Illusion of Control

The illusion of control is the tendency to overestimate one's own ability to control or influence outcomes that are actually determined by chance. The psychologist Ellen Langer demonstrated the effect in a series of 1975 experiments, finding for example that people were willing to sell a lottery ticket they had personally chosen for a higher price than one that had been assigned to them, even though the odds of winning were identical either way. The effect tends to be strengthened by factors that resemble features of a genuine skill-based situation, such as active involvement, choice, familiarity with the task and competition with a weak opponent, even when those features have no actual bearing on a chance-determined outcome.