The Purposeful-Action Sequence and the "Illusion of Control": The Effects of Foreknowledge and Target Involvement on Observers' Judgments of Others' Control Over Random Events
Abstract
This study examined how features of both the situation and the target's behavior may lead observers to infer that a target has exerted control over a random event-in this case a roll of the dice in a game of backgammon. Observers read stories about a game of backgammon in which the male target either strongly wished for one particular outcome of the roll of the dice or was indifferent and in which either the target rolled the dice himself or a third party rolled the dice for him. Results showed that when the target desired a particular consequence of the dice roll in advance and rolled the dice himself, observers were more likely to see him as having exerted influence over the dice roll, were willing to wager more that he could roll the same number again, and rated luck as less influential in producing the dice roll outcome. These results are discussed from the perspective of illusory perceptions of control that might explain why observers inferred an actor's intentions from the actor's production of an event generally regarded as random.
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1.
1 A similar concept has been described by others as skill orientation (Langer, 1975; Langer & Roth, 1975). We use the term purposeful-action sequence because we mean it to apply to the broad class of situations in which a person purposefully brings about an outcome. In some of those situations, such as opening a door, phenomenologically the ordinary person would not say that skill was involved, simply purpose.
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2 These cues are the same ones previously used by Wortman (1975).
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3 These subjects also participated in another study, reported elsewhere (Fleming & Darley, 1989, Experiment 1). The subjects who participated in the present study always did so following completion of the other experiment. Subjects were randomly assigned to treatment conditions in this experiment, irrespective of the condition to which they had been assigned in the first study. In order to ensure that participation in the first experiment did not exert any systematic influence on subjects' responses in this study, the treatment condition assignment from the earlier experiment was used as a blocking factor in all of the preliminary analyses from the present experiment. Results of these preliminary analyses showed that subjects' prior treatment condition assignment exerted no effects on the results from this study (all Fs < 1.50). As a result of these analyses, it was concluded that the two experiments were statistically independent, and the prior treatment condition variable was dropped from further analyses; it will not be reported in the present results.
Finally, because some of the subjects who participated in the present research had previously watched a videotape in which dice rolling was used, while others had not, dice rolling might have been more salient for some of these subjects than it was for others. This may suggest a potential problem in interpreting the results from the present research, especially because the vignettes that were used here concerned backgammon, a game in which dice rolling plays a major role. To minimize these potential differential salience effects, we assigned subjects to treatment conditions in the present study irrespective of their prior treatment condition assignment, and equal numbers of subjects from the various treatment conditions in the first experiment were assigned to each condition in the present study. As a result, any differential salience produced by the videotapes used in the earlier experiment was evenly distributed among the treatment conditions in this experiment. Because we were interested primarily in the relative differences among the treatment conditions in this study, rather than absolute estimates of influence, the potential impact of differential salience was considered inconsequential.
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4 Three of the items from the first questionnaire would have been redundant and were not included in the second set of measures.
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5 We found a similar pattern of results when we examined each question separately. Specifically, all of the five questions yielded significant main effects for both the foreknowledge and the target involvement manipulations, Fs(1, 118) ranging from 3.18 to 87.18, ps ranging from .05 to .0001, and Fs(1, 118) ranging from 5.90 to 45.60, ps ranging from .02 to .0001, respectively. The Foreknowledge × Target Involvement interaction was significant for Questions 2 and 4 (Fs[1, 118] = 4.29 and 10.18, ps < .02 and .001, respectively), marginal for Questions 1 and 3 (Fs[1, 118] = 2.25 and 1.89, ps < .11 and .16, respectively), and nonsignificant for Question 5 (F[1,118] = 1.35. In addition, our planned comparison prediction (that the planned-ahead/rolled-own target would be rated as exerting significantly more control over the outcomes of the dice rolls than the other targets) was significant for all five items, with Fs(1, 118) ranging from 22.31 to 133.34, all ps < .0001.
References
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Article first published: June 1990
Issue published: June 1990
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