Illusory Control and Well-Being in a Non-Clinical Sample

A perceived sense of control over the environment is one of our basic needs. People’s need of control is a survival mechanism and a factor of human progress. Perceived control refers to the individual’s beliefs about the controllability of a situation and about the degree to which she/he has the skills and abilities necessary to obtain a desired outcome. Illusion of control is people’s tendency to overestimate their abilities to control the events. According to Taylor and Brown (1988), illusion of control is one of the people’s positive illusions, enhancing their emotional comfort and sense of security, in a word which is perceived more familiar and predictable than it is in reality. The general aims of this study are: 1) to investigate the presence of unrealistic perceptions of control in a sample of Romanian students and 2) to investigate a possible correlation between illusory control and well-being. The results confirm people’s general tendency to overestimate their ability to control the events. A direct correlation between illusion of control and well-being could not been demonstrated. The role of illusory control as an adaptive mechanism is discussed according to the available data.

Chagrin d’amour

This essay’s close interrogation of James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room allows us to see one aspect of how sexual shame functions: it shows how shame exposes anxiety not only about the feminizing force of homosexuality, but about how being the object of the gaze is feminizing—and therefore shameful. It also shows that the paradigm of the closet is not the metaphor of privacy and enclosure on one hand and openness and liberation on the other that it is commonly thought to be, but instead is a site of illusory control over whether one is available to be seen and therefore humiliated by being feminized. Further, the essay reveals the paradox of denial, where one must first know the thing that is at the same time being disavowed or denied. The narrative requirements of fictions such as Giovanni’s Room demonstrate this, as it requires that the narrator both know, in order to narrate, and not know something at the same time.

Inducing illusory control ensures persistence when rewards fade and when others outperform us

Persisting even when the rewards of continued effort are fading is essential for achieving long-term goals, skills, and good health, alike. Yet, we often quit when things get hard. Here, we tested whether augmenting the feeling of control through external measures increases persistence under such discouraging circumstances. In two laboratory experiments, we first induced illusory control by manipulating the base-rate of positive outcomes and then tested the effect of this elevation of participants’ perceived control upon their persistence under diminishing returns and in a competition against a stronger opponent. Induced illusory control significantly enhanced people’s persistence in both of these motivationally challenging situations. Our findings demonstrate that motivation is dependent upon perceived, rather than objective, control, and reveal that this can be leveraged to counteract quitting behavior when things get hard, for instance in rehabilitation, physical activity interventions, or other training settings.

Is Self-Reported Propensity for Everyday Illusions of Control Higher in Gamblers and Is It Associated With Gambling-Specific Erroneous Beliefs?

People who engage in gambling are known to hold erroneous views about the nature of gambling. One of the most commonly observed cognitive biases is the illusion of control, where people’s subjective appraisal of contingency between behavior and events is greater than the objective contingency. Such beliefs have been found to be strongest in problem gamblers and can lead to over-confidence in the ability to win money from gambling. A question, however, is whether such perceptions are (a) specific to gambling and whether gamblers display a tendency to over-estimate contingencies in everyday life and (b) if a tendency to endorse everyday illusion of control beliefs is related to specific gambling-related beliefs among those who gamble. Answers to these questions might provide insights into whether some people are potentially more vulnerable to beliefs that might have implications for gambling. An online sample of 788 adults completed a survey about simple everyday situations where people might attempt to exert control (e.g., pressing elevator buttons more often, throwing dice in games). The survey included a scale that captured everyday situations as well as established measures of illusion of control and superstition in gambling. The results showed that those who report greater control in everyday tasks scored higher on standardized measures of beliefs about chance and gambling-related cognitions relating to illusory control. Scores on both types of measures were higher in gamblers than non-gamblers. The findings suggest that gamblers may differ in how they generally perceive and respond to situations involving tasks largely dominated by chance or limited opportunities for genuine control.

Believing in one's power: a counterfactual heuristic for goal-directed control

Most people envision themselves as operant agents endowed with the capacity to bring about changes in the outside world. This ability to monitor one's own causal power has long been suggested to rest upon a specific model of causal inference, i.e., a model of how our actions causally relate to their consequences. What this model is and how it may explain departures from optimal inference, e.g., illusory control and self-attribution biases, are still conjecture. To address this question, we designed a series of novel experiments requiring participants to continuously monitor their causal influence over the task environment by discriminating changes that were caused by their own actions from changes that were not. Comparing different models of choice, we found that participants' behaviour was best explained by a model deriving the consequences of the forgone action from the current action that was taken and assuming relative divergence between both. Importantly, this model agrees with the intuitive way of construing causal power as "difference-making" in which causally efficacious actions are actions that make a difference to the world. We suggest that our model outperformed all competitors because it closely mirrors people's belief in their causal power - a belief that is well-suited to learning action-outcome associations in controllable environments. We speculate that this belief may be part of the reason why reflecting upon one's own causal power fundamentally differs from reasoning about external causes.

The Role of Personal Control in Adaptive Functioning

A sense of personal control helps people maintain emotional stability and negotiate their way through life. People foster this by focusing on reachable goals, creating new avenues for control, and accepting difficult-to-change circumstances. Perceived control need not be realistic in order to have beneficial effects. Research suggests that those from more collectivist cultures may derive less benefit from a sense of personal control, relying instead on a socially derived sense of control. Interventions to enhance personal control include programs that bolster coping skills, give options to participants, encourage attributions to controllable factors, and focus on empowerment. Future research should include longitudinal studies that examine disconfirmations of control and the value of maintaining vs. relinquishing control following a traumatic event. More attention is also needed on cultural differences in perceived control, the effects of illusory control on health-promotion behaviors, and interventions to increase perceived control in everyday life.