Illusion of control
The tendency to believe we can influence outcomes that are really out of our hands, such as chance events.
A recent set of 17 experiments found that simply getting to choose, such as picking your own lottery ticket, rarely makes people feel more likely to win, so this illusion may be narrower than early studies suggested.
In everyday life
Some dice players throw harder when they want high numbers and more gently when they want low ones.
Waiting in a lift, you keep pressing the "close door" button, feeling it makes the doors shut sooner, though in many buildings that button does nothing.
Why your mind does this
To act at all, we need some belief that our choices matter and that we can pull them off. A bit of extra confidence gets us moving, keeps us going after setbacks, and protects our sense of self-worth and our standing in a group.
Its family, in 30 seconds: Confidence to act
How to spot it
Ask yourself whether your action can actually change the outcome, or just makes you feel involved.
How to counter it
Separate what you can influence from what is pure chance, and put your effort only into the first list.
Habits that catch it
- Run a pre-mortem
Imagine it is a year from now and the plan failed. List the likeliest reasons, then fix what you can today.
Same family: Confidence to act
- Overconfidence effect
- Social desirability bias
- Third-person effect
- False consensus effect
- Hard-easy effect
- Lake Wobegon effect
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- Egocentric bias
- Optimism bias
- Forer effect
- Barnum effect
- Self-serving bias
- Actor-observer bias
- Illusion of control
- Illusory superiority
- Fundamental attribution error
- Defensive attribution hypothesis
- Trait ascription bias
- Effort justification
- Risk compensation
- Peltzman effect
SourcesLanger (1975)·Wikipedia