The illusion of control: why you don't always get what you deserve

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In life, chance decides a lot, but it's too scary to admit it.

You and a colleague are fighting for a more promising position. At the most tense moment, when a rise is about to strike, your appendix gets inflamed and you go to the hospital for a week. After going to work, it turns out that the colleague has won - his place.

Few in such a situation will humbly accept defeat. Most likely, you will tear and throw, curse your body for such a setup and assume that a colleague has sent damage to you. These are the bitter consequences of the illusion of control: in fact, all plans were simply destroyed by chance.

What is the illusion of control

It is a cognitive bias that leads you to believe that your actions are more likely to succeed than they actually are.

The simplest example is a dice game. Observing the players, scientists noticed that when a person wants to get a large number, he throws the dice strongly, and when a smaller number - gently and carefully. The force of the throw does not affect the final value in any way, but people still make an effort to turn the dice in the right direction.

Why are we trying to control everything

This is due to the habit of acting in ordinary life. There are two types of situations: those that require skill - work, sports, relationships, and those where chance dominates - lottery, gambling, sports betting.

To get a good result in a situation where a lot depends on you, you need to make the right choice, compete, study the situation, and build a strategy. When the case determines the case, all these actions are useless. But since a person is accustomed to them, he continues to do something out of habit. At the same time, it seems to him that his actions increase the chances of success.

For example, a person is more willing to take risks if he does not believe that everything is a foregone conclusion. In the experiment, people were offered two types of bets: in one they made a bet before the scientists roll the dice and announce the result, in the other - after the throw, but before the announcement of the result.

In fact, people could not influence the outcome in any way: what difference does it make when to guess if you still can't see the bones? But in the first case, it seemed to the participants that they somehow control the events, while in the second, everything had already been decided - the bones fell out.

As a rule, this applies only to those situations where a person can do something. For example, choose a lottery ticket or come up with your own strategy for playing poker. But even if a person cannot influence the result at all, he still comes up with ways to control: calculating the best day for a deal from the stars or sacrificing a hamster to spirits.

Moreover, the belief in the absolute equality of action and consequences makes us believe in a just world and expect a reward for our merits.

Why we believe in justice

People tend to believe that everything comes back in life: good things happen to good people, and bad things get what they deserve.

In one experiment, participants were asked to rate the skills of two workers, one of whom was accidentally awarded. And people have always rated the latter as more capable.

In another study, participants observed how strangers were shocked for mistakes in assignments. To relieve the discomfort that they could not influence what was happening, the participants began to deny and devalue the suffering of the victims: to believe that they deserved it, in order to confirm their belief in a just world.

Such faith excludes the possibility of chance, which is always present in real life. Kind people get cancer and crash in traffic accidents, the cruel win the lottery, the stupid get a good job, the smart do not have money. The element of randomness is everywhere, but to admit it is to build an anxiety disorder and constantly suffer from the fear of the unknown.

When the illusion of control can get in the way

On the one hand, we need the illusion of control in order not to despair and continue to do something, despite the fact that at any moment everything can go to hell. On the other hand, it makes us do stupid things, believe in universal justice and blame ourselves for what we are not to blame.

For example, when working in a team, even the most talented leader depends on the actions of other people: what they will take, how they will understand the task, what circumstances will prevent them from fulfilling the plan. It is impossible to predict everything. But after failure, a person may, without evaluating their contribution and the work of chance, blame themselves for failure and earn fear of the future.

How not to fall into the trap

Here's what you can do to avoid suffering from the illusion of control:

1. Before starting any project, think about what depends only on you, what depends on other team members, and what is impossible to predict at all. This will help you prevent certain situations and, if you fail, maintain your peace of mind.
2. Stop inventing systems where they don't exist. Gambling, horoscopes, fortune telling, fatalism. Everyone wants certainty and security, but the world doesn't work that way. If the case is determined by chance and you want to protect yourself from losses, just do not participate in it.
3. Assess the situation before blaming yourself. In case of failure, analyze what went wrong and what exactly influenced the outcome of the case. If this happened through your fault - oversight, too lazy to check, forgot - take a lesson for the future. If chance gets involved, just admit it happens.