Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow [96]
One of the pioneers in the psychology of control is the psychologist and amateur painter Ellen Langer, now a professor at Harvard. Years ago, when she was at Yale, Langer and a collaborator studied the effect of the feeling of control on elderly nursing home patients.36 One group was told they could decide how their rooms would be arranged and were allowed to choose a plant to care for. Another group had their rooms set up for them and a plant chosen and tended to for them. Within weeks the group that exercised control over their environment achieved higher scores on a predesigned measure of well-being. Disturbingly, eighteen months later a follow-up study shocked researchers: the group that was not given control experienced a death rate of 30 percent, whereas the group that was given control experienced a death rate of only 15 percent.37
Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability to recognize randomness. That clash is one of the principal reasons we misinterpret random events. In fact, inducing people to mistake luck for skill, or pointless actions for control, is one of the easiest enterprises a research psychologist can engage in. Ask people to control flashing lights by pressing a dummy button, and they will believe they are succeeding even though the lights are flashing at random.38 Show people a circle of lights that flash at random and tell them that by concentrating they can cause the flashing to move in a clockwise direction, and they will astonish themselves with their ability to make it happen. Or have two groups simultaneously compete in a similar enterprise—one strives for clockwise motion along the circle, and the other attempts to make the lights travel counterclockwise—and the two groups will simultaneously perceive the lights traveling around the circle in the direction of their intention.39
Langer showed again and again how the need to feel in control interferes with the accurate perception of random events. In one of her studies, participants were found to be more confident of success when competing against a nervous, awkward rival than when competing against a confident one even though the card game in which they competed, and hence their probability of succeeding, was determined purely by chance.40 In another study she asked a group of bright and well-educated Yale undergraduates to predict the results of thirty random coin tosses.41 The experimenters secretly manipulated the outcomes so that each student was correct exactly half the time. They also arranged for some of the students to have early streaks of success. After the coin tosses the researchers quizzed the students in order to learn how they assessed their guessing ability. Many answered as if guessing a coin toss were a skill they could cultivate. One quarter reported that their performance would be hampered by distraction. Forty percent felt that their performance would improve with practice. And when asked directly to rate their ability at predicting the tosses, the students who achieved the early streaks of success rated themselves better at the task than did the others even though the number of successes was the same for all the subjects.
In another clever experiment, Langer set up a lottery in which each volunteer received a sports trading card with a player’s picture on it.42 A card identical to one of the distributed cards was placed in a bag with the understanding that the participant whose card it matched would be declared the winner. The players were divided into two groups.