Langer 1975 - The Illusion of Control

Google Scholar Link

Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of personality and social psychology, 32(2), 311.

Summary

People believe that they have more control than they actually do. This manifests in a self-confidence bias. This is shown in the ”just world” hypothesis, which is a belief that good outcomes follow good actions and bad outcomes follow bad actions. This belief eliminates the need for stress that would occur if one instead believed that bad outcomes can occur randomly at any time. When we see other humans suffer, and especially when we cannot change their suffering, we tend to increasingly see their consequence as deserved. Another outcome of this belief is the fundamental attribution bias, a “tendency for people to attribute desirable outcomes to internal factors but to blame external factors such as luck for failures.”

By giving a chance event the trappings of a skill event, a skill orientation can be induced in the subject. The following elements are found in skill events, and thus can be used to induce skill orientations: competition, choice, familiarity, and involvement. In a luck-based game, competing against a less competent-seeming opponent would result in higher bets than would competing against a more competent opponent. In a lottery game, subjects placed a higher value on lottery tickets that they chose as opposed to ticket that were assigned (perhaps related to the endowment effect). In another lottery game, subjects whose lottery “number” was instead an unfamiliar squiggle were much more likely to trade in their ticket for a new one (familiarity increases the illusion of control, just as it would also increase the feeling of control in a skill orientation). In an apparatus-based task, subjects were more confident when they manipulated the object as opposed to an experimenter. This held true in another lottery-based task where the involvement was passive (i.e., the subjects had more or less time to think about the lottery), confidence increased as time went on.

Application

Confidence, though misplaced, can still be a beneficial trait. This paper suggests four elements that could be used to increase confidence, whether in a skill or luck orientation. To encourage people to change to something new, make it familiar (thereby increasing the feeling of control and decreasing fear regarding it). “The illusion of control is in a sense the inverse of learned helplessness.” The authors also hypothesize that an extreme illusion of control is viewed in manic patients.