February 13, 2024 • 49 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss our psychological tendency to overestimate our control over events, with implications for everything from gambling and paranormal beliefs to our movements through everyday life.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and today we are
back to continue our series on the psychology concept known
as the illusion of control. This is a cognitive illusion
or a common error in thinking and judgment, in which
we overestimate the amount of control we have over outcomes
(00:36):
in the world, even outcomes that are in no way
determined by our actions. So if you haven't heard part one,
you should probably go back and listen to that first.
But for a brief recap. We talked about some examples
last time of the illusion of control. One would be
the belief that you can control your chances of winning
(00:56):
at a slot machine based on who presses the the
button and how when actually you know it's a purely
random process. There's no like. You know, you can't be
like better at working a slot machine. But other examples
would include like the belief that you can improve your
chances of hitting a desired number on a dice throw
by concentrating before the throw.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I do this, yeah, yeah, and yeah, I was going
to save this for a listener mail, but I go
ahead and mention it. Now heard from a listener on
Discord who pointed out this is I believe it's pass cish.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, use your name,
but anyway, may point it out that in Dungeons and
Dragons there's an additional element here that we didn't touch on,
(01:40):
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 roll, but because this matters,
This is an important role. Perhaps the life or death
of your character may hinge on the outcome. You can
play it up a little bit.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, it's a socially performative drum roll.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
But I think undeniably there's off also that sense of like,
all right, NAT twenty, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
I can do this.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
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 a 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.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, And we also ended up talking about an influential
early paper on the illusion of control from nineteen seventy
five called the Illusion of Control in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology by the American psychologist Ellen J. Langer.
And for a quick summary of this paper, it used
experiments involving games of chance with superficial elements inserted from
(02:59):
games of skill to see if people would behave consistent
with a belief that they had impossible levels of control
over chance outcomes. And this study found that yes, in
its experiments, people did behave in a way that was
consistent with overestimating their level of control over chance determined outcomes. However,
(03:20):
the thing about this paper was the experiments did use
indirect methods of studying the phenomenon, so these results came
with some limitations that I'll describe in just a minute.
I wanted to learn some more about the history of
how the illusion of control has been studied, because there
have been tons of papers on this, tons of experiments,
(03:41):
and I wanted to kind of general overview, so I
turned to a very helpful book chapter by a psychologist
named Suzanne C. Thompson. The chapter is called Illusions of
Control and it appears in a book called Cognitive Illusions
edited by Rudiger F. Pohl published by Psychology Press twenty sixteen,
(04:02):
though the version I read seems to have been an
updated edition because it included references to more recent studies,
such as one paper from twenty twenty one. So in
this overview, Thompson uses a broader definition of the illusion
of control than Langer did. Langer's definition was specifically about
seeking desired outcomes in chance determined events. Thompson says, instead, quote,
(04:27):
illusions of control occur when individuals overestimate their personal influence
influence over an outcome. So 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 (04:43):
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 interperson relationships, you know, thinking that
you have more control over other people in your circle
(05:05):
than you do.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
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 illusory control. There's like three branches of
(05:28):
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
(05:50):
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.
(06:11):
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
(06:31):
that you could call like 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
(06:52):
one person who gets to roll the die, and the
other person records all the numbers that they roll, and
participants do this like twenty times, and then across the
whole test group, whichever pair in the group has the
highest total sum of roles wins a cash prize, and
both subjects in each pair guess their likelihood of winning
(07:16):
before the game. Thompson says that if you try to
replicate this sort of experiment with students, you will usually
find that subjects, on average rate their chance of winning
a little bit higher if they're the one rolling the
die than if they're the one recording the roles. Again,
that should not make a difference. So even though we
both rationally know that the outcome is random, it just
(07:39):
feels a little luckier if I'm the one doing it. However,
and I thought this was interesting. Thompson says that some
research has found that this effect can be reduced or
even neutralized completely by the context of the game, for example,
if it takes place in a classroom that has previously
discs us the correct way to estimate probability on games
(08:04):
like this. And that was interesting to me because it
made me think about how people overcome cognitive biases and
cognitive illusions. You know, sometimes the unfortunate fact is that
simply being aware of a cognitive illusion, like knowing that
sometimes our brains have a certain kind of bias, is
(08:26):
not sufficient to keep us from falling for that bias.
So you can, like know about the tricks your brain plays,
and you can fall for them anyway. It happens to
all of us, but in every case.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
And this obviously applies to many other aspects of the
human psyche as well. I mean awareness, self awareness is
often the first step, but that doesn't mean you've completely
defeated the illusion or illusion that you are having to
deal with exactly.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
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
(09:15):
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
(09:37):
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,
(09:59):
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
(10:24):
move on, That was approach number one. 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
(10:45):
more control, and then you ask the subject how much
control they think they had. So an experiment typical of
this type is one that was done by Alloy and
Abrahamson in nineteen seventy nine, in which subjects would be
given a button to press and they're told to see
if they can use that button to control whether or
(11:07):
not a light comes on, and then they're asked to
judge at the end what amount of control they think
the button had over the light. In reality, the light
had no relationship to whether the button was pressed or not.
It was simply programmed to come on at some fixed
percentage of the trials with each subject, and unsurprisingly even
(11:27):
though it had nothing to do with whether the button
was pushed or not, or when subjects broadly thought they
had some amount of control, and experiments when the light
came on more frequently but again unconnected to the button,
caused people to believe that they had more control over
the light. So, at least in some cases, it seems
(11:48):
like success at getting a desired outcome makes people more
likely to believe they have control over that outcome, whether
or not they do. And while at the risk of
over extrapolating from a very contained laboratory outcome, this does
sort of suggest to me connections to behaviors in the world,
Like you know, when somebody has very good fortune at
(12:11):
a particular juncture, they're like, yep, that was all me. Later,
Thompson describes another version of this kind of test. This
one is called the computer screen on set task. And
so in this test, like you sit in front of
a computer and you're looking at a screen, and the
screen will sequentially produce a series of forty images, and
(12:32):
all of these images are either a green X or
a red O. And with each new screen, you can
choose to press a button or not press a button,
and your goal is to make the green X appear
as many times as possible, so people will be trying
to figure out if there's some pattern like pressing the
button or not, you know, pressing it or not in
(12:52):
what sequence, etc. That'll make the greenexes appear. Actually, once again,
the button has no relation whatsoever to whether the symbols
here 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.
(13:15):
People who got the green ex seventy five percent of
their random screens believed that they had a lot of
control over the display.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
This is also interesting to think of in terms of
the example 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 interesting 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
(13:47):
maybe a little more directly comparable to just pressing a
button and seeing a random o or an ax on
the screen, like there was a lot more room to
ask the question, Am I controlling it? I have fifty
percent chance I am.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
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
(14:22):
in which anything is possible, a more magical way of
relating to the world.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
It's a cheaper way to go about going to the arcade,
you know. I wonder what they would think if 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 3 (14:37):
Yeah, just toggling the joystick at the demo.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
It's great, I gotta sell this guy's nacho do something Okay?
Speaker 3 (14:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
McCay, I think this is Frank P. McKenna.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
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 themselves as the
driver versus imagining themselves as the passenger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most
people thought that accidents would be relatively less likely if
(15:26):
they were the driver.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
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 am not actually in control. I can't
hit the brake when I see the brake lights ahead
(15:49):
getting closer, and therefore I feel like a little more
anxious about the whole scenario oftentimes, like realizing that this
is irrational, but feeling it Nonetheless.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
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. In a
second study, in this McKenna 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
(16:21):
about like rear ending someone versus being rear ended versus
having a tire blowout, And the idea was rear ending
someone is generally thought to be largely subject to driver control.
Of course, we know that there are factors that other
factors that can intervene, breaks, could fail whatever, whereas getting
rear ended seems to be out of the driver's hands,
(16:43):
and people were highly likely to say that they were
less likely to have the type of collision in which
the driver was in control has high control, So I
am much less likely than other people to rear end someone.
Whether it's me or someone else, makes less difference in
getting rear ended.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Thus, people show illusory control over avoiding an accident by
assuming that they will be able to exert control that
others cannot.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
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. But I would tend
to doubt it.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah, that would be dangerous if someone else did it.
But I can handle it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
I alone can weave in and out of traffic and
make it to my destination two minutes ahead of schedule.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
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
(18:00):
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
(18:23):
people might resist admitting 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
(18:46):
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
(19:07):
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
(19:30):
everyday activities like driving Ala McKenna. Pros are 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
(19:52):
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
(20:15):
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 these experimental findings
are framed. So it seems there probably is an illusion
(20:39):
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 is that we think
(21:01):
we have more control of than others, more illusory control
over than others, and what kind of situations or states
can we be in that heighten this illusion? And to
continue with Thompson's overview, Thompson highlights seven variables that have
been studied and found to affect the illusion of control.
This list does not mean that these are the only
(21:22):
factors influencing it. It's just that these have been studied
well enough to discuss in this book chapter. So the
first one is skill related factors. Now, this was a
major part of the original nineteen seventy five paper by Langer.
A lot of studies have found that if a situation
has features we associate with dependence on skill, we're more
(21:45):
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. Talked about several
of these in the previous episode. For example, familiarity you
know you might be more inclined to think you have
(22:07):
control over the outcome of a chance game if you
are familiar with the game, or if there are elements
of the game that are familiar to you. And this
is generally true of skill based games, but wouldn't affect
chance based games. One of these variables, though, actually there
was a twenty twenty one paper that casts some doubt
over whether it affects illusions of control, and that variable
(22:30):
is choice. So the original idea is that if you
have a choice to make, that gives you illusions of control.
An example would be a lottery type game. So imagine
a game where you buy a lottery ticket. The ticket
has a random series of numbers on it, and you
win a prize if the winning number matches your ticket.
Now consider the same game, except you get to pick
(22:52):
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 World, which by Jack Martin.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
To your number, that's the one you play.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
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
(23:23):
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,
(23:44):
which found that choice did not reliably cause an illusion
of control.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Okay, Like the scenario I'm instantly thinking of would be
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 were 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
(24:10):
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 card 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
(24:32):
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 who's going to choose a king
or a queen, or they going to try and outsmart
me by, you know, choosing a two or a three
something that isn't superficially interesting.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
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 it. That's an interesting scenario because it adds these
(25:13):
other variables too. My intuition is that that would increase
illusions of control. It feels like it would for me.
It would it would falsely increase my belief that I
could control the outcome even though I can't. And just
to go again on my intuitions, it would seem to
me that the choices could increase illusions of control, Like
(25:36):
if I get to pick the lottery numbers, it would
feel more likely like I had a better chance of winning,
But again. This twenty twenty one study found that in
some circumstances, no, that's not the case. So it might
It might have to do with just like how people
are primed to think about the task they're they're about
to do, you know, like, are you say, as we
talked about earlier, like, are you given some kind of
(25:57):
hint of remembering how probable these actually work as you're
engaging in the task.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, okay, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
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
(26:26):
streaks in a game where you, you know, 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.
(26:48):
But if people are gambling on coin tosses and they
have an early string of successes, at making the right call.
This will apparently increase the illusion of control relative to
subjects who have an early string of failures. So if
you lose a lot at the beginning, outcomes feel random.
If you win a lot at the beginning, you think
(27:10):
I'm doing this. In reality, it's equally random either way.
But we can get tricked into thinking that we have
control because we've been winning and it just seems like
winning is happening, so somehow I must be making it happen.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
See. I 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 3 (27:43):
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? Feel like I've wasted it?
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Yeah, X, check to see if you can pick up
a stick and it's a natural twenty it's like, all right,
I needed to get like a three on that probably. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
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 in
the feedback and it's not one hundred percent clear whether
(28:29):
you have failed or not, the illusion of control can persist.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
All right, yeah, a natural one on your D twenty row. Definitely.
I think we'll knock that illusion out of place.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
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 we
(29:00):
talked about that earlier. That's the one with the green
exes and the red o's where people are pressing a
button trying to figure out if they can control making
the green exes appear on the screen. In this kind
of experiment, people believed that they had more they had
significantly more control if they received cash payments proportional to
the number of greenexes that appeared compared to people who
(29:21):
did the same task but did not get a cash reward.
There was no cash involved. And remember in this experiment
either way, subjects have zero control at all. A study
by Biner at All in nineteen ninety five found a
similar kind of thing, that the illusion of control was
increased for a random lottery with a food reward if
(29:42):
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 (29:58):
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
(30:20):
win that, Sure, it's worth my worth my time to
go ahead and and enter because yeah, I can imagine
that on my shelf.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Do you have a specific disc in mind here?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah? Yeah, I ages ago I entered a contest and
won DVD copies of The Fly and The Fly Too,
and it was 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,
(30:51):
I'm like, well, I won this. I won this once
before it could happen again. I'm good at this. Apparently.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Oh so you apparently had an early success that increased
the success salience of that kind of lottery for you.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah. I had a similar scenario happened with my son.
I took him to a 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,
got on 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
(31:24):
get the toy, but there are a number of additional
tricks in play that that enable the house to win.
And uh, 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 it. Tell him,
all right, I'm going to give you, give you one
quarter or whatever it took to use the machine, and
(31:47):
but I want you to know that this. These machines
are tricky. They are made to trick you. You're not
going to win anything. And then then I'm like, go
forth and lose, you know, learn this lesson immediate jackpot.
He got some stuffy out of that, and I think
he still has that stuffy that I occasionally see in
his room. And it mocks me because I'm like, you
were never supposed to come out of that machine, and
(32:07):
you gave him too much confidence in these claw machines.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
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 (32:17):
Minor yes, and if memory serves like we'd have to
go deeper in. But I believe there's some additional shenanigans
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.
(32:39):
Nobody's getting anything out of there.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I'm very sorry your son had an early success emphasis
on claw machines. That is an unfortunate fate.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Well, I let him have a number of failures after
that and on other visits, so I think the lesson
finally hammer him.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Oh but the flip side of the success failure emphasis
is that research has also found that there are increased
illusions of control in a situation where somebody is trying
to avoid an outcome they find extremely undesirable. Don't worry,
these experiments didn't have actual torture or anything. The really
undesirable conditions were things like having to speak in front
(33:27):
of a group, which is 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 (33:40):
Yeah, I mean it's a different scenario, to be sure.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Another one was like having to put your hand in
cold water. That's another common thing tested here. So people
who strongly wanted to avoid these outcomes mistakenly believed they
had more agency in the task that determined whether they
would have to do them or not. So it's just
a flip side of the thing, like, if you really
want that hamburger, you have more illusion of control over
(34:03):
the chance process of getting it. If you really want
to avoid speaking in front of a group, apparently you
have more illusions of control in avoiding that fade. Another
interesting thing noted here is that some studies have found
a greater illusion of control when people are experiencing heightened stress.
I thought that was interesting. Fourth factor is mood. This
(34:27):
is pretty straightforward, but studies have found on average, people
experience more illusory control when they're in a better mood,
and people with a negative mood showed less illusions of
control on average. Of course, this is probably not a
reason to try to be in a bad mood, but
you know, one advantage if you're currently feeling down is
(34:49):
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 (34:56):
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 3 (35:12):
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
(35:33):
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 (35:43):
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 as 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
(36:05):
like this astronomically small chance of winning if you enter.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
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,
(36:30):
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
(36:51):
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 the people who get to be the
boss or get to be the leader in some way
(37:13):
seem more susceptible than regular people to thinking they can
like magically will a dice roll to come out the
way they want it.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yeah. Yeah, it's easy to apply this to various like
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 often just attribute to you
(37:42):
just to pure ego and so forth. But yeah, the
illusion of control could also play a huge part in it.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
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
got you know, promotion or increased status or whatever, and
you're in this position of power now, so you've sort
(38:10):
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 (38:19):
Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
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 Langan's in two thousand and
(38:43):
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 (38:53):
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 you know, too much tendency
towards either illusion exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
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.
(39:34):
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,
(39:56):
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
(40:17):
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 know,
come up with a plan of action to get what
you want. And this study found that the deliberation group
experienced less illusory control on the unrelated light onset task,
(40:42):
so quote. Overall finding suggests that people who are trying
to make decisions develop a deliberative mindset that allows for
a realistic view of action outcome expectancies, whereas people who
try to act on a decision develop an implemental mindset
that promotes illusory optimism. And that was to the extent
(41:03):
that this is a valid finding that that was illuminating
to me because it's like, Okay, if you're more just
sort of exploring ideas, thinking about different contingencies and all that,
you apparently might be more realistic about how much control
you have. But once you get into thinking about how
to get something done, then you're more prone to illusions
(41:25):
of control, which might actually be useful even though it's
just as we said last time, the illusion of control
could be useful even though it generates false beliefs, because
maybe it maybe those false beliefs could be motivating, could
help you, you know, spur you to action.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
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 to
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
(42:05):
you know, you know, we knew that first prize ribbon,
but it could result in a better product overall.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Okay, So the last thing I want to talk about
in this part of our series is I've mentioned there
are some criticisms of the concept of the illusion of control.
There is one really interesting, complicating result I found concerning
when the illusion of control manifests, and that was in
a paper by Francesca Gino, Zachariah Sharik, and don A.
(42:34):
Moore published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in
twenty eleven. Paper was called keeping the Illusion of Control
under Control, Ceilings, floors, and imperfect calibration. And so this
paper offers a critique of illusion of control research by
suggesting that maybe it's better to think about this as
(42:57):
a general tendency to make incorrect estimates of our level
of control over things. And this would include both overestimating
and underestimating our level of control in situations where the
evidence is somewhat ambiguous. So, according to these authors, the
(43:18):
literature appears to support a general overestimation of control merely
because so many of these studies focus on games of chance,
and other purely random outcomes, things that we have zero
control over, and thus belief in any amount of control
in these experiments will be factually mistaken. But the authors
(43:40):
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 perform several experiments
to test them, and they found that across three experiments,
(44:04):
indeed there is a corresponding illusory lack of control in
some cases where people have a high degree of control
over outcomes. So I wanted to describe just one example
of the kinds of experiments they did. Subjects would be
asked to do a kind of word search puzzle on
computer screens. They're looking for like patterns of repeating letters
(44:25):
and a jumble of letters, and occasionally, at random time intervals,
the background of the screens they're looking at would change color,
maybe making it harder to pick out the letters and
solve the puzzle. Participants could press a button to make
the background revert to its original color and make the
game easier again. And so the independent variable here was
(44:47):
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 after this puzzle
search game was over, subjects were asked what level of
control they thought they had over the background color with
(45:08):
the button, and as predicted in this experiment, the authors
found in the low control conditions, like if you have
zero percent or fifteen percent of control over the background,
there was an illusion of control, same kind of thing
you would expect based on these previous experiments, But in
the high control conditions, where players had like eighty five
(45:29):
percent control over the background, they thought they had less
control than they actually did. So they did three experiments
in total, and in the end, the authors here say
that this raises doubts about whether people actually do systematically
overestimate their control, and instead, what might be more accurate
to say is that people overestimate their control when they
(45:51):
have little and underestimate their control when they have much.
And so they they offer this as a critique of
the sort of theoretical frame work of the illusion of control,
because they say, really, 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
(46:12):
level of control we have over events, and that goes
both ways.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Interesting, Yeah, I mean it reminds me of various discussions
we've had about occasional, occasionally beneficial errors and 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
(46:38):
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 3 (46:50):
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 (46:59):
I don't know. Maybe. I mean I feel like a
lot of our worldviews 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,
(47:21):
like you can't be over confident about everything. You're going
to get plowed over on the but you've got to
do things like leave the house, so you have to
have like some level of confidence, even in cases where
the confidence is outpacing the actual chances a little bit.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
All right, well, I think maybe we should call it
there for part two on the illusion of control.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
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 stuft to Blew Your Mind
is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursday, we have listener mail. On Mondays, we have
one of about three different varieties of short form episodes
on Wednesday, and then on Friday, we set aside most
(48:09):
serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on
Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
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 contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Speaker 2 (49:00):
A four pop music
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and today we are
back to continue our series on the psychology concept known
as the illusion of control. This is a cognitive illusion
or a common error in thinking and judgment, in which
we overestimate the amount of control we have over outcomes
(00:36):
in the world, even outcomes that are in no way
determined by our actions. So if you haven't heard part one,
you should probably go back and listen to that first.
But for a brief recap. We talked about some examples
last time of the illusion of control. One would be
the belief that you can control your chances of winning
(00:56):
at a slot machine based on who presses the the
button and how when actually you know it's a purely
random process. There's no like. You know, you can't be
like better at working a slot machine. But other examples
would include like the belief that you can improve your
chances of hitting a desired number on a dice throw
by concentrating before the throw.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
I do this, yeah, yeah, and yeah, I was going
to save this for a listener mail, but I go
ahead and mention it. Now heard from a listener on
Discord who pointed out this is I believe it's pass cish.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, use your name,
but anyway, may point it out that in Dungeons and
Dragons there's an additional element here that we didn't touch on,
(01:40):
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 roll, but because this matters,
This is an important role. Perhaps the life or death
of your character may hinge on the outcome. You can
play it up a little bit.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Yeah, it's a socially performative drum roll.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
But I think undeniably there's off also that sense of like,
all right, NAT twenty, let's do it.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
I can do this.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
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 a 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.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, And we also ended up talking about an influential
early paper on the illusion of control from nineteen seventy
five called the Illusion of Control in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology by the American psychologist Ellen J. Langer.
And for a quick summary of this paper, it used
experiments involving games of chance with superficial elements inserted from
(02:59):
games of skill to see if people would behave consistent
with a belief that they had impossible levels of control
over chance outcomes. And this study found that yes, in
its experiments, people did behave in a way that was
consistent with overestimating their level of control over chance determined outcomes. However,
(03:20):
the thing about this paper was the experiments did use
indirect methods of studying the phenomenon, so these results came
with some limitations that I'll describe in just a minute.
I wanted to learn some more about the history of
how the illusion of control has been studied, because there
have been tons of papers on this, tons of experiments,
(03:41):
and I wanted to kind of general overview, so I
turned to a very helpful book chapter by a psychologist
named Suzanne C. Thompson. The chapter is called Illusions of
Control and it appears in a book called Cognitive Illusions
edited by Rudiger F. Pohl published by Psychology Press twenty sixteen,
(04:02):
though the version I read seems to have been an
updated edition because it included references to more recent studies,
such as one paper from twenty twenty one. So in
this overview, Thompson uses a broader definition of the illusion
of control than Langer did. Langer's definition was specifically about
seeking desired outcomes in chance determined events. Thompson says, instead, quote,
(04:27):
illusions of control occur when individuals overestimate their personal influence
influence over an outcome. So 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 (04:43):
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 interperson relationships, you know, thinking that
you have more control over other people in your circle
(05:05):
than you do.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
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 illusory control. There's like three branches of
(05:28):
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
(05:50):
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.
(06:11):
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
(06:31):
that you could call like 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
(06:52):
one person who gets to roll the die, and the
other person records all the numbers that they roll, and
participants do this like twenty times, and then across the
whole test group, whichever pair in the group has the
highest total sum of roles wins a cash prize, and
both subjects in each pair guess their likelihood of winning
(07:16):
before the game. Thompson says that if you try to
replicate this sort of experiment with students, you will usually
find that subjects, on average rate their chance of winning
a little bit higher if they're the one rolling the
die than if they're the one recording the roles. Again,
that should not make a difference. So even though we
both rationally know that the outcome is random, it just
(07:39):
feels a little luckier if I'm the one doing it. However,
and I thought this was interesting. Thompson says that some
research has found that this effect can be reduced or
even neutralized completely by the context of the game, for example,
if it takes place in a classroom that has previously
discs us the correct way to estimate probability on games
(08:04):
like this. And that was interesting to me because it
made me think about how people overcome cognitive biases and
cognitive illusions. You know, sometimes the unfortunate fact is that
simply being aware of a cognitive illusion, like knowing that
sometimes our brains have a certain kind of bias, is
(08:26):
not sufficient to keep us from falling for that bias.
So you can, like know about the tricks your brain plays,
and you can fall for them anyway. It happens to
all of us, but in every case.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
And this obviously applies to many other aspects of the
human psyche as well. I mean awareness, self awareness is
often the first step, but that doesn't mean you've completely
defeated the illusion or illusion that you are having to
deal with exactly.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
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
(09:15):
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
(09:37):
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,
(09:59):
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
(10:24):
move on, That was approach number one. 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
(10:45):
more control, and then you ask the subject how much
control they think they had. So an experiment typical of
this type is one that was done by Alloy and
Abrahamson in nineteen seventy nine, in which subjects would be
given a button to press and they're told to see
if they can use that button to control whether or
(11:07):
not a light comes on, and then they're asked to
judge at the end what amount of control they think
the button had over the light. In reality, the light
had no relationship to whether the button was pressed or not.
It was simply programmed to come on at some fixed
percentage of the trials with each subject, and unsurprisingly even
(11:27):
though it had nothing to do with whether the button
was pushed or not, or when subjects broadly thought they
had some amount of control, and experiments when the light
came on more frequently but again unconnected to the button,
caused people to believe that they had more control over
the light. So, at least in some cases, it seems
(11:48):
like success at getting a desired outcome makes people more
likely to believe they have control over that outcome, whether
or not they do. And while at the risk of
over extrapolating from a very contained laboratory outcome, this does
sort of suggest to me connections to behaviors in the world,
Like you know, when somebody has very good fortune at
(12:11):
a particular juncture, they're like, yep, that was all me. Later,
Thompson describes another version of this kind of test. This
one is called the computer screen on set task. And
so in this test, like you sit in front of
a computer and you're looking at a screen, and the
screen will sequentially produce a series of forty images, and
(12:32):
all of these images are either a green X or
a red O. And with each new screen, you can
choose to press a button or not press a button,
and your goal is to make the green X appear
as many times as possible, so people will be trying
to figure out if there's some pattern like pressing the
button or not, you know, pressing it or not in
(12:52):
what sequence, etc. That'll make the greenexes appear. Actually, once again,
the button has no relation whatsoever to whether the symbols
here 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.
(13:15):
People who got the green ex seventy five percent of
their random screens believed that they had a lot of
control over the display.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
This is also interesting to think of in terms of
the example 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 interesting 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
(13:47):
maybe a little more directly comparable to just pressing a
button and seeing a random o or an ax on
the screen, like there was a lot more room to
ask the question, Am I controlling it? I have fifty
percent chance I am.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
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
(14:22):
in which anything is possible, a more magical way of
relating to the world.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
It's a cheaper way to go about going to the arcade,
you know. I wonder what they would think if 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 3 (14:37):
Yeah, just toggling the joystick at the demo.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
It's great, I gotta sell this guy's nacho do something Okay?
Speaker 3 (14:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
McCay, I think this is Frank P. McKenna.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
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 themselves as the
driver versus imagining themselves as the passenger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most
people thought that accidents would be relatively less likely if
(15:26):
they were the driver.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
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 am not actually in control. I can't
hit the brake when I see the brake lights ahead
(15:49):
getting closer, and therefore I feel like a little more
anxious about the whole scenario oftentimes, like realizing that this
is irrational, but feeling it Nonetheless.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
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. In a
second study, in this McKenna 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
(16:21):
about like rear ending someone versus being rear ended versus
having a tire blowout, And the idea was rear ending
someone is generally thought to be largely subject to driver control.
Of course, we know that there are factors that other
factors that can intervene, breaks, could fail whatever, whereas getting
rear ended seems to be out of the driver's hands,
(16:43):
and people were highly likely to say that they were
less likely to have the type of collision in which
the driver was in control has high control, So I
am much less likely than other people to rear end someone.
Whether it's me or someone else, makes less difference in
getting rear ended.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Quote.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
Thus, people show illusory control over avoiding an accident by
assuming that they will be able to exert control that
others cannot.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
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. But I would tend
to doubt it.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Yeah, that would be dangerous if someone else did it.
But I can handle it.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
I alone can weave in and out of traffic and
make it to my destination two minutes ahead of schedule.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
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
(18:00):
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
(18:23):
people might resist admitting 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
(18:46):
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
(19:07):
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
(19:30):
everyday activities like driving Ala McKenna. Pros are 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
(19:52):
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
(20:15):
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 these experimental findings
are framed. So it seems there probably is an illusion
(20:39):
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 is that we think
(21:01):
we have more control of than others, more illusory control
over than others, and what kind of situations or states
can we be in that heighten this illusion? And to
continue with Thompson's overview, Thompson highlights seven variables that have
been studied and found to affect the illusion of control.
This list does not mean that these are the only
(21:22):
factors influencing it. It's just that these have been studied
well enough to discuss in this book chapter. So the
first one is skill related factors. Now, this was a
major part of the original nineteen seventy five paper by Langer.
A lot of studies have found that if a situation
has features we associate with dependence on skill, we're more
(21:45):
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. Talked about several
of these in the previous episode. For example, familiarity you
know you might be more inclined to think you have
(22:07):
control over the outcome of a chance game if you
are familiar with the game, or if there are elements
of the game that are familiar to you. And this
is generally true of skill based games, but wouldn't affect
chance based games. One of these variables, though, actually there
was a twenty twenty one paper that casts some doubt
over whether it affects illusions of control, and that variable
(22:30):
is choice. So the original idea is that if you
have a choice to make, that gives you illusions of control.
An example would be a lottery type game. So imagine
a game where you buy a lottery ticket. The ticket
has a random series of numbers on it, and you
win a prize if the winning number matches your ticket.
Now consider the same game, except you get to pick
(22:52):
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 World, which by Jack Martin.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
To your number, that's the one you play.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
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
(23:23):
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,
(23:44):
which found that choice did not reliably cause an illusion
of control.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Okay, Like the scenario I'm instantly thinking of would be
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 were 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
(24:10):
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 card 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
(24:32):
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 who's going to choose a king
or a queen, or they going to try and outsmart
me by, you know, choosing a two or a three
something that isn't superficially interesting.
Speaker 3 (24:52):
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 it. That's an interesting scenario because it adds these
(25:13):
other variables too. My intuition is that that would increase
illusions of control. It feels like it would for me.
It would it would falsely increase my belief that I
could control the outcome even though I can't. And just
to go again on my intuitions, it would seem to
me that the choices could increase illusions of control, Like
(25:36):
if I get to pick the lottery numbers, it would
feel more likely like I had a better chance of winning,
But again. This twenty twenty one study found that in
some circumstances, no, that's not the case. So it might
It might have to do with just like how people
are primed to think about the task they're they're about
to do, you know, like, are you say, as we
talked about earlier, like, are you given some kind of
(25:57):
hint of remembering how probable these actually work as you're
engaging in the task.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, okay, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
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
(26:26):
streaks in a game where you, you know, 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.
(26:48):
But if people are gambling on coin tosses and they
have an early string of successes, at making the right call.
This will apparently increase the illusion of control relative to
subjects who have an early string of failures. So if
you lose a lot at the beginning, outcomes feel random.
If you win a lot at the beginning, you think
(27:10):
I'm doing this. In reality, it's equally random either way.
But we can get tricked into thinking that we have
control because we've been winning and it just seems like
winning is happening, so somehow I must be making it happen.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
See. I 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 3 (27:43):
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? Feel like I've wasted it?
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Yeah, X, check to see if you can pick up
a stick and it's a natural twenty it's like, all right,
I needed to get like a three on that probably. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
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 in
the feedback and it's not one hundred percent clear whether
(28:29):
you have failed or not, the illusion of control can persist.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
All right, yeah, a natural one on your D twenty row. Definitely.
I think we'll knock that illusion out of place.
Speaker 3 (28:39):
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 we
(29:00):
talked about that earlier. That's the one with the green
exes and the red o's where people are pressing a
button trying to figure out if they can control making
the green exes appear on the screen. In this kind
of experiment, people believed that they had more they had
significantly more control if they received cash payments proportional to
the number of greenexes that appeared compared to people who
(29:21):
did the same task but did not get a cash reward.
There was no cash involved. And remember in this experiment
either way, subjects have zero control at all. A study
by Biner at All in nineteen ninety five found a
similar kind of thing, that the illusion of control was
increased for a random lottery with a food reward if
(29:42):
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 (29:58):
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
(30:20):
win that, Sure, it's worth my worth my time to
go ahead and and enter because yeah, I can imagine
that on my shelf.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Do you have a specific disc in mind here?
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah? Yeah, I ages ago I entered a contest and
won DVD copies of The Fly and The Fly Too,
and it was 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,
(30:51):
I'm like, well, I won this. I won this once
before it could happen again. I'm good at this. Apparently.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Oh so you apparently had an early success that increased
the success salience of that kind of lottery for you.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah. I had a similar scenario happened with my son.
I took him to a 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,
got on 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
(31:24):
get the toy, but there are a number of additional
tricks in play that that enable the house to win.
And uh, 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 it. Tell him,
all right, I'm going to give you, give you one
quarter or whatever it took to use the machine, and
(31:47):
but I want you to know that this. These machines
are tricky. They are made to trick you. You're not
going to win anything. And then then I'm like, go
forth and lose, you know, learn this lesson immediate jackpot.
He got some stuffy out of that, and I think
he still has that stuffy that I occasionally see in
his room. And it mocks me because I'm like, you
were never supposed to come out of that machine, and
(32:07):
you gave him too much confidence in these claw machines.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
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 (32:17):
Minor yes, and if memory serves like we'd have to
go deeper in. But I believe there's some additional shenanigans
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.
(32:39):
Nobody's getting anything out of there.
Speaker 3 (32:41):
I'm very sorry your son had an early success emphasis
on claw machines. That is an unfortunate fate.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Well, I let him have a number of failures after
that and on other visits, so I think the lesson
finally hammer him.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Oh but the flip side of the success failure emphasis
is that research has also found that there are increased
illusions of control in a situation where somebody is trying
to avoid an outcome they find extremely undesirable. Don't worry,
these experiments didn't have actual torture or anything. The really
undesirable conditions were things like having to speak in front
(33:27):
of a group, which is 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 (33:40):
Yeah, I mean it's a different scenario, to be sure.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Another one was like having to put your hand in
cold water. That's another common thing tested here. So people
who strongly wanted to avoid these outcomes mistakenly believed they
had more agency in the task that determined whether they
would have to do them or not. So it's just
a flip side of the thing, like, if you really
want that hamburger, you have more illusion of control over
(34:03):
the chance process of getting it. If you really want
to avoid speaking in front of a group, apparently you
have more illusions of control in avoiding that fade. Another
interesting thing noted here is that some studies have found
a greater illusion of control when people are experiencing heightened stress.
I thought that was interesting. Fourth factor is mood. This
(34:27):
is pretty straightforward, but studies have found on average, people
experience more illusory control when they're in a better mood,
and people with a negative mood showed less illusions of
control on average. Of course, this is probably not a
reason to try to be in a bad mood, but
you know, one advantage if you're currently feeling down is
(34:49):
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 (34:56):
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 3 (35:12):
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
(35:33):
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 (35:43):
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 as 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
(36:05):
like this astronomically small chance of winning if you enter.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
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,
(36:30):
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
(36:51):
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 the people who get to be the
boss or get to be the leader in some way
(37:13):
seem more susceptible than regular people to thinking they can
like magically will a dice roll to come out the
way they want it.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Yeah. Yeah, it's easy to apply this to various like
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 often just attribute to you
(37:42):
just to pure ego and so forth. But yeah, the
illusion of control could also play a huge part in it.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
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
got you know, promotion or increased status or whatever, and
you're in this position of power now, so you've sort
(38:10):
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 (38:19):
Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 3 (38:20):
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 Langan's in two thousand and
(38:43):
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 (38:53):
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 you know, too much tendency
towards either illusion exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
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.
(39:34):
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,
(39:56):
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
(40:17):
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 know,
come up with a plan of action to get what
you want. And this study found that the deliberation group
experienced less illusory control on the unrelated light onset task,
(40:42):
so quote. Overall finding suggests that people who are trying
to make decisions develop a deliberative mindset that allows for
a realistic view of action outcome expectancies, whereas people who
try to act on a decision develop an implemental mindset
that promotes illusory optimism. And that was to the extent
(41:03):
that this is a valid finding that that was illuminating
to me because it's like, Okay, if you're more just
sort of exploring ideas, thinking about different contingencies and all that,
you apparently might be more realistic about how much control
you have. But once you get into thinking about how
to get something done, then you're more prone to illusions
(41:25):
of control, which might actually be useful even though it's
just as we said last time, the illusion of control
could be useful even though it generates false beliefs, because
maybe it maybe those false beliefs could be motivating, could
help you, you know, spur you to action.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
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 to
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
(42:05):
you know, you know, we knew that first prize ribbon,
but it could result in a better product overall.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
Okay, So the last thing I want to talk about
in this part of our series is I've mentioned there
are some criticisms of the concept of the illusion of control.
There is one really interesting, complicating result I found concerning
when the illusion of control manifests, and that was in
a paper by Francesca Gino, Zachariah Sharik, and don A.
(42:34):
Moore published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in
twenty eleven. Paper was called keeping the Illusion of Control
under Control, Ceilings, floors, and imperfect calibration. And so this
paper offers a critique of illusion of control research by
suggesting that maybe it's better to think about this as
(42:57):
a general tendency to make incorrect estimates of our level
of control over things. And this would include both overestimating
and underestimating our level of control in situations where the
evidence is somewhat ambiguous. So, according to these authors, the
(43:18):
literature appears to support a general overestimation of control merely
because so many of these studies focus on games of chance,
and other purely random outcomes, things that we have zero
control over, and thus belief in any amount of control
in these experiments will be factually mistaken. But the authors
(43:40):
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 perform several experiments
to test them, and they found that across three experiments,
(44:04):
indeed there is a corresponding illusory lack of control in
some cases where people have a high degree of control
over outcomes. So I wanted to describe just one example
of the kinds of experiments they did. Subjects would be
asked to do a kind of word search puzzle on
computer screens. They're looking for like patterns of repeating letters
(44:25):
and a jumble of letters, and occasionally, at random time intervals,
the background of the screens they're looking at would change color,
maybe making it harder to pick out the letters and
solve the puzzle. Participants could press a button to make
the background revert to its original color and make the
game easier again. And so the independent variable here was
(44:47):
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 after this puzzle
search game was over, subjects were asked what level of
control they thought they had over the background color with
(45:08):
the button, and as predicted in this experiment, the authors
found in the low control conditions, like if you have
zero percent or fifteen percent of control over the background,
there was an illusion of control, same kind of thing
you would expect based on these previous experiments, But in
the high control conditions, where players had like eighty five
(45:29):
percent control over the background, they thought they had less
control than they actually did. So they did three experiments
in total, and in the end, the authors here say
that this raises doubts about whether people actually do systematically
overestimate their control, and instead, what might be more accurate
to say is that people overestimate their control when they
(45:51):
have little and underestimate their control when they have much.
And so they they offer this as a critique of
the sort of theoretical frame work of the illusion of control,
because they say, really, 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
(46:12):
level of control we have over events, and that goes
both ways.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Interesting, Yeah, I mean it reminds me of various discussions
we've had about occasional, occasionally beneficial errors and 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
(46:38):
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 3 (46:50):
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 (46:59):
I don't know. Maybe. I mean I feel like a
lot of our worldviews 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,
(47:21):
like you can't be over confident about everything. You're going
to get plowed over on the but you've got to
do things like leave the house, so you have to
have like some level of confidence, even in cases where
the confidence is outpacing the actual chances a little bit.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
All right, well, I think maybe we should call it
there for part two on the illusion of control.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
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 stuft to Blew Your Mind
is primarily a science podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursday, we have listener mail. On Mondays, we have
one of about three different varieties of short form episodes
on Wednesday, and then on Friday, we set aside most
(48:09):
serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on
Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
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 contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (49:00):
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