The illusion of control is also well-known among athletes and sports players, who often feel that a given ritual or lucky charm is necessary for success ( Bleak and Frederick, 1998), or even in sport spectators, who tend to feel that supporting (or not) their favorite team through their TV at home contributes to the happy (or disastrous) score of the team ( Pronin et al., 2006). Illusions of control have also been reported in students trying to cure fictitious patients in a medical decision task ( Blanco et al., 2011), or in Internet users who are trying to obtain points in an otherwise uncontrollable computer game ( Matute et al., 2007). Many laboratory experiments have shown that college students develop the illusion that they are controlling uncontrollable lights or tones or lottery tickets (e.g., Langer, 1975 Alloy and Abramson, 1979 Wasserman et al., 1983 Matute, 1996 Aeschleman et al., 2003 Msetfi et al., 2005). The illusion of control is a universal phenomenon which has been observed to occur in most people and under many different conditions. ![]() The illusion of control can be defined as the tendency to believe that our behavior is the cause of the occurrence of desired events that occur independently of our own actions ( Alloy and Abramson, 1979 Taylor and Brown, 1988 Matute, 1996). People often fail to distinguish those events that are controllable from those that are not, which gives rise to the illusion of control ( Langer, 1975). ![]() Sometimes, however, perceived control is not real. It allows us to predict the consequences of our actions and the actions of others, which adaptively can imply the difference between surviving and perishing. The perception of control over important events in our lives has been studied from many different perspectives in psychology. This suggests (1) that the experimental tasks used in basic associative learning research could be used to detect illusions of control in gamblers in a more indirect way, as compared to introspective and domain-specific questionnaires and (2), that in addition to gambling-specific problems, pathological gamblers may have a higher-than-normal illusion of control in their daily life. The results showed that the illusion was significantly stronger in pathological gamblers than in a control undiagnosed sample. Thus, we tested them using a standard associative learning task which is known to produce illusions of control in most people under certain conditions. The illusion of control of pathological gamblers, however, could be a more general problem, affecting other aspects of their daily life. Pathological gambling has often been related to an illusion of control, but the assessment of the illusion has generally used introspective methods in domain-specific (i.e., gambling) situations. 2Department of Psychology, Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, SpainĪn illusion of control is said to occur when a person believes that he or she controls an outcome that is uncontrollable.1Department of Psychology, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain. ![]() Cristina Orgaz 1 Ana Estévez 2 Helena Matute 2*
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