Illusion of control Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The illusion of control is the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.One simple form of this fallacy is found in casinos: when rolling dice in craps, it has been shown that people tend to throw harder for high numbers and lower for low numbers.
Under some circumstances, experimental subjects have been induced to believe that they could effect the outcome of a purely random coin toss. Subjects who guessed a series of coin tosses more successfully began to believe that they were actually better guessers, and believed that their guessing performance would be less accurate if they were distracted.
Interestingly, those suffering from clinical depression tend to show these effects to a much lesser degree. Some have hypothesized that effects like the illusion of control and overoptimism may actually be more psychologically healthy.
Many of the incarnations of this cognitive bias may be partially explained by the representativeness heuristic: people expect hard throws to reach higher numbers because they expect big outcomes to have big causes. Self-serving bias is an attributional bias that refers the tendency to overestimate one's own contributions to an outcome; in this way, the illusion of control may be an extrapolation of this bias.
The illusion of control has been studied extensively by Ellen Langer.
See also
clustering illusion, gambler's fallacy, list of cognitive biases.