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Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement

The illusion of control consists of overestimating the influence that our behavior exerts over uncontrollable outcomes. Available evidence suggests that an important factor in development of this illusion is the personal involvement of participants who are trying to obtain the outcome. The dominant...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Yarritu, Ion, Matute, Helena, Vadillo, Miguel A.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Hogrefe Publishing 2013
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4013923/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23948387
http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000225
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author Yarritu, Ion
Matute, Helena
Vadillo, Miguel A.
author_facet Yarritu, Ion
Matute, Helena
Vadillo, Miguel A.
author_sort Yarritu, Ion
collection PubMed
description The illusion of control consists of overestimating the influence that our behavior exerts over uncontrollable outcomes. Available evidence suggests that an important factor in development of this illusion is the personal involvement of participants who are trying to obtain the outcome. The dominant view assumes that this is due to social motivations and self-esteem protection. We propose that this may be due to a bias in contingency detection which occurs when the probability of the action (i.e., of the potential cause) is high. Indeed, personal involvement might have been often confounded with the probability of acting, as participants who are more involved tend to act more frequently than those for whom the outcome is irrelevant and therefore become mere observers. We tested these two variables separately. In two experiments, the outcome was always uncontrollable and we used a yoked design in which the participants of one condition were actively involved in obtaining it and the participants in the other condition observed the adventitious cause-effect pairs. The results support the latter approach: Those acting more often to obtain the outcome developed stronger illusions, and so did their yoked counterparts.
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spelling pubmed-40139232014-06-16 Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement Yarritu, Ion Matute, Helena Vadillo, Miguel A. Exp Psychol Research Article The illusion of control consists of overestimating the influence that our behavior exerts over uncontrollable outcomes. Available evidence suggests that an important factor in development of this illusion is the personal involvement of participants who are trying to obtain the outcome. The dominant view assumes that this is due to social motivations and self-esteem protection. We propose that this may be due to a bias in contingency detection which occurs when the probability of the action (i.e., of the potential cause) is high. Indeed, personal involvement might have been often confounded with the probability of acting, as participants who are more involved tend to act more frequently than those for whom the outcome is irrelevant and therefore become mere observers. We tested these two variables separately. In two experiments, the outcome was always uncontrollable and we used a yoked design in which the participants of one condition were actively involved in obtaining it and the participants in the other condition observed the adventitious cause-effect pairs. The results support the latter approach: Those acting more often to obtain the outcome developed stronger illusions, and so did their yoked counterparts. Hogrefe Publishing 2013-08-16 2014 /pmc/articles/PMC4013923/ /pubmed/23948387 http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000225 Text en © 2013 Hogrefe Publishing.. Distributed under the Hogrefe OpenMind License [ http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/a000001] (http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/a000001)
spellingShingle Research Article
Yarritu, Ion
Matute, Helena
Vadillo, Miguel A.
Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement
title Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement
title_full Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement
title_fullStr Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement
title_full_unstemmed Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement
title_short Illusion of Control: The Role of Personal Involvement
title_sort illusion of control: the role of personal involvement
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4013923/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23948387
http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000225
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