Illusion of control
Encyclopedia
The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events, for instance to feel that they control outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over. The effect was named by psychologist Ellen Langer
and has been replicated in many different contexts. It is thought to influence gambling
behavior and belief in the paranormal
. Along with illusory superiority
and optimism bias
, the illusion of control is one of the positive illusions
.
The illusion is more common in familiar situations, and in situations where the person knows the desired outcome. Feedback that emphasizes success rather than failure can increase the effect, while feedback that emphasizes failure can decrease or reverse the effect. The illusion is weaker for depressed
individuals and is stronger when individuals have an emotional need to control the outcome. The illusion is strengthened by stressful and competitive situations, including financial trading
. Though people are likely to overestimate their control when the situations are heavily chance-determined, they also tend to underestimate their control when they actually have it, which runs contrary to some theories of the illusion and its adaptiveness.
The illusion might arise because people lack direct introspective
insight into whether they are in control of events. This has been called the introspection illusion
. Instead they may judge their degree of control by a process that is often unreliable. As a result, they see themselves as responsible for events when there is little or no causal link
.
One kind of laboratory demonstration involves two lights marked "Score" and "No Score". Subjects have to try to control which one lights up. In one version of this experiment, subjects could press either of two buttons. Another version had one button, which subjects decided on each trial to press or not. Subjects had a variable degree of control over the lights, or none at all, depending on how the buttons were connected. The experimenters made clear that there might be no relation between the subjects' actions and the lights. Subjects estimated how much control they had over the lights. These estimates bore no relation to how much control they actually had, but was related to how often the "Score" light lit up. Even when their choices made no difference at all, subjects confidently reported exerting some control over the lights.
Ellen Langer's research demonstrated that people were more likely to behave as if they could exercise control in a chance situation where "skill cues" were present. By skill cues, Langer meant properties of the situation more normally associated with the exercise of skill, in particular the exercise of choice, competition, familiarity with the stimulus and involvement in decisions. One simple form of this effect is found in casino
s: when rolling dice
in a craps
game people tend to throw harder when they need high numbers and softer for low numbers.
In another experiment, subjects had to predict the outcome of thirty coin tosses. The feedback was rigged so that each subject was right exactly half the time, but the groups differed in where their "hits" occurred. Some were told that their early guesses were accurate. Others were told that their successes were distributed evenly through the thirty trials. Afterwards, they were surveyed about their performance. Subjects with early "hits" overestimated their total successes and had higher expectations of how they would perform on future guessing games. This result resembles the irrational primacy effect in which people give greater weight to information that occurs earlier in a series. Forty percent of the subjects believed their performance on this chance task would improve with practice, and twenty-five percent said that distraction would impair their performance.
Another of Langer's experiments—replicated by other researchers—involves a lottery. Subjects are either given tickets at random or allowed to choose their own. They can then trade their tickets for others with a higher chance of paying out. Subjects who had chosen their own ticket were more reluctant to part with it. Tickets bearing familiar symbols were less likely to be exchanged than others with unfamiliar symbols. Although these lotteries were random, subjects behaved as though their choice of ticket affected the outcome.
Another way to investigate perceptions of control is to ask people about hypothetical situations, for example their likelihood of being involved in a motor vehicle accident. On average, drivers regard accidents as much less likely in "high-control" situations, such as when they are driving, than in "low-control" situations, such as when they are in the passenger seat. They also rate a high-control accident, such as driving into the car in front, as much less likely than a low-control accident such as being hit from behind by another driver.
Suzanne Thompson and colleagues argued that Langer's explanation was inadequate to explain all the variations in the effect. As an alternative, they proposed that judgments about control are based on a procedure that they called the "control heuristic". This theory proposes that judgments of control to depend on two conditions; an intention to create the outcome, and a relationship between the action and outcome. In games of chance, these two conditions frequently go together. As well as an intention to win, there is an action, such as throwing a die or pulling a lever on a slot machine
, which is immediately followed by an outcome. Even though the outcome is selected randomly, the control heuristic would result in the player feeling a degree of control over the outcome.
Self-regulation theory
offers another explanation. To the extent that people are driven by internal goals concerned with the exercise of control over their environment, they will seek to reassert control in conditions of chaos, uncertainty or stress. One way of coping with a lack of real control is to falsely attribute oneself control of the situation.
The core self-evaluations
(CSE) trait is a stable personality trait composed of locus of control
, neuroticism
, self-efficacy
, and self-esteem
. While those with high core self-evaluations are likely to believe that they control their own environment (i.e., internal locus of control), very high levels of CSE may lead to the illusion of control.
's claim that "optimistic self-appraisals of capability, that are not unduly disparate from what is possible, can be advantageous, whereas veridical judgements can be self-limiting". His argument is essentially concerned with the adaptive effect of optimistic beliefs about control and performance in circumstances where control is possible, rather than perceived control in circumstances where outcomes do not depend on an individual's behavior.
Bandura has also suggested that:
Taylor and Brown argue that positive illusions are adaptive, since there is evidence that they are more common in normally mentally healthy individuals than in depressed individuals. However, Pacini, Muir and Epstein have shown that this may be because depressed people overcompensate for a tendency toward maladaptive intuitive processing by exercising excessive rational control in trivial situations, and note that the difference with non-depressed people disappears in more consequential circumstances.
There is also empirical evidence that high self-efficacy can be maladaptive in some circumstances. In a scenario-based study, Whyte et al. showed that participants in whom they had induced high self-efficacy were significantly more likely to escalate commitment to a failing course of action. Knee and Zuckerman have challenged the definition of mental health used by Taylor and Brown and argue that lack of illusions is associated with a non-defensive personality oriented towards growth and learning and with low ego involvement in outcomes. They present evidence that self-determined individuals are less prone to these illusions. In the late 1970s, Abramson
and Alloy
demonstrated that depressed individuals held a more accurate view than their non-depressed counterparts in a test which measured illusion of control. This finding held true even when the depression was manipulated experimentally. However, when replicating the findings Msetfi et al. (2005, 2007) found that the overestimation of control in nondepressed people only showed up when the interval was long enough, implying that this is because they take more aspects of a situation into account than their depressed counterparts. Also, Dykman et al. (1989) showed that depressed people believe they have no control in situations where they actually do, so their perception is not more accurate overall. Allan et al. (2007) has proposed that the pessimistic bias of depressives resulted in "depressive realism" when asked about estimation of control, because depressed individuals are more likely to say no even if they have control.
A number of studies have found a link between a sense of control and health, especially in older people.
Fenton-O'Creevy et al. argue, as do Gollwittzer and Kinney, that while illusory beliefs about control may promote goal striving, they are not conducive to sound decision-making. Illusions of control may cause insensitivity to feedback, impede learning and predispose toward greater objective risk taking (since subjective risk will be reduced by illusion of control).
argues that an illusion of control over external events underlies belief in psychokinesis
, a supposed paranormal ability to move objects directly using the mind. As evidence, Wegner cites a series of experiments on magical thinking
in which subjects were induced to think they had influenced external events. In one experiment, subjects watched a basketball
player taking a series of free throws. When they were instructed to visualise him making his shots, they felt that they had contributed to his success.
One study examined traders working in the City of London
's investment banks
. They each watched a graph being plotted on a computer screen, similar to a real-time graph of a stock price or index. Using three computer keys, they had to raise the value as high as possible. They were warned that the value showed random variations, but that the keys might have some effect. In fact, the fluctuations were not affected by the keys. The traders' ratings of their success measured their susceptibility to the illusion of control. This score was then compared with each trader's performance. Those who were more prone to the illusion scored significantly lower on analysis, risk management
and contribution to profits. They also earned significantly less.
Ellen Langer
Ellen Jane Langer is professor of psychology at Harvard University who has studied the illusion of control, decision making, aging and mindfulness theory.-Biography:...
and has been replicated in many different contexts. It is thought to influence gambling
Gambling
Gambling is the wagering of money or something of material value on an event with an uncertain outcome with the primary intent of winning additional money and/or material goods...
behavior and belief in the paranormal
Paranormal
Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...
. Along with illusory superiority
Illusory superiority
Illusory superiority is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests, and the possession of...
and optimism bias
Optimism bias
Optimism bias is the demonstrated systematic tendency for people to be overly optimistic about the outcome of planned actions. This includes over-estimating the likelihood of positive events and under-estimating the likelihood of negative events. Along with the illusion of control and illusory...
, the illusion of control is one of the positive illusions
Positive illusions
Positive illusions are unrealistically favourable attitudes that people have towards themselves. There are three broad kinds: inflated assessment of one's own abilities, unrealistic optimism about the future and an illusion of control...
.
The illusion is more common in familiar situations, and in situations where the person knows the desired outcome. Feedback that emphasizes success rather than failure can increase the effect, while feedback that emphasizes failure can decrease or reverse the effect. The illusion is weaker for depressed
Depression (mood)
Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity that can affect a person's thoughts, behaviour, feelings and physical well-being. Depressed people may feel sad, anxious, empty, hopeless, helpless, worthless, guilty, irritable, or restless...
individuals and is stronger when individuals have an emotional need to control the outcome. The illusion is strengthened by stressful and competitive situations, including financial trading
Trader (finance)
A trader is someone in finance who buys and sells financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. A broker who simply fills buy or sell orders is not a trader, as they are merely executing instructions given to them. According to the Wall Street Journal in 2004, a managing...
. Though people are likely to overestimate their control when the situations are heavily chance-determined, they also tend to underestimate their control when they actually have it, which runs contrary to some theories of the illusion and its adaptiveness.
The illusion might arise because people lack direct introspective
Introspection
Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious and purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul...
insight into whether they are in control of events. This has been called the introspection illusion
Introspection illusion
The introspection illusion is a cognitive illusion in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable...
. Instead they may judge their degree of control by a process that is often unreliable. As a result, they see themselves as responsible for events when there is little or no causal link
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
.
Demonstration
The illusion of control is demonstrated by three converging lines of evidence: 1) laboratory experiments, 2) observed behavior in familiar games of chance such as lotteries, and 3) self-reports of real-world behavior.One kind of laboratory demonstration involves two lights marked "Score" and "No Score". Subjects have to try to control which one lights up. In one version of this experiment, subjects could press either of two buttons. Another version had one button, which subjects decided on each trial to press or not. Subjects had a variable degree of control over the lights, or none at all, depending on how the buttons were connected. The experimenters made clear that there might be no relation between the subjects' actions and the lights. Subjects estimated how much control they had over the lights. These estimates bore no relation to how much control they actually had, but was related to how often the "Score" light lit up. Even when their choices made no difference at all, subjects confidently reported exerting some control over the lights.
Ellen Langer's research demonstrated that people were more likely to behave as if they could exercise control in a chance situation where "skill cues" were present. By skill cues, Langer meant properties of the situation more normally associated with the exercise of skill, in particular the exercise of choice, competition, familiarity with the stimulus and involvement in decisions. One simple form of this effect is found in casino
Casino
In modern English, a casino is a facility which houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. Casinos are most commonly built near or combined with hotels, restaurants, retail shopping, cruise ships or other tourist attractions...
s: when rolling dice
Dice
A die is a small throwable object with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers...
in a craps
Craps
Craps is a dice game in which players place wagers on the outcome of the roll, or a series of rolls, of a pair of dice. Players may wager money against each other or a bank...
game people tend to throw harder when they need high numbers and softer for low numbers.
In another experiment, subjects had to predict the outcome of thirty coin tosses. The feedback was rigged so that each subject was right exactly half the time, but the groups differed in where their "hits" occurred. Some were told that their early guesses were accurate. Others were told that their successes were distributed evenly through the thirty trials. Afterwards, they were surveyed about their performance. Subjects with early "hits" overestimated their total successes and had higher expectations of how they would perform on future guessing games. This result resembles the irrational primacy effect in which people give greater weight to information that occurs earlier in a series. Forty percent of the subjects believed their performance on this chance task would improve with practice, and twenty-five percent said that distraction would impair their performance.
Another of Langer's experiments—replicated by other researchers—involves a lottery. Subjects are either given tickets at random or allowed to choose their own. They can then trade their tickets for others with a higher chance of paying out. Subjects who had chosen their own ticket were more reluctant to part with it. Tickets bearing familiar symbols were less likely to be exchanged than others with unfamiliar symbols. Although these lotteries were random, subjects behaved as though their choice of ticket affected the outcome.
Another way to investigate perceptions of control is to ask people about hypothetical situations, for example their likelihood of being involved in a motor vehicle accident. On average, drivers regard accidents as much less likely in "high-control" situations, such as when they are driving, than in "low-control" situations, such as when they are in the passenger seat. They also rate a high-control accident, such as driving into the car in front, as much less likely than a low-control accident such as being hit from behind by another driver.
Explanations
Ellen Langer, who first demonstrated the illusion of control, explained her findings in terms of a confusion between skill and chance situations. She proposed that people base their judgments of control on "skill cues". These are features of a situation that are usually associated with games of skill, such as competitiveness, familiarity and individual choice. When more of these skill cues are present, the illusion is stronger.Suzanne Thompson and colleagues argued that Langer's explanation was inadequate to explain all the variations in the effect. As an alternative, they proposed that judgments about control are based on a procedure that they called the "control heuristic". This theory proposes that judgments of control to depend on two conditions; an intention to create the outcome, and a relationship between the action and outcome. In games of chance, these two conditions frequently go together. As well as an intention to win, there is an action, such as throwing a die or pulling a lever on a slot machine
Slot machine
A slot machine , informally fruit machine , the slots , poker machine or "pokies" or simply slot is a casino gambling machine with three or more reels which spin when a button is pushed...
, which is immediately followed by an outcome. Even though the outcome is selected randomly, the control heuristic would result in the player feeling a degree of control over the outcome.
Self-regulation theory
Self-regulation theory
Self-Regulation Theory or SRT is a system of conscious personal health management. Although a doctor may give a patient sound medical advice, the theory states that only with self-regulation will the patient appropriately implement that advice. For medical treatment to be effective, the patient...
offers another explanation. To the extent that people are driven by internal goals concerned with the exercise of control over their environment, they will seek to reassert control in conditions of chaos, uncertainty or stress. One way of coping with a lack of real control is to falsely attribute oneself control of the situation.
The core self-evaluations
Core self-evaluations
Core self-evaluations represent a stable personality trait which encompasses an individual’s subconscious, fundamental evaluations about themselves, their own abilities and their own control. People who have high core self-evaluations will think positively of themselves and be confident in their...
(CSE) trait is a stable personality trait composed of locus of control
Locus of control
Locus of control is a theory in personality psychology referring to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Understanding of the concept was developed by Julian B...
, neuroticism
Neuroticism
Neuroticism is a fundamental personality trait in the study of psychology. It is an enduring tendency to experience negative emotional states. Individuals who score high on neuroticism are more likely than the average to experience such feelings as anxiety, anger, guilt, and depressed mood...
, self-efficacy
Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is a term used in psychology, roughly corresponding to a person's belief in their own competence.It has been defined as the belief that one is capable of performing in a certain manner to attain certain set of goals. It is believed that our personalized ideas of self-efficacy affect...
, and self-esteem
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is a term in psychology to reflect a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame: some would distinguish how 'the self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, the...
. While those with high core self-evaluations are likely to believe that they control their own environment (i.e., internal locus of control), very high levels of CSE may lead to the illusion of control.
Benefits and costs to the individual
Taylor and Brown have argued that positive illusions, including the illusion of control, are adaptive as they motivate people to persist at tasks when they might otherwise give up. This position is supported by Albert BanduraAlbert Bandura
Albert Bandura is a psychologist and the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University...
's claim that "optimistic self-appraisals of capability, that are not unduly disparate from what is possible, can be advantageous, whereas veridical judgements can be self-limiting". His argument is essentially concerned with the adaptive effect of optimistic beliefs about control and performance in circumstances where control is possible, rather than perceived control in circumstances where outcomes do not depend on an individual's behavior.
Bandura has also suggested that:
"In activities where the margins of error are narrow and missteps can produce costly or injurious consequences, personal well-being is best served by highly accurate efficacy appraisal."
Taylor and Brown argue that positive illusions are adaptive, since there is evidence that they are more common in normally mentally healthy individuals than in depressed individuals. However, Pacini, Muir and Epstein have shown that this may be because depressed people overcompensate for a tendency toward maladaptive intuitive processing by exercising excessive rational control in trivial situations, and note that the difference with non-depressed people disappears in more consequential circumstances.
There is also empirical evidence that high self-efficacy can be maladaptive in some circumstances. In a scenario-based study, Whyte et al. showed that participants in whom they had induced high self-efficacy were significantly more likely to escalate commitment to a failing course of action. Knee and Zuckerman have challenged the definition of mental health used by Taylor and Brown and argue that lack of illusions is associated with a non-defensive personality oriented towards growth and learning and with low ego involvement in outcomes. They present evidence that self-determined individuals are less prone to these illusions. In the late 1970s, Abramson
Lyn Yvonne Abramson
Lyn Yvonne Abramson is currently a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison....
and Alloy
Lauren Alloy
Lauren B. Alloy is a professor of psychology at Temple University recognized in the area of mood disorders. Her research focuses on cognitive, interpersonal, and biopsychosocial processes in the onset and maintenance of depression and bipolar disorder...
demonstrated that depressed individuals held a more accurate view than their non-depressed counterparts in a test which measured illusion of control. This finding held true even when the depression was manipulated experimentally. However, when replicating the findings Msetfi et al. (2005, 2007) found that the overestimation of control in nondepressed people only showed up when the interval was long enough, implying that this is because they take more aspects of a situation into account than their depressed counterparts. Also, Dykman et al. (1989) showed that depressed people believe they have no control in situations where they actually do, so their perception is not more accurate overall. Allan et al. (2007) has proposed that the pessimistic bias of depressives resulted in "depressive realism" when asked about estimation of control, because depressed individuals are more likely to say no even if they have control.
A number of studies have found a link between a sense of control and health, especially in older people.
Fenton-O'Creevy et al. argue, as do Gollwittzer and Kinney, that while illusory beliefs about control may promote goal striving, they are not conducive to sound decision-making. Illusions of control may cause insensitivity to feedback, impede learning and predispose toward greater objective risk taking (since subjective risk will be reduced by illusion of control).
Applications
Psychologist Daniel WegnerDaniel Wegner
Daniel M. Wegner is an American social psychologist. He is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
argues that an illusion of control over external events underlies belief in psychokinesis
Psychokinesis
The term psychokinesis , also referred to as telekinesis with respect to strictly describing movement of matter, sometimes abbreviated PK and TK respectively, is a term...
, a supposed paranormal ability to move objects directly using the mind. As evidence, Wegner cites a series of experiments on magical thinking
Magical thinking
Magical thinking is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events. In religion, folk religion, and superstition, the correlation posited is between religious ritual, such as prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or...
in which subjects were induced to think they had influenced external events. In one experiment, subjects watched a basketball
Basketball
Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...
player taking a series of free throws. When they were instructed to visualise him making his shots, they felt that they had contributed to his success.
One study examined traders working in the City of London
City of London
The City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...
's investment banks
Investment banking
An investment bank is a financial institution that assists individuals, corporations and governments in raising capital by underwriting and/or acting as the client's agent in the issuance of securities...
. They each watched a graph being plotted on a computer screen, similar to a real-time graph of a stock price or index. Using three computer keys, they had to raise the value as high as possible. They were warned that the value showed random variations, but that the keys might have some effect. In fact, the fluctuations were not affected by the keys. The traders' ratings of their success measured their susceptibility to the illusion of control. This score was then compared with each trader's performance. Those who were more prone to the illusion scored significantly lower on analysis, risk management
Risk management
Risk management is the identification, assessment, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability and/or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities...
and contribution to profits. They also earned significantly less.