Illusion Of Control

What is it: our ego instinctively wants to control, however, we dramatically overestimate what we believe we can influence or control, especially events and other people’s actions…

“He’s an expert so, even though his argument doesn’t make sense to me, I won’t challenge it because I’m not an expert.”

Overview

The illusion of control is a bias which affects our ability to correctly estimate how much we are truly in control of.

Although, ultimately, we’re really only in control of our own reaction to events and other people’s behaviours, we still like to believe we have more influence and control over these external factors than we actually do.

If I asked you how much of your life and your interaction with the world you can control, what would you say? Well, you’d probably WANT to think you can control a good percentage of it, but can you really? The answer is somewhere marginally above zero.

We all like to think (well, our ego does) that we’re complete masters of our own destiny. Believing that we have NO control is an incredibly difficult concept to accept.

Why do we do this though? Is it simply hope over reality? Partly. Although we are more programmed to avoid risk than strive for an equivalent likelihood of success, we often filter out failure (see self-serving bias). This makes it more likely for us to create a link (a casual effect) between our actions and outcomes, when in fact it’s often simply correlated. Or blind luck to put it another way.

It’s believed that a lot of superstition, and dare I say it, religious faiths, come from this belief that we can influence more than we can. Much research has shown that early humans wanted to believe that someone or something out there could be reasoned with, placated or pleased enough to ensure good things happen, such as a good harvest or lack of illness and disease.

At best, we believe we can control luck in situations such as gambling, and at worst, we believe we can control the time and place of our own deaths, and our chances of having a second life!

What can we do to avoid this?

It’s believed that a lack of introspection (looking objectively at ourselves) is responsible for the illusion of control. It’s important to ask ourselves whether something is causal (linked) or simple correlated (two factors that have the same trend but no relationship). It’s human nature to want to believe we can predict and influence good things and avoid bad things.

We also need to look at the fact that to totally control many situations, we need to totally control other people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Ask yourself, given that they are all trying to do the same as you, how likely is it that you are SO much better at controlling other people than they are? Also look at the likelihood of someone giving the perception that you are in control only for them to sabotage you with passive aggression!

Examples

• With the lottery, we believe we are far more likely to win if we pick our numbers, especially if we believe we have a system or a patter, than we do if the numbers are randomly selected by say, a machine, even though the odds are exactly the same.
• Casinos are rife with many cognitive biases, it’s what makes them work. See clustering illusion, gamblers falacy and beginner’s luck. It’s been documented that in games of craps, players throw the dice harder when they want higher numbers. The belief is based on feeling they need to control something, anything. The odds are the same, but we feel we have exerted some influence.
• Have you ever noticed how people will keep pressing a lift button in the belief it makes the door close more quickly or how passengers press the door button on the train, even when it’s not illuminated and therefore not active?