You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (29 page)

In blind taste tests, longtime smokers can’t tell their brand from any of the competitors and wine connoisseurs have a hard time telling $200 bottles from $20 ones. When presented with microwaved food from the frozen food section in the setting of a fine restaurant, most people never notice. Taste is subjective, which is another way of saying you are not so smart when it comes to choosing one product over another. All things being equal—you refer back to the advertising or the packaging or conformity with your friends and family. Presentation is everything.

Restaurants depend on this. Actually, just about every retailer depends on this. Presentation, price, good marketing, great service—it all leads to an expectation of quality. The actual experience at the end of all this is less important. As long as it isn’t total crap, your experience will match up with your expectations. A series of bad reviews will make the movie worse, and a heap of positive buzz can sway you in the other direction. You rarely watch films in a social vacuum with no input at all from critics and peers and advertisements. Your expectations are the horse, and your experience is the cart. You get this backward all the time because you are not so smart.

If you were to flip a coin and have it come up heads five times in a row, you would have a strong feeling deep in your gut the next toss would land on tails because it needed to. You think it must balance out.

This is called the gambler’s fallacy, or the Monte Carlo fallacy after a casino roulette game there in 1913 where black came up twenty-six times in a row. As you can imagine, the betting on red got out of hand as black came up over and over again, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen times. It was unbelievable, and in the minds of the gamblers the odds became astronomical that black would come up again; red just had to be next. Order must be restored. The excitement, the clamoring, and the noise as the ball bearing bounced across the numbers and colors was a great fit of delusion, because the odds never changed. It was just as likely to come up black, as it had twenty-six times before.

In gambling, whether it be on a slot machine, a roulette table, or in a game of cards, you have the tendency to see yourself as being lucky or unlucky, on a streak or in a rut. You say things like “The cards are about to turn.” You see a change of dealers as a positive sign, or you notice when people get up from the table and change the rotation of the deal. You get two out of three cherries and decide to go for another spin; you bet on red after black comes up ten times in a row, because you think red is due.

You might even have your own system devised to maximize your chances. You never sit in the outer seats in blackjack. You play only slot machines with real handles, or you blow on the dice before tossing them down the craps table. None of this, of course, has any real effect on the odds. The odds are fixed, but sometimes you think you can beat them, because you are not so smart.

When you watch someone play a slot machine for twenty minutes and then walk away, you might rush and take over because it seems as if the one-armed bandit is ready to pay off after so many losses, but it isn’t. This is the gambler’s fallacy, assuming the odds change based on the history of the outcomes so far. Sure, over a long enough period of time the odds will return to normal, but in the short run there is no way to outsmart random chance. If you flip a coin five hundred times, you’ll come across runs of heads and tails, some very long, on your way to an overall split of something close to 50 percent. If you just flip five times, the chances are better you’ll streak. This is how casinos always win; when you are winning, you find it difficult to walk away. The longer you play, however, the more the odds balance out, but you never know when a streak will begin or end.

Your ancestors lived long enough to meet a partner and have children one after the other, generation upon generation, for millions of years because they were great at pattern recognition. Predators, prey, friends, and foes all stood out from the background because your kin could see signals amid noise. Thanks to them, you’ve inherited the same powers, but you can’t turn them off. Your brain is always looking for patterns and sending little squirts of happy throughout your body when it finds them, but like faces in clouds, you often see patterns where none exist.

If you roll a die and it lands on one, and then roll again and get a two, and again and see a three, there is no force in the universe that is pushing the odds of a four out of the realm of random chance. But wouldn’t it feel like it
had
to be? That’s pattern recognition messing with your judgment. Each roll of a die is statistically independent of the next roll. Despite this, a study by James Henslin in 1967 showed people tend to throw harder when they need high numbers in a game of craps and toss gently when they want low ones. Since you briefly control the action, you start to feel like the control extends beyond just the toss, into the randomness that results.

Have you ever crossed your fingers while watching someone shoot for a free throw in basketball? Have you ever wished someone would get hurt, and then they did? In 2006, Emily Pronin and Sylvia Rodriguez at Princeton, along with Daniel Wegner and Kimberly McCarthy at Harvard, decided to see if they could study this behavior in the lab.

They had college students agree to participate in a study on psychosomatic symptoms, those that arise from merely thinking about being sick. This wasn’t really the goal of the study though. They actually wanted to see if under the right conditions normal people would believe their own thoughts could harm or help others.

Students were told they would be participating with a partner who was also a student, but the partner was really an actor. In one group, the actor was ten minutes late and wore a shirt that said STUPID PEOPLE SHOULDN’T BREED. He then proceeded to act rude and obnoxious to the experimenter and chewed gum with his mouth open. In the second group, the actor was pleasant and agreeable. The actors and the students pulled slips of paper out of a hat after reading about voodoo for a while. Both slips read “witch doctor,” but the students were told that one slip read “victim.” The actors then pretended to get the victim slips.

After all of this, the students were handed a voodoo doll and told to think of the other person as they stuck pins into it. Soon the actor started to complain of a headache. As you probably guessed by now, the people who were made to hate the actor more often reported they believed they had caused his pain than did the group who met with a polite confederate. Most people were skeptical, but the skepticism was diminished in the group who had been influenced to harbor negative thoughts about the actor. They saw an effect, and given all the possibilities, they saw their own thoughts as a possible cause.

The experimenters had people watch an athlete shoot basketballs into a basket in a second round of this study. The shooter was blindfolded with a trick blindfold he could secretly see through. In one group the researchers asked subjects to visualize the shooter making the shot for ten seconds before each time he launched the ball, and in the other group they asked the spectators to visualize the shooter lifting weights. They went so far as to have the player practice for a minute before they began and miss most of the shots.

The shooter tried to consistently make six out of eight tries, which he usually did. It was an astonishing feat for a person wearing a blindfold, and the two groups saw it differently. When questioned later, most people were skeptical, but those who had visualized the shooter making the basket were nearly twice as likely to say they believed they helped. As with any good magic trick, people wanted to believe that something otherworldly or telepathic might be afoot.

The researchers concluded most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, assuming their thoughts can influence things outside of their control. The people in the experiments knew they were in a study, so they likely were more skeptical than usual. This skepticism can dissolve away in the right conditions. If you are an avid sports fan, you can’t help but think your mental cheerlead-ing has some sort of positive effect on the game play. You take some credit when your team wins. You think you didn’t cheer hard enough if they lose. This illusion of control is pervasive enough to show up when teachers take credit for the success of their students or people in war zones start to accumulate lucky charms or engage in rituals they think will keep them alive. You ask people to send well wishes and positive thoughts when someone is sick.

In 1975, Ellen Langer conducted a series of studies in which she had people engage in games of chance both with and without some control over how the games were played. In a card game she had people play against both nervous and confident actors, and although the outcome was random, the subjects bet more when they believed their opponents were weak. She had people either pick their own lottery numbers or have them assigned. Those who picked their own numbers asked for more money than those who did not when she tried to buy back the tickets. She also had people flip coins and predict if they would land on heads or tails, but her team manipulated the outcomes. Some subjects were made to believe they guessed correctly fifteen times in row at the beginning, some fifteen times in a row at the end, and a third group fifteen times spread out over all thirty tosses. Those who thought they did well at the beginning said they felt like they could practice to improve their performance on future runs. Those who thought they guessed poorly at the beginning or saw their fifteen correct guesses as being random were less confident. The number of correct guesses were the same in all three groups, but the people who experienced streaks early on believed they had some sort of control. They thought they could beat the odds.

Langer concluded the deciding factors were the cues in the games that made the participants feel as if some skill was involved. Seeing patterns, becoming more familiar with the games, having options as to how to play—all contributed to the illusion of control. As obvious as it should have been, the subjects tended to see randomness as something they could outwit. This is why you are far more likely to participate in games of chance when there are some customizable features. Allowing you to choose your own lottery numbers or pick the numbers to bet on in roulette affects how you see the results. You assume the cold hand of fate becomes a tad less potent if you have some say in how you tempt it.

Flipping a coin or winning at poker are relatively simple in comparison to giant monsters of randomness like stock markets and wars, corporate mergers and family vacations, yet no matter how complex a situation can be, there will be people who assume they can predict and control it. Those who hold power become delusional about how far the power extends.

In 2008, Nathaneal Fast and Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford University conducted experiments designed to reveal how the illusion of control is created. They knew previous studies had shown those with high socioeconomic status or who came from cultures where power and influence were highly regarded were more likely to think they were better at predicting the future. People even fear death less when they have a college degree. What if, they asked, you were just asked to think about being powerful?

They divided subjects into three groups. One group wrote an essay about a time in their life in which they remembered being a leader. Another group wrote about a time when they were a follower. The third group served as a control and wrote about going to the supermarket. After the essays were finished, the groups played a game where they had to guess the roll of a pair of dice. If they guessed correctly, they would get $5. The catch was this: Choose yourself or another person to roll.

Sure enough, the illusion of control had been properly primed in the group that wrote about being leaders. A full 100 percent of them asked to roll the dice. In the subordinate group, 58 percent asked for control of the roll. The control group fell in between, with 69 percent asking to try their luck instead of handing the dice over to someone else. Of course the dice didn’t care who tossed them. You start to assume you are imbued with gifts others do not possess if you find yourself at the helm of a great and powerful ship. You make plans and decisions assuming randomness and chaos are for chumps. The illusion of control is a peculiar thing because it often leads to high self-esteem and a belief your destiny is yours for the making more than it really is. This over-optimistic view can translate into actual action, rolling with the punches and moving ahead no matter what. Often, this attitude helps lead to success. Eventually, though, most people get punched in the stomach by life. Sometimes, the gut-punch doesn’t come until after a long chain of wins, until you’ve accumulated enough power to do some serious damage. This is when wars go awry, stock markets crash, and political scandals spill out into the media. Power breeds certainty, and certainty has no clout against the unpredictable, whether you are playing poker or running a country.

Psychologists point out these findings do not suggest you should throw up your hands and give up. Those who are not grounded in reality, oddly enough, often achieve a lot in life simply because they believe they can and try harder than others. If you focus too long on your lack of power, you can slip into a state of learned helplessness that will whirl you into a negative feedback loop of depression. Some control is necessary or else you give up altogether. Langer proved this when studying nursing homes where some patients were allowed to arrange their furniture and water plants—they lived longer than those who had had those tasks performed by others.

Knowing about the illusion of control shouldn’t discourage you from attempting to carve a space for yourself out of whatever field you want to tackle. After all, doing nothing guarantees no results. But as you do so, remember most of the future is unforeseeable. Learn to coexist with chaos. Factor it into your plans. Accept that failure is always a possibility, even if you are one of the good guys; those who believe failure is not an option never plan for it. Some things are predictable and manageable, but the farther away in time an event occurs, the less power you have over it. The farther away from your body and the more people involved, the less agency you wield. Like a billion rolls of a trillion dice, the factors at play are too complex, too random to truly manage. You can no more predict the course of your life than you could the shape of a cloud. So seek to control the small things, the things that matter, and let them pile up into a heap of happiness. In the bigger picture, control is an illusion anyway.