Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK; Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, UK.
Cognition. 2020 Dec;205:104429. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104429. Epub 2020 Sep 16.
We frequently experience feelings of agency over events we do not objectively influence - so-called 'illusions of control'. These illusions have prompted widespread claims that we can be insensitive to objective relationships between actions and outcomes, and instead rely on grandiose beliefs about our abilities. However, these illusory biases could instead arise if we are highly sensitive to action-outcome correlations, but attribute agency when such correlations emerge simply by chance. We motion-tracked participants while they made agency judgements about a cursor that could be yoked to their actions or follow an independent trajectory. A combination of signal detection analysis, reverse correlation methods and computational modelling indeed demonstrated that 'illusions' of control could emerge solely from sensitivity to spurious action-outcome correlations. Counterintuitively, this suggests that illusions of control could arise because agents have excellent insight into the relationships between actions and outcomes in a world where causal relationships are not perfectly deterministic.
我们经常会对那些我们实际上无法客观影响的事件产生控制感，即所谓的“控制错觉”。这些错觉引发了广泛的观点，即我们可能对行为与结果之间的客观关系不敏感，而是依赖于对自身能力的夸大信念。然而，如果我们对行为-结果相关性非常敏感，但仅仅因为相关性是偶然出现的，就归因于控制感，那么这些错觉偏差就可能会出现。在参与者做出关于一个光标（可以与他们的动作关联，或者遵循独立的轨迹）的控制判断时，我们对其进行了动作追踪。信号检测分析、反向相关方法和计算建模的组合确实表明，控制的“错觉”仅能从对虚假的行为-结果相关性的敏感性中产生。反直觉的是，这表明控制错觉的产生是因为主体对在一个因果关系并非完全确定的世界中，行为与结果之间的关系具有出色的洞察力。
