Previous research suggests that choice causes an illusion of control—that it makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes, even when they are selecting among options that are functionally identical

Does Choice Cause an Illusion of Control? Joowon Klusowski, Deborah A. Small, Joseph P. Simmons. Psychological Science, January 5, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620958009

Abstract: Previous research suggests that choice causes an illusion of control—that it makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes, even when they are selecting among options that are functionally identical (e.g., lottery tickets with an identical chance of winning). This research has been widely accepted as evidence that choice can have significant welfare effects, even when it confers no actual control. In this article, we report the results of 17 experiments that examined whether choice truly causes an illusion of control (N = 10,825 online and laboratory participants). We found that choice rarely makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes—unless it makes the preferable outcomes actually more likely—and when it does, it is not because choice causes an illusion but because choice reflects some participants’ preexisting (illusory) beliefs that the functionally identical options are not identical. Overall, choice does not seem to cause an illusion of control.

Keywords: choice, illusion of control, open data, open materials, preregistered

General Discussion

Across 17 studies, we found no evidence that choice causes an illusion of control. Choice rarely made people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes when all options were functionally identical, whether we used different outcome measures (Studies 1–3), made the process visual (Study 4), varied the levels of uncertainty (Studies 5–7), or increased the subjectivity of the outcome evaluations (Studies 8 and 9). Choice had such effects only when it conferred actual control (Studies 10 and 11). In the rare cases in which choosers felt more likely to achieve preferable outcomes (Studies 12–15), choice seemed to reflect people’s preexisting beliefs rather than cause an illusion (Studies 16 and 17).

Our findings that a purported effect of choice results from an alternative account shares similarities with other reinvestigations of classic findings. Specifically, Chen and Risen (2010) showed that what looks like a choice-driven attitude change via cognitive-dissonance reduction in fact occurs because the choice is used to select people with different attitudes in the first place. Similarly, Tong, Feiler, and Ivantsova (2018) showed that what appears as choice-driven overoptimism via motivated reasoning emerges because choice reveals options that people already overestimate. Likewise, we revisited the highly influential and widely accepted phenomenon that choice causes an illusion of control. We found that such patterns rarely occur in cleanly designed experiments, and when they do, they are due to the choice reflecting people’s preexisting beliefs rather than causing an illusion. Together, this line of work suggests that some purported effects of choice may be due to the choice acting as a selection mechanism—among either different participants or different options—rather than as a cause of such effects.

Limitations

Despite our attempts to provide a comprehensive investigation, multiple questions remain.

First, our research does not address what might moderate the difference between the nonsignificant (Studies 1–11) and the significant (Studies 12–15) effects of choice. One possibility is that the probability estimates used in the latter studies are more sensitive than the other measures. In fact, our result from Study 15, which directly compared the probability estimates and multiple-choice measures, seems consistent with this conjecture. However, the nonsignificant coefficients in Studies 1 to 9 do not have a consistently positive sign, which is not what one would expect if the measures were merely less sensitive. Moreover, Studies 10 and 11 directly show that these measures were sensitive enough to respond when the choice made the preferable outcomes actually more likely. Another possibility is that evaluating multiple options in Studies 12 to 15 makes people more likely to develop normatively incorrect beliefs and hence more likely to show patterns that appear consistent with a choice-driven illusion of control. When one evaluates multiple options, there is a greater number of ways to express normatively incorrect beliefs (vs. only one way to express the normatively correct belief) than when one evaluates a single option, which might facilitate such beliefs. However, our results from Studies 12 to 14 indicate that the number of evaluated options does not always moderate the effect of choice. Although our research did not address these puzzling discrepancies, subsequent research could examine what may explain them.

Second, we do not know what led a subset of participants to demonstrate preexisting illusions, even when we explicitly informed them that all options have identical prospects (Studies 16 and 17). It is possible that certain individuals were prone to forming these beliefs because of past experiences, superstitious thinking, or distrust, but our research did not address what causes these beliefs or whether they are generalizable to people outside of our samples (Harris & Osman, 2012; Risen, 2016, Sharpe, Adair, & Roese, 1992). Future research could examine what individual or situational factors can lead people to develop such beliefs in the face of instructions that contradict them.

Third, our research focused on choice and thus did not address other factors that might truly cause an illusion of control. Previous research suggests additional factors that might cause an illusion of control (e.g., competition, familiarity, active involvement; Langer, 1975; Martinez et al., 2009). Although our research suggests that choice is unlikely to cause an illusion of control itself, it is possible that these other factors could.

In conclusion, past research suggests that choice can be powerful even without conferring actual control because it creates an illusion of control. Our research suggests a more sober perspective on the value of choice: Choice simply enables people to get what they want.