more work into that,
into into the quality, you know, to put more effort
into the creation of whatever it is you're making. And
(42:39):
you know, you know, we knew that that first prize ribbon,
but it could result in a better product overall.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about
in this part of our series is I mentioned there
are some criticisms of the concept of the illusion of control. Uh.
There is one really interesting compleating result I found concerning
when the illusion of control manifests, and that was in
a paper by Francesca Gino, Zachariah Sharrek, and Don A.
(43:09):
Moore published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in
twenty eleven. The paper was called keeping the Illusion of
control under control, Ceilings, floors and imperfect Calibration and So
this paper offers a critique of illusion of control research
by suggesting that maybe it's better to think about this
(43:32):
as a general tendency to make incorrect estimates of our
level of control over things, and this would include both
overestimating and underestimating our level of control in situations where
the evidence is somewhat ambiguous. So, according to these authors,
(43:52):
the literature appears to support a general overestimation of control
merely because so many of these studies focus on games
of chance and other purely random outcomes, things that we
have zero control over, and thus belief in any amount
of control in these experiments will be factually mistaken. But
(44:14):
the authors of this paper basically they accept that pattern
is valid. But they also say, if you give people
tasks where they have a high level of control, sometimes
you should expect to see subjects systematically underestimate how much
control they have on those things. So the authors performed
several experiments to test this, and they found that across
(44:37):
three experiments, indeed, there is a corresponding illusory lack of
control in some cases where people have a high degree
of control over outcomes. So I want to describe just
one example of the kinds of experiments they did. Subjects
would be asked to do a kind of word search
puzzle on computer screens. They're looking for like patterns of
(44:58):
repeating letters in a jumble of letters, and occasionally, at
random time intervals, the background of the screens they're looking
at would change color, maybe making it harder to pick
out the letters and solve the puzzle. Participants could press
a button to make the background revert to its original
color and make the game easier again. And so the
(45:20):
independent variable here was how responsive the background was to
presses of the button. The button could be set to
zero percent control, fifteen percent, fifty percent, and eighty five percent.
And then after this puzzle search game was over, subjects
were asked what level of control they thought they had
(45:41):
over the background color with the button, And as predicted
in this experiment, the authors found in the low control conditions,
like if you have zero percent or fifteen percent of
control over the background, there was an illusion of control,
same kind of thing you would expect based on these
previous experiments. But in the high control conditions, where players
(46:02):
had like eighty five percent control over the background, they
thought they had less control than they actually did, so
they did three experiments in total, and in the end,
the authors here say that this raises doubts about whether
people actually do systematically overestimate their control, and instead, what
might be more accurate to say is that people overestimate
(46:25):
their control when they have little and underestimate their control
when they have much. And so they they offer this
as a critique of the sort of theoretical framework of
the illusion of control, because they say, really that that's
only half of the picture, and that it's more accurate
probably to say that we have a general tendency to
make mistaken judgments about the level of control we have
(46:48):
over events, and that goes both ways.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Interesting, Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of various discussions
we've had about occasional, occasionally beneficial errors in cognition. You know,
sometimes overconfidence pays off, like we were just saying, sometimes
overconfidence just gives you confidence you need to do something,
and sometimes an abundance of caution pays off. And then,
of course, in either case, sometimes it doesn't work out
(47:12):
well for the individual. Either. Overconfidence can screw you up,
and so can being too cautious, And I guess you
need to some degree a little bit of both to
sort of balance out these illusions.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yeah, is it all right to have one type of
illusion pretty consistently if you have like a compensating illusion
that sort of like steers you toward the middle.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
I don't know, maybe. I mean I feel like a
lot of our world views are kind of arranged like this.
There are the things that we are unreasonably anxious about
and unreasonably cautious about perhaps or at least have a
heightened level of caution, and then there are other areas
where we may kind of have blinders on and we're
just kind of like babes in the woods with those
particular threats. And yeah, at the end of the day,
(47:56):
like you can't be over confident about everything. You can
get plowed over on the butt. You've got to do
things like leave the house, So you have to have
some level of confidence, even in cases where the confidence
is outpacing the actual chances a little bit.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
All right, Well, I think maybe we should call it
there for part two on the illusion of control.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there
if you have feedback personal experience on anything we discussed here.
As usual, remind everybody that's Seftable Your Mind is primarily
a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
we have listener mail. On Mondays, we have one of
about three different varieties of short form episodes on Wednesday,
(48:42):
and then on Friday, we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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 con tact at Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Stuff 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. This week Rob and I are out,
so in our Tuesday and Thursday slots, we are bringing
you a couple of older episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, episodes from the vault, continuing the series we
started this past Saturday. Today's episode is part two of
our series on the illusion of control. This originally aired
(00:30):
on February tenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
We hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
And I am Joe McCormick, and today we are back
to continue our series on the psychology concept known as
the illusion of control. This is a cognitive illusion, or
a common error in thinking and judgment, in which we
overestimate the amount of control we have over outcomes in
(01:11):
the world, even outcomes that are in no way determined
by our actions. So if you haven't heard part one,
you should probably go back and listen to that first.
But for a brief recap, we talked about some examples
last time of the illusion of control. One would be
the belief that you can control your chances of winning
(01:31):
at a slot machine based on you know, who presses
the button and how, and actually you know, it's a
purely random process.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
There's no like.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
You know, you can't be like better at working a
slot machine. But other examples would include like the belief
that you can improve your chances of hitting a desired
number on a dice throw by concentrating before the throw.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I do this, yeah, yeah, and yeah. I was going
to save this for a listener mail, but I go
ahead mention it now heard from a listener on Discord
who pointed out, this is I believe it's passy cish.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, so you
use your name. But anyway. They pointed out that in
Dungeons and Dragons there's an additional element here that we
(02:14):
didn't touch on, and that's the drama of rolling your dice,
of rolling that d twenty, doing that saving throw. You
may put some concentration into it, not because not as
much because you're hoping to influence the role, but because
this matters, This is an important role. Perhaps the life
or death of your character may hinge on the outcome,
and you're going to play it up a little bit. Yeah,
(02:36):
it's a socially performative drum roll, but I think undeniably
there's off also that sense of like, all right, NAT twenty,
let's do it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I can do this.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Other examples would be like the belief that you can
influence the outcome of a sporting event hundreds of miles
away by wearing a lucky charm. We talked about the
childhood belief that you can control gameplay on video game
with like a controller that's not plugged in, or by
moving the joystick on a on an arcade cabinet you
haven't put any quarters in. Yeah, yeah, And we also
(03:10):
ended up talking about an influential early paper on the
illusion of control from nineteen seventy five called the Illusion
of Control in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
by the American psychologist Ellen J. Langer. And for a
quick summary of this paper, it used experiments involving games
of chance with superficial elements inserted from games of skill
(03:35):
to see if people would behave consistent with a belief
that they had impossible levels of control over chance outcomes,
and this study found that yes. In its experiments people
did behave in a way that was consistent with overestimating
their level of control over chance determined outcomes. However, the
thing about this paper was the experiments did use indirect
(03:58):
methods of studying the phenomenon, so these results came with
some limitations that I'll describe in just a minute. I
wanted to learn some more about the history of how
the illusion of control has been studied, because there have
been tons of papers on this, tons of experiments, and
I wanted to kind of general overview, so I turned
to a very helpful book chapter by a psychologist named
(04:22):
Suzanne C. Thompson. The chapter is called Illusions of Control
and it appears in a book called Cognitive Illusions, edited
by Rudiger F. Pohl, published by Psychology Press twenty sixteen,
though the version I read seems to have been an
updated edition because it included references to more recent studies,
(04:43):
such as one paper from twenty twenty one. So in
this overview, Thompson uses a broader definition of the illusion
of control than Langer did. Langer's definition was specifically about
seeking desired outcomes in chance determined events, to Thompson says, instead,
quote illusions of control occur when individuals overestimate their personal
(05:06):
influence over an outcome, So that that's a more general
way of stating it. You know, maybe your influence could
be good or bad. It could be in getting something
you want or in something you don't want.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, so this broader definition could apply to like various
games that have some sort of random element that you
truly can't control. For you may be really great at
the game, but you have this added level of illusion
of control that thinks that you can you can definitely
navigate any random occurrence. And I guess you could also
apply it even to interpersonal relationships, you know, thinking that
you have more control over other people in your circle
(05:39):
than you do.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Right, because this idea would also apply to things where
you do have some control, but you're imagining you have
more control than you actually do. And Thompson says that
since the origins of this research in the nineteen seventies,
there have been basically three different ways of experimentally demonstrating
that people experience or control. There's like three branches of
(06:03):
experiments on this tree. So approach number one that she
outlines is the main example. Here is the original research
by Ellen Langer, which we already described in the last episode.
This general strategy involves gauging people's guesses about their likelihood
of success in chance games that have superficial elements of
(06:25):
skill games introduced. So to emphasize again, this approach does
not actually directly measure people's perceptions of control. Instead, these
experiments would kind of infer it from their behavior in
a game. So you see that people bet more money.
That suggests they think they have more control over the outcome,
(06:45):
But it's possible there's another factor operating there, so there's
less certainty that you're testing for the variable you're actually
looking for. And Thompson explains some other ways of doing
these kind of tests apart from like Langer's original experimental design.
One thing she talks about is a type of study
(07:06):
that you could call observer participant discrepancies. So an example
of this would be you get a test group, you know,
maybe a classroom of students or whatever, and you split
them up into pairs, and you give each pair of
subjects a random number generating apparatus, maybe a die that's
a simple one. So in each pair, there's one person
(07:28):
who gets to roll the die and the other person
records all the numbers that they roll, and participants do
this like twenty times, and then across the whole test group,
whichever pair in the group has the highest total sum
of rolls wins a cash prize, and both subjects in
(07:48):
each pair guess their likelihood of winning before the game.
Thompson says that if you try to replicate this sort
of experiment with students, you will usually find that subjects,
on average rate their chance of winning a little bit
higher if they're the one rolling the die than if
they're the one recording the roles. Again, that should not
(08:08):
make a difference. So even though we both rationally know
that the outcome is random, it just feels a little
luckier if I'm the one doing it. However, and I
thought this was interesting. Thompson says that some research has
found that this effect can be reduced or even neutralized
completely by the context of the game, for example, if
(08:31):
it takes place in a classroom that has previously discussed
the correct way to estimate probability on games like this.
And that was interesting to me because it made me
think about how people overcome cognitive biases and cognitive illusions.
You know, sometimes the unfortunate fact is that simply being
(08:54):
aware of a cognitive illusion, like knowing that sometimes our
brains have a certain kind of bias, is not sufficient
to keep us from falling for that bias. So you
can know about the tricks your brain plays, and you
can fall for them anyway. It happens to all of us,
but in a case.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
And this obviously applies to many other aspects of the
human psyche as well. I mean awareness, self awareness is
often the first step, but that doesn't mean you've completely
defeated the illusion or illusion that you are having to
deal with.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Exactly. This is true for everybody, but in other cases,
and it varies from case to case. So in some cases,
research has shown that we can be successfully inoculated mentally
from certain irrational tendencies by being made aware of them,
and this seems to be one of those cases. You
can sometimes neutralize illusions of control just by like having
(09:49):
a context in which people have already been reminded about
how probabilities work. And I think that's interesting because you
might naturally assume that the variable in resistance to cognitive
illusions like the illusion of control is the person you know,
like permanent features of a person's personality, and you might
(10:11):
be inclined to think like well, a more rational person
is better able to overcome their biases and think clearly.
But I don't know if that's always the case. I
wonder if it's really more about setting and context. Maybe
setting and context are equally, if not more, powerful predictors
of how well people overcome cognitive illusions. In other words,
(10:33):
does like currently being in the setting of a statistics
class inoculate you against the illusion of control better than
being a person who is generally aware of cognitive illusions.
I don't know the answer for sure there, but it
seems worth considering rather than just defaulting to the explanation
of permanent internal personality based differences. But anyway, so to
(10:58):
move on, That was approach number Experimental approach number two
is different. In this type of experiment, you give subjects
a laboratory task where researchers can program exactly how much
control the subject actually has. And in many of these
experiments the subject has zero control. Sometimes they have more control,
(11:21):
and then you ask the subject how much control they
think they had. So an experiment typical of this type
is one that was done by Alloy and Abrahamson in
nineteen seventy nine, in which subjects would be given a
button to press and they're told to see if they
can use that button to control whether or not a
(11:42):
light comes on, and then they're asked to judge at
the end what amount of control they think the button
had over the light. In reality, the light had no
relationship to whether the button was pressed or not. It
was simply programmed to come on at some fixed percentage
of the trials with each subject, and unsurprisingly, even though
it had nothing to do with whether the button was
(12:05):
pushed or not or when subjects broadly thought they had
some amount of control, and experiments when the light came
on more frequently but again unconnected to the button, caused
people to believe that they had more control over the light. So,
at least in some cases, it seems like success at
getting a desired outcome makes people more likely to believe
(12:28):
they have control over that outcome, whether or not they do.
And while at the risk of over extrapolating from a
very contained laboratory outcome, this does sort of suggest to
me connections to behaviors in the world, Like you know,
when somebody has very good fortune at a particular juncture,
they're like, yep, that was all me. Later, Thompson describes
(12:52):
another version of this kind of test. This one is
called the computer screen on set task. And so in
this test, like you sit in front of a computer
and you're looking at a screen, and the screen will
sequentially produce a series of forty images, and all of
these images are either a green X or a red O.
And with each new screen, you can choose to press
(13:13):
a button or not press a button, and your goal
is to make the green X appear as many times
as possible. So people will be trying to figure out
if there's some pattern like pressing the button or not,
you know, pressing it or not in what sequence, et
cetera that'll make the green exes appear. Actually, once again,
the button has no relation whatsoever to whether the symbols
(13:34):
appear on the screen. The button doesn't do anything. And
you can vary what percentage of each symbol the subjects get.
At the end of the test, you have them rate,
on a scale of zero to one hundred how much
control they think they had over what appeared on the screen.
People who got the green X seventy five percent of
their random screens believed that they had a lot of
(13:55):
control over the display.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
This is also interesting to think of in terms of
the sample we discussed in the last episode about as
a child thinking you had control over a video game. Yeah,
maybe this doesn't play out. I'd be interested to hear
from folks much younger than me. But looking back on
the video games that I was doing this on, like
these were the old school arcade games, where it was
(14:21):
maybe a little more directly comparable to just pressing a
button and seeing a random O or an AX on
the screen, Like, there is a lot more room to
ask the question, am I controlling it? I have fifty
percent chance I am.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
In a way, I'm almost nostalgic for that mindset, Like
there's something kind of beautiful about the ambiguity of wondering
if you're controlling what's happening on the screen. I feel
like maybe I'm wrong about this. I feel like I
wouldn't fall for that now, but I kind of wish
I could, because it suggests a more I don't know,
just kind of like totally radically opened state of mind
(14:56):
in which anything is possible, a more magical way of
relating to the world.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
It's a cheaper way to go about going to the arcade.
You know, I wonder what they would think if there
was an adult who regularly came into the arcade and
they're like, oh, man, he never spends anything. He just
stands at the machines and pretends to play.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Yeah, just toggling the joystick at the demo.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
It's great. You gotta sell this guy's nachos or something.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Okay, anyway, that's approach number two, these very tightly controlled
laboratory experiments. Approach number three is different. Once again, you
get people to report their judgments of control in real
life scenarios. An example here is a study by McKenna
in nineteen ninety three. Not that McKenna different, Chaya, I
think this is Frank P.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
McKenna.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Yeah. Ask participants to rate the likelihood that, compared to
other drivers, they would experience an auto collision, and they
were asked to judge this when imagining themself as the
driver versus imagining themselves as the passenger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most
people thought that accidents would be relatively less likely if
(16:01):
they were the driver.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
This absolutely matches up with my experience. You know, even
when I'm in the car with a driver that I
definitely trust and even know that they are a better
driver than me. You know, maybe they have more experience
or they've undergone training. They're still like that gut feeling
of like I'm not actually in control. I can't hit
the brake when I see the brake lights ahead getting closer,
(16:24):
and therefore I feel like a little more anxious about
the whole scenario oftentimes, like realizing that this is irrational,
but feeling it.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Nonetheless, I totally relate to that. I feel that too,
the same thing. It's not like I actually think this
other person is a more dangerous driver than me. I
just it's just hard to get over that feeling.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
In the second study in this mckinna paper, participants were
asked about specific types of collisions, those that would seem
to involve either more or less driver control. So they
were talking about like rear ending someone versus being rear
ended versus having a tire blowout, And the idea was
rear ending someone is generally thought to be largely subject
(17:07):
to driver control. Of course, we know that there are
factors that other factors that can intervene breaks could fail whatever,
whereas getting rear ended seems to be out of the
driver's hands, and people were highly likely to say that
they were less likely to have the type of collision
in which the driver was in control. Has high control,
(17:28):
So I am much less likely than other people to
rear end someone. Whether it's me or someone else, makes
less difference in getting rear ended. Quote. Thus, people show
illusory control over avoiding an accident by assuming that they
will be able to exert control that others cannot.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
And I guess this is what's in play when you
see drivers, so many drivers just riding bumpers through terrifyingly
fast traffic all the time, like they just maybe they
have just heightened control over things. I would tend to
doubt it.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Yeah, that would be dangerous if someone else did it,
But I can handle it.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
I alone can weave in and out of traffic and
make it to my destination two minutes ahead of schedule.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So this type of experiment is taken to show that
people have an illusion of control when they consider themselves
relative to other people. A driver has some degree of
control over whether they end up in a collision. On average,
people think that they are better able to avoid that
outcome than other people are, and so looking back over
these three methodologies, Thompson says, you know, each of them
(18:34):
have strengths and weaknesses. So approach number one kind of
the Langer approach. The pros are that it uses realistic
situations that people engage in every day, like lottery drawings
and games and stuff. And also it has the pro
that the indirect measure can help detect an illusory belief
in control that does in reality guide behavior, but which
(18:58):
people might resist admits if they were asked directly, and
that does seem big to me. It helps avoid like
people tailoring their answers to avoid embarrassment. Cons on the
other hand, are it's indirect, so it doesn't test whether
control is really the deciding factor. You kind of have
to infer that and wonder if other factors could be
(19:21):
contributing as well. Approach number two the laboratory experiments like
Alloy and Abramson with like you know, the light coming
on or the greenexes and red o's on the computer screen.
The pros of that are that the dependent variable is
definitely judgment of control, like it's a very tightly controlled experiment.
Cons would be that these tasks do not have what
(19:42):
psychologists call external validity, So they're like weird tasks with
no close analogy in our day to day lives, so
they might not be telling us how people would actually
behave in reality. They might just be like producing a
weird kind of behavior that's specific to the lab task.
Approach Number three the self reporting of control judgments about
(20:04):
everyday activities like driving. Ala McKenna pros this does have
external validity cons are it relies on reflective self reporting,
which can be subject to all kinds of biases you
know when you're trying to when you ask people to
self report on their own judgments about their lives. However,
Thompson says that a strength of illusion of control research
(20:27):
is that even though these methodologies all have their strengths
and weaknesses, they mostly point to a similar conclusion, which
is the fact that on average, people believe we have
more control over outcomes than we actually do. And there
do seem to be some doubts about in exactly what
scenarios this applies and what causes it, but the core
(20:49):
finding seems fairly robust. Though I'm going to talk about
one paper later in this episode that has some theoretical
criticisms of how this research and how the experimental findings
are framed. So it seems there probably is an illusion
(21:14):
of control, especially for outcomes that we have very little
control over. But it would be very surprising if people
showed an illusory belief in control over all variables in
all situations equally. So there has to be some more
granular research on like when illusions of control happen, Like
what are the kinds of things that we think we
(21:35):
have more control of than others, more illusory control over
than others, And what kind of situations or states can
we be in that heighten this illusion? And to continue
with Thompson's overview, Thompson highlights seven variables that have been
studied and found to affect the illusion of control. This
list does not mean that these are the only factors
(21:57):
influencing it. It's just that these have been studied well
enough to discuss in this book chapter. So the first
one is skill related factors. Now, this was a major
part of the original nineteen seventy five paper by Langer.
A lot of studies have found that if a situation
has features we associate with with dependence on skill, we're
(22:19):
more likely to experience an illusion of control and Examples
of these features could include quote, familiarity, making choices, active
engagement with the material, competition, and four knowledge. So we
talked about several of these in the previous episode. For example, familiarity,
you know you might be more inclined to think you
(22:41):
have control over the outcome of a chance game if
you are familiar with the game, or if there are
elements of the game that are familiar to you. And
this is generally true of skill based games, but wouldn't
affect chance based games. One of these variables though, Actually
there was a twenty twenty one paper that casts some
doubt over whether it affects illusions of control, and that
(23:03):
variable is choice. So the original idea is that if
you have a choice to make that gives you illusions
of control. An example would be a lottery type game.
So imagine a game where you buy a lottery ticket.
The ticket has a random series of numbers on it,
and you win a prize if the winning number matches
your ticket. Now consider the same game, except you get
(23:26):
to pick your ticket numbers. Maybe you can use your
lucky number, which of course is the ISBN. For the
novelization of Halloween three season of the Witch by Jack Martin.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
To your number, that's the one you play.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
It's got to be what could be a luckier number? Happy,
Happy Halloween. Now, of course, in a fair lottery like,
whatever the number is, it makes no difference whatsoever to
your chance of winning. Winning numbers are selected randomly. No
number has a higher chance of victory than any other.
And yet the fact that you get to choose your
number might make it seem like there's some element of
(23:58):
skill involved in this game, and thus increases your illution
of control. Langer did find this kind of result in
the nineteen seventy five paper. However, Thompson mentions that this
particular metric of choice specifically has been contradicted by recent research,
a paper by Klousowski at All in twenty twenty one,
(24:18):
which found that choice did not reliably cause an illusion
of control.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
Okay, Like the scenario I'm instantly thinking of would be
like the classic magician game of Like, Okay, draw a
card from this deck, and now I'm going to guess it.
Assuming in this case that you are the magician, but
you have actually absolutely no magic up your sleeve, no trick.
You're just going completely off of chance. You know, you
have a certain percentage chance of guessing it right because
(24:44):
there are only so many cards in that deck versus, Okay,
you draw a card at random from this deck. I'll
draw a card at random from this deck. Do you
think we're going to have the same card like by
being able to pick a car by saying I believe
you have the Ace of Spades in your hand when
it's just completely random, would you feel confident in making
(25:06):
that choice now? I feel like you would be more
confident in making that choice if the other person picked
their card, because then you can potentially overestimate your ability
to guess the mind of the individual. Okay, this is
the kind of person's going to choose a king or
a queen, or they can try and outsmart me by,
you know, choosing a two or three something that isn't
superficially interesting.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
I guess that would introduce other elements because it would introduce, like,
I don't know if the other person picking a card
in the scenario is technically a competitor. But we did
talk last time about how like competition in some experiments
seem to increase the illusion of control. And I don't know.
That's an interesting scenario because it adds these other variables too.
(25:50):
My intuition is that that would increase illusions of control.
It feels like it would for me, it would it
would falsely increase my belief that I could control the
outcome even though I can't. And just to go again
on my intuitions, it would seem to me that the
choices could increase illusions of control, like if I get
(26:11):
to pick the lottery numbers, it would feel more likely
like I had a better chance of winning. But again,
this twenty twenty one study found that in some circumstances, no,
that's not the case. So it might It might have
to do with just like how people are primed to
think about the task they're about to do, you know,
like you say, as we talked about earlier, like, are
you given some kind of hint of remembering how probabilities
(26:34):
actually work as you're engaging in the task.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah, okay, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
But anyway, So to come back to more factors that
can apparently influence it. According to experiments, one factor is
success or failure emphasis. This is the second thing Thompson lists.
So does the task or the context highlight the idea
of success or failure? One example, here would be early
(27:00):
streaks in a game where you repeatedly guess or draw something.
So experiments have found if you let somebody gamble on
calling coin tosses again, coin tosses something that in reality
might not be truly perfectly random, it is close enough
to random. It's basically random, so you should not have
any skill at calling a coin toss. But if people
(27:23):
are gambling on coin tosses and they have an early
string of successes at making the right call, this will
apparently increase the illusion of control relative to subjects who
have an early string of failures. So if you lose
a lot at the beginning, outcomes feel random. If you
win a lot at the beginning, you think I'm doing this.
(27:46):
In reality, it's equally random either way. But we can
get tricked into thinking that we have control because we've
been winning and it just seems like winning is happening,
so somehow I must be making it happen.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
See feel rather opposite in Dungeons and Dragons. If like
the first couple of D twenty rolls of the night
are really high for me, or or heaven forbid their
natural twenties on things that don't matter, I have this
sinking suspicion that I'm just doomed when we get to
actual combat because that's when the ones are going to
come out.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
That is really funny. I've had the same feeling before.
It's almost as bad as like rolling a critical fail
on something important is rolling a critical success on something
that doesn't matter at all? Ye feel like I've wasted it?
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, decks, check to see if you can pick up
a stick and it's a natural twenty. It's like, all right,
I needed to get like a three on that probably.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Yeah. So on the other hand, though, in this success
failure thing, failure apparently sometimes neutralizes illusory beliefs of control.
So in some studies they have found this is only
true if failure is clear and explicit. If there's like
ambiguity and the feedback and it's not one hundred percent
(29:02):
clear whether you have failed or not, the illusion of
control can persist.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
All right, Yeah, a natural one on your D twenty
row Definitely, I think we'll knock that illusion out of place.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yeah, yeah, okay. Third factor that seems to influence it
need or desire for outcome. So evidence shows that how
much you want an outcome can increase the illusion of
control over the process of getting it. So an example
would be in a computer screen on set task. So
(29:34):
we talked about that earlier. That's the one with the
green exes and the red o's where people are pressing
a button trying to figure out if they can control
making the green exes appear on the screen. In this
kind of experiment, people believed that they had more They
had significantly more control if they received cash payments proportional
to the number of greenexes that appeared compared to people
(29:56):
who did the same task but did not get a
cash reward. There was no cash involve And remember in
this experiment either way, subjects have zero control at all.
A study by Buyer at All in nineteen ninety five
found a similar kind of thing that the illusion of
control was increased for a random lottery with a food
(30:16):
reward if people getting a hamburger if the subject was hungry,
compared to subjects who were not hungry. So like, if
the reward is food and you are currently hungry, you
have more illusions of control over a chance outcome than
if you're not hungry.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
All right, well, that makes sense. I mean the scenario,
I mean the outcome, not so much the Hamburger lottery.
I don't think I've encountered one of those in real life.
But yeah, the more desirable the outcome, the more acceptable
the gambling risk becomes, the more confident you are that
you can pull it off. I think I've felt this
way in the past, regarding things like DVD giveaways and all,
you know, where it's like, oh, I'd like to win that. Sure,
(30:56):
it's worth worth my time to go ahead and and enter,
because uh yeah, I can imagine that on my shelf.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Do you have a specific disc in mind here?
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah? Yeah, I uh. Ages ago, I entered a contest
and won DVD copies of The Fly and The Fly Too,
and and it was like and it was it was
like magic, you know, because I'm like, yeah, I would
mind winning that, and bam I won it. And in
a way it kind of like ruined it. It ruined
things for me moving forward because then anytime there's like
a DVD giveaway, I'm like, well, I won this, I
(31:27):
won this once before it could happen again. I'm good
at this. Apparently.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Oh so you apparently had an early success that increased
the success salience of that kind of lottery for you.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, I had a similar scenario happened with my son.
I took him to local bowling alleys for years and
years ago when he was much younger. And you know
the claw machines. We've talked about claw machines before. Oh yeah,
the show. You know, they're they're they're tricky if you're predatory,
if you want to describe them as such. You know,
it seems like an easy thing. You just put in
a quarter of claw grabs a toy, you get the toy,
(32:00):
but there are a number of additional tricks in play
that that enable the house to win. And you know,
of course he was interested in trying out his claw machine,
and I was like, well, this is a teaching moment.
I'd say, tell him, all right, I'm going to give you,
give you one quarter or whatever it took to use
the machine, but I want you to know that these
(32:23):
machines are tricky. They are made to trick you. You're
not going to win anything. And then then I'm like,
go forth and lose, you know, learn this lesson immediate jackpot.
He got some stuffy out of that, and I think
he still has that stuffy that I occasionally see in
his room. And it mocks me because I'm like, you
were never supposed to come out of that machine, and
you you gave him too much confidence in these claw machines.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Oh that's terrible, though, I would say at least the
claw machine is not a slot machine because there is
some minor amount of skill involved.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Minor, yes, and if memory serves like we'd have to
go deeper in. But I believe there's some some additional
Shenanigan's going on with those machines that enable occasional win
because that's the thing. People need to occasionally win those
toys out of those machines. Otherwise people will realized that, Okay,
there's just a bunch of dust covered stuff. He's in there.
(33:13):
Nobody's getting anything out of there.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
I'm very sorry your son had an early success emphasis
on claw machines. That is an unfortunate fate.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
Well, I let him have a number of failures after
that on other visits, so I think the lesson finally
hammered him. Oh.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
But the flip side of the success failure emphasis is
that research has also found that there are increased illusions
of control in a situation where somebody is trying to
avoid an outcome they find extremely undesirable. Don't worry, these
experiments didn't have actual torture or anything. The really undesirable
conditions things like having to speak in front of a group,
(34:02):
which is a very terrifying prospect to many of us,
including myself, even though I speak into a microphone for
a living. So let that be a comfort to you
out there who have this same fear.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
Yeah, I mean it's a different scenario, to be sure.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
Another one was like having to put your hand in
cold water. That's another common thing tested here. So people
who strongly wanted to avoid these outcomes mistakenly believed they
had more agency in the task that determined whether they
would have to do.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Them or not.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
So it's just a flip side of the thing, like,
if you really want that hamburger, you have more illusion
of control over the chance process of getting it. If
you really want to avoid speaking in front of a group,
apparently you have more illusions of control in avoiding that fade.
Another interesting thing noted here is that some studies have
found a greater illusion of control when people are experiencing
(34:56):
heightened stress. I thought that was interesting. Fourth factor is mood.
This is pretty straightforward, But studies have found on average,
people experience more illusory control when they're in a better mood,
and people with a negative mood showed less illusions of
control on average. Of course, this is probably not a
(35:16):
reason to try to be in a bad mood. But
you know, one advantage if you're currently feeling down is
that in this state of being in a bad mood,
you might be less likely to think you can control
things you can.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah. Yeah, though, of course, like we've been saying, it's
complex anything human psyche's doing. So on the flip side,
you might find yourself more inclined to go after a
quick dopamine hit of initiating a gamble if you're in
a bad mood. So you know a lot going on there.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
Okay, fifth factor We sort of already alluded to this one,
but this is what Thompson calls the intrusion of reality.
This basically means giving people a reality check. Illusion of
control is one type of cognitive illusion that seems pretty
easy to overcome in the moment by simply reminding people
what the probabilities actually are. So if you remind people
(36:08):
of the objective probability of winning a gambling task before
they place their bets. The illusion of control can be
significantly reduced or neutralized completely.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Yeah, and you see this a lot with coverage of
lottery odds, you know, the advertisements for the lottery and
like general buzz for the lottery make it seem like
anything is possible. You know, the winning ticket might be
you know, it might have been sold to the gas
station down the street. But then oftentimes news reporting on
these situations will often drive home like, no, you have
(36:39):
like this astronomically small chance of winning if you enter.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, here's your reality check. And it seems like with
illusions of control, a simple reality check is quite useful
to people. Next factor I thought was quite interesting Thompson
mentions power. Apparently, people in positions of power and authority.
Of course, they do have more actual control over many situations.
(37:04):
That's what power means. But it seems power also correlates
with increased illusions of control. So if you like, do
an experiment where you assign someone a position of power
over others in the experiment, or you prime them to
remember times in their life when they were in a
position of power, this seems to come with an increased
(37:25):
tendency toward the illusion of control. And that seemed very
interesting to me because you might imagine that it would
work the opposite way that you know, it's when you
feel disempowered that you dream of having more control. Maybe,
But the way this is framed actually does gel with
my experience. Like people who get to be the boss
or get to be the leader in some way seem
(37:48):
more susceptible than regular people to thinking they can, like
magically will a dice roll to come out the way
they wanted.
Speaker 2 (37:56):
Yeah, yeah, it's easy to apply this to various like
you well known scenarios contemporary and historic. You know, you
look to some person in a position of power who
ends up in a situation where like clearly the odds
are stacked against them, but they they continue on with
like a seeming overconfidence that we we often just attribute
(38:16):
to you just to pure ego and so forth. But yeah,
the illusion of control could also play a huge part
in it.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
I wonder if there's actually some overlap with the idea
of success emphasis here, because like, if you are in
a position of power, you've had some reinforcement already of
like in some scenario where you didn't know what the
outcome was like you got what you wanted, Like you've
got you know, promotion or increased status or whatever, and
you're in this position of power now, so you've sort
(38:44):
of been trained to think like, oh, yeah, I can
make things happen for me, and that could be that
could lead to illusions that you can do that in
scenarios when you can't.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Another thing Thompson mentions that can affect it is what
she calls regulatory focus. This basically hinges on a theory
of motivation that distinguishes between situations where you have a
focus on getting an outcome you do want, versus situations
where you have a focus on avoiding an outcome you
don't want. And research by Langans in two thousand and
(39:18):
seven found that when you're in the mindset of getting
an outcome you do want, that was more associated with
illusions of control than the other mindset.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
That's interesting, But I guess, on the other hand, like
we shouldn't then desire a life where we're just focusing
on avoiding negative outcomes, because right that sounds pretty dreadful.
I guess in reality, you'd want some sort of healthy
balance of the two without too much tendency towards either
illusion exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
I mean in the same way that you might be
less prone to illusions of control if you're in a
negative mood, but that probably shouldn't make you want to
be in a negative mood. Another one I just happened
to come across. This is not on Thompson's list, but
another paper mentioned it, so I thought i'd take a look.
Is the idea of what's called deliberative versus implemental mindset.
(40:09):
So this is the effect of what kind of frame
of mind you're in when approaching a control judgment. So
this was a paper by Galwitzer and Kinney in nineteen
eighty nine called Effects of Deliberative and Implemental mindsets on
the Illusion of control. This is a paper that used
a light onset experiment like the kinds we've talked about before,
(40:31):
where you know you're trying to turn on a light
by figuring out, you know, if pressing a button turns
it on or not. And this experiment had two different
experimental groups doing the same task, but they were separated
by the independent variable of a mental exercise. Before making
their judgments, one group was asked to quote deliberate on
(40:51):
an unresolved personal problem, so you know, thinking about a
problem considering various solutions. The other group was asked to
plan the implementation of a personal goal, so you come
up with the plan of action to get what you want.
And this study found that the deliberation group experienced less
(41:12):
illusory control on the unrelated light onset task. So quote
overall finding suggests that people who are trying to make
decisions develop a deliberative mindset that allows for a realistic
view of action outcome expectancies, whereas people who try to
act on a decision develop an implemental mindset that promotes
(41:33):
illusory optimism. And that was to the extent that this
is a valid finding that that was illuminating to me
because it's like, Okay, if you're more just sort of
exploring ideas, thinking about different contingencies and all that, you
apparently might be more realistic about how much control you have.
(41:53):
But once you get into thinking about how to get
something done, then you're more prone to illusions of control,
which might actually be useful even though it's just as
we said last time, the illusion of control could be
useful even though it generates false beliefs, because maybe it
maybe those false beliefs could be motivating, could help you,
(42:15):
you know, spur you to action.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah yeah, I mean you're working on something that's going
to be entered in a contest. Let's say, you know,
your chances of actually winning that contest may be too
small due to you know, various various factors that have
nothing to do with the quality of the work. But
you may be inspired to put more work into that,
into into the quality, you know, to put more effort
into the creation of whatever it is you're making. And
(42:39):
you know, you know, we knew that that first prize ribbon,
but it could result in a better product overall.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about
in this part of our series is I mentioned there
are some criticisms of the concept of the illusion of control. Uh.
There is one really interesting compleating result I found concerning
when the illusion of control manifests, and that was in
a paper by Francesca Gino, Zachariah Sharrek, and Don A.
(43:09):
Moore published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in
twenty eleven. The paper was called keeping the Illusion of
control under control, Ceilings, floors and imperfect Calibration and So
this paper offers a critique of illusion of control research
by suggesting that maybe it's better to think about this
(43:32):
as a general tendency to make incorrect estimates of our
level of control over things, and this would include both
overestimating and underestimating our level of control in situations where
the evidence is somewhat ambiguous. So, according to these authors,
(43:52):
the literature appears to support a general overestimation of control
merely because so many of these studies focus on games
of chance and other purely random outcomes, things that we
have zero control over, and thus belief in any amount
of control in these experiments will be factually mistaken. But
(44:14):
the authors of this paper basically they accept that pattern
is valid. But they also say, if you give people
tasks where they have a high level of control, sometimes
you should expect to see subjects systematically underestimate how much
control they have on those things. So the authors performed
several experiments to test this, and they found that across
(44:37):
three experiments, indeed, there is a corresponding illusory lack of
control in some cases where people have a high degree
of control over outcomes. So I want to describe just
one example of the kinds of experiments they did. Subjects
would be asked to do a kind of word search
puzzle on computer screens. They're looking for like patterns of
(44:58):
repeating letters in a jumble of letters, and occasionally, at
random time intervals, the background of the screens they're looking
at would change color, maybe making it harder to pick
out the letters and solve the puzzle. Participants could press
a button to make the background revert to its original
color and make the game easier again. And so the
(45:20):
independent variable here was how responsive the background was to
presses of the button. The button could be set to
zero percent control, fifteen percent, fifty percent, and eighty five percent.
And then after this puzzle search game was over, subjects
were asked what level of control they thought they had
(45:41):
over the background color with the button, And as predicted
in this experiment, the authors found in the low control conditions,
like if you have zero percent or fifteen percent of
control over the background, there was an illusion of control,
same kind of thing you would expect based on these
previous experiments. But in the high control conditions, where players
(46:02):
had like eighty five percent control over the background, they
thought they had less control than they actually did, so
they did three experiments in total, and in the end,
the authors here say that this raises doubts about whether
people actually do systematically overestimate their control, and instead, what
might be more accurate to say is that people overestimate
(46:25):
their control when they have little and underestimate their control
when they have much. And so they they offer this
as a critique of the sort of theoretical framework of
the illusion of control, because they say, really that that's
only half of the picture, and that it's more accurate
probably to say that we have a general tendency to
make mistaken judgments about the level of control we have
(46:48):
over events, and that goes both ways.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
Interesting, Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of various discussions
we've had about occasional, occasionally beneficial errors in cognition. You know,
sometimes overconfidence pays off, like we were just saying, sometimes
overconfidence just gives you confidence you need to do something,
and sometimes an abundance of caution pays off. And then,
of course, in either case, sometimes it doesn't work out
(47:12):
well for the individual. Either. Overconfidence can screw you up,
and so can being too cautious, And I guess you
need to some degree a little bit of both to
sort of balance out these illusions.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yeah, is it all right to have one type of
illusion pretty consistently if you have like a compensating illusion
that sort of like steers you toward the middle.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
I don't know, maybe. I mean I feel like a
lot of our world views are kind of arranged like this.
There are the things that we are unreasonably anxious about
and unreasonably cautious about perhaps or at least have a
heightened level of caution, and then there are other areas
where we may kind of have blinders on and we're
just kind of like babes in the woods with those
particular threats. And yeah, at the end of the day,
(47:56):
like you can't be over confident about everything. You can
get plowed over on the butt. You've got to do
things like leave the house, So you have to have
some level of confidence, even in cases where the confidence
is outpacing the actual chances a little bit.
Speaker 1 (48:17):
All right, Well, I think maybe we should call it
there for part two on the illusion of control.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Yeah, obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there
if you have feedback personal experience on anything we discussed here.
As usual, remind everybody that's Seftable Your Mind is primarily
a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
we have listener mail. On Mondays, we have one of
about three different varieties of short form episodes on Wednesday,
(48:42):
and then on Friday, we set aside most serious concerns
to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
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 con tact at Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (49:10):
Stuff 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.
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