#WHAT IS ILLUSION REAL PLAY SKIN#
Also, during the experiment, participants were hooked up to a machine that measured their galvanic skin response-basically, how much they were sweating. Meanwhile, people in the “No Perceived Control” group (NPC) weren’t given an out if they didn’t like the noise they just had to sit through it, for 24 minutes. Some of the participants, the “Perceived Control” group (PC), were given a button they could push to communicate that they wanted the noise to stop (although the experimenters made it clear that “we’d prefer that you do not”). In this experiment, the researchers told participants that they were doing a study on “the effects of different noise levels on your performance on some simple tasks,” and then made them proofread passages while a highly annoying buzzer sounded at random intervals in the background. One classic study illustrating this was conducted in 1971 by Glass and colleagues. Over the years, a lot of research has shown that we experience things very differently depending on whether or not we feel like we have control over them. But why are we vulnerable to it in the first place? In short, there are a lot of things that can trigger the illusion of control. People bet more money when they were cutting cards against someone who seemed awkward and unconfident, even though skill didn’t matter in this game they assigned a higher value to lottery tickets they had picked themselves, suggesting they believed these tickets were more likely to win and they became more confident in their odds of winning a lottery they more time they spent thinking about it. Langer found that people’s confidence in their chances of winning was influenced by a bunch of different factors-none of which actually had anything to do with their chances of winning. 2 In each experiment, participants had to participate in some sort of game that was governed by chance, including cutting cards and entering a lottery. In her original paper, she conducted six different experiments to see where and when this bias would appear. “The illusion of control” was coined by Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist. And yet, we are very susceptible to feeling like we do have some influence. This illusion crops up in cases where something is very clearly random, such as the lottery, and in situations where we obviously do not have any effect on the outcome, such as sports matches. The illusion of control is one of many cognitive biases that throws a wrench into this idea. We like to think of ourselves as rational decision-makers, carefully making choices based on data and logic.