Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Joe McCormick. This week Rob and I are out,
Speaker 1: so in our Tuesday and Thursday slots, we are bringing
Speaker 1: you a couple of older episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind, episodes from the vault, continuing the series we
Speaker 1: started this past Saturday. Today's episode is part two of
Speaker 1: our series on the illusion of control. This originally aired
Speaker 1: on February tenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: We hope you enjoy.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 2: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 1: And I am Joe McCormick, and today we are back
Speaker 1: to continue our series on the psychology concept known as
Speaker 1: the illusion of control. This is a cognitive illusion, or
Speaker 1: a common error in thinking and judgment, in which we
Speaker 1: overestimate the amount of control we have over outcomes in
Speaker 1: the world, even outcomes that are in no way determined
Speaker 1: by our actions. So if you haven't heard part one,
Speaker 1: you should probably go back and listen to that first.
Speaker 1: But for a brief recap, we talked about some examples
Speaker 1: last time of the illusion of control. One would be
Speaker 1: the belief that you can control your chances of winning
Speaker 1: at a slot machine based on you know, who presses
Speaker 1: the button and how, and actually you know, it's a
Speaker 1: purely random process.
Speaker 2: There's no like.
Speaker 1: You know, you can't be like better at working a
Speaker 1: slot machine. But other examples would include like the belief
Speaker 1: that you can improve your chances of hitting a desired
Speaker 1: number on a dice throw by concentrating before the throw.
Speaker 2: I do this, yeah, yeah, and yeah. I was going
Speaker 2: to save this for a listener mail, but I go
Speaker 2: ahead mention it now heard from a listener on Discord
Speaker 2: who pointed out, this is I believe it's passy cish.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, so you
Speaker 2: use your name. But anyway. They pointed out that in
Speaker 2: Dungeons and Dragons there's an additional element here that we
Speaker 2: didn't touch on, and that's the drama of rolling your dice,
Speaker 2: of rolling that d twenty, doing that saving throw. You
Speaker 2: may put some concentration into it, not because not as
Speaker 2: much because you're hoping to influence the role, but because
Speaker 2: this matters, This is an important role. Perhaps the life
Speaker 2: or death of your character may hinge on the outcome,
Speaker 2: and you're going to play it up a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a socially performative drum roll, but I think undeniably
Speaker 2: there's off also that sense of like, all right, NAT twenty,
Speaker 2: let's do it.
Speaker 1: I can do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Other examples would be like the belief that you can
Speaker 1: influence the outcome of a sporting event hundreds of miles
Speaker 1: away by wearing a lucky charm. We talked about the
Speaker 1: childhood belief that you can control gameplay on video game
Speaker 1: with like a controller that's not plugged in, or by
Speaker 1: moving the joystick on a on an arcade cabinet you
Speaker 1: haven't put any quarters in. Yeah, yeah, And we also
Speaker 1: ended up talking about an influential early paper on the
Speaker 1: illusion of control from nineteen seventy five called the Illusion
Speaker 1: of Control in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Speaker 1: by the American psychologist Ellen J. Langer. And for a
Speaker 1: quick summary of this paper, it used experiments involving games
Speaker 1: of chance with superficial elements inserted from games of skill
Speaker 1: to see if people would behave consistent with a belief
Speaker 1: that they had impossible levels of control over chance outcomes,
Speaker 1: and this study found that yes. In its experiments people
Speaker 1: did behave in a way that was consistent with overestimating
Speaker 1: their level of control over chance determined outcomes. However, the
Speaker 1: thing about this paper was the experiments did use indirect
Speaker 1: methods of studying the phenomenon, so these results came with
Speaker 1: some limitations that I'll describe in just a minute. I
Speaker 1: wanted to learn some more about the history of how
Speaker 1: the illusion of control has been studied, because there have
Speaker 1: been tons of papers on this, tons of experiments, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of general overview, so I turned
Speaker 1: to a very helpful book chapter by a psychologist named
Speaker 1: Suzanne C. Thompson. The chapter is called Illusions of Control
Speaker 1: and it appears in a book called Cognitive Illusions, edited
Speaker 1: by Rudiger F. Pohl, published by Psychology Press twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: though the version I read seems to have been an
Speaker 1: updated edition because it included references to more recent studies,
Speaker 1: such as one paper from twenty twenty one. So in
Speaker 1: this overview, Thompson uses a broader definition of the illusion
Speaker 1: of control than Langer did. Langer's definition was specifically about
Speaker 1: seeking desired outcomes in chance determined events, to Thompson says, instead,
Speaker 1: quote illusions of control occur when individuals overestimate their personal
Speaker 1: influence over an outcome, So that that's a more general
Speaker 1: way of stating it. You know, maybe your influence could
Speaker 1: be good or bad. It could be in getting something
Speaker 1: you want or in something you don't want.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this broader definition could apply to like various
Speaker 2: games that have some sort of random element that you
Speaker 2: truly can't control. For you may be really great at
Speaker 2: the game, but you have this added level of illusion
Speaker 2: of control that thinks that you can you can definitely
Speaker 2: navigate any random occurrence. And I guess you could also
Speaker 2: apply it even to interpersonal relationships, you know, thinking that
Speaker 2: you have more control over other people in your circle
Speaker 2: than you do.
Speaker 1: Right, because this idea would also apply to things where
Speaker 1: you do have some control, but you're imagining you have
Speaker 1: more control than you actually do. And Thompson says that
Speaker 1: since the origins of this research in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: there have been basically three different ways of experimentally demonstrating
Speaker 1: that people experience or control. There's like three branches of
Speaker 1: experiments on this tree. So approach number one that she
Speaker 1: outlines is the main example. Here is the original research
Speaker 1: by Ellen Langer, which we already described in the last episode.
Speaker 1: This general strategy involves gauging people's guesses about their likelihood
Speaker 1: of success in chance games that have superficial elements of
Speaker 1: skill games introduced. So to emphasize again, this approach does
Speaker 1: not actually directly measure people's perceptions of control. Instead, these
Speaker 1: experiments would kind of infer it from their behavior in
Speaker 1: a game. So you see that people bet more money.
Speaker 1: That suggests they think they have more control over the outcome,
Speaker 1: But it's possible there's another factor operating there, so there's
Speaker 1: less certainty that you're testing for the variable you're actually
Speaker 1: looking for. And Thompson explains some other ways of doing
Speaker 1: these kind of tests apart from like Langer's original experimental design.
Speaker 1: One thing she talks about is a type of study
Speaker 1: that you could call observer participant discrepancies. So an example
Speaker 1: of this would be you get a test group, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a classroom of students or whatever, and you split
Speaker 1: them up into pairs, and you give each pair of
Speaker 1: subjects a random number generating apparatus, maybe a die that's
Speaker 1: a simple one. So in each pair, there's one person
Speaker 1: who gets to roll the die and the other person
Speaker 1: records all the numbers that they roll, and participants do
Speaker 1: this like twenty times, and then across the whole test group,
Speaker 1: whichever pair in the group has the highest total sum
Speaker 1: of rolls wins a cash prize, and both subjects in
Speaker 1: each pair guess their likelihood of winning before the game.
Speaker 1: Thompson says that if you try to replicate this sort
Speaker 1: of experiment with students, you will usually find that subjects,
Speaker 1: on average rate their chance of winning a little bit
Speaker 1: higher if they're the one rolling the die than if
Speaker 1: they're the one recording the roles. Again, that should not
Speaker 1: make a difference. So even though we both rationally know
Speaker 1: that the outcome is random, it just feels a little
Speaker 1: luckier if I'm the one doing it. However, and I
Speaker 1: thought this was interesting. Thompson says that some research has
Speaker 1: found that this effect can be reduced or even neutralized
Speaker 1: completely by the context of the game, for example, if
Speaker 1: it takes place in a classroom that has previously discussed
Speaker 1: the correct way to estimate probability on games like this.
Speaker 1: And that was interesting to me because it made me
Speaker 1: think about how people overcome cognitive biases and cognitive illusions.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes the unfortunate fact is that simply being
Speaker 1: aware of a cognitive illusion, like knowing that sometimes our
Speaker 1: brains have a certain kind of bias, is not sufficient
Speaker 1: to keep us from falling for that bias. So you
Speaker 1: can know about the tricks your brain plays, and you
Speaker 1: can fall for them anyway. It happens to all of us,
Speaker 1: but in a case.
Speaker 2: And this obviously applies to many other aspects of the
Speaker 2: human psyche as well. I mean awareness, self awareness is
Speaker 2: often the first step, but that doesn't mean you've completely
Speaker 2: defeated the illusion or illusion that you are having to
Speaker 2: deal with.
Speaker 1: Exactly. This is true for everybody, but in other cases,
Speaker 1: and it varies from case to case. So in some cases,
Speaker 1: research has shown that we can be successfully inoculated mentally
Speaker 1: from certain irrational tendencies by being made aware of them,
Speaker 1: and this seems to be one of those cases. You
Speaker 1: can sometimes neutralize illusions of control just by like having
Speaker 1: a context in which people have already been reminded about
Speaker 1: how probabilities work. And I think that's interesting because you
Speaker 1: might naturally assume that the variable in resistance to cognitive
Speaker 1: illusions like the illusion of control is the person you know,
Speaker 1: like permanent features of a person's personality, and you might
Speaker 1: be inclined to think like well, a more rational person
Speaker 1: is better able to overcome their biases and think clearly.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if that's always the case. I
Speaker 1: wonder if it's really more about setting and context. Maybe
Speaker 1: setting and context are equally, if not more, powerful predictors
Speaker 1: of how well people overcome cognitive illusions. In other words,
Speaker 1: does like currently being in the setting of a statistics
Speaker 1: class inoculate you against the illusion of control better than
Speaker 1: being a person who is generally aware of cognitive illusions.
Speaker 1: I don't know the answer for sure there, but it
Speaker 1: seems worth considering rather than just defaulting to the explanation
Speaker 1: of permanent internal personality based differences. But anyway, so to
Speaker 1: move on, That was approach number Experimental approach number two
Speaker 1: is different. In this type of experiment, you give subjects
Speaker 1: a laboratory task where researchers can program exactly how much
Speaker 1: control the subject actually has. And in many of these
Speaker 1: experiments the subject has zero control. Sometimes they have more control,
Speaker 1: and then you ask the subject how much control they
Speaker 1: think they had. So an experiment typical of this type
Speaker 1: is one that was done by Alloy and Abrahamson in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine, in which subjects would be given a
Speaker 1: button to press and they're told to see if they
Speaker 1: can use that button to control whether or not a
Speaker 1: light comes on, and then they're asked to judge at
Speaker 1: the end what amount of control they think the button
Speaker 1: had over the light. In reality, the light had no
Speaker 1: relationship to whether the button was pressed or not. It
Speaker 1: was simply programmed to come on at some fixed percentage
Speaker 1: of the trials with each subject, and unsurprisingly, even though
Speaker 1: it had nothing to do with whether the button was
Speaker 1: pushed or not or when subjects broadly thought they had
Speaker 1: some amount of control, and experiments when the light came
Speaker 1: on more frequently but again unconnected to the button, caused
Speaker 1: people to believe that they had more control over the light. So,
Speaker 1: at least in some cases, it seems like success at
Speaker 1: getting a desired outcome makes people more likely to believe
Speaker 1: they have control over that outcome, whether or not they do.
Speaker 1: And while at the risk of over extrapolating from a
Speaker 1: very contained laboratory outcome, this does sort of suggest to
Speaker 1: me connections to behaviors in the world, Like you know,
Speaker 1: when somebody has very good fortune at a particular juncture,
Speaker 1: they're like, yep, that was all me. Later, Thompson describes
Speaker 1: another version of this kind of test. This one is
Speaker 1: called the computer screen on set task. And so in
Speaker 1: this test, like you sit in front of a computer
Speaker 1: and you're looking at a screen, and the screen will
Speaker 1: sequentially produce a series of forty images, and all of
Speaker 1: these images are either a green X or a red O.
Speaker 1: And with each new screen, you can choose to press
Speaker 1: a button or not press a button, and your goal
Speaker 1: is to make the green X appear as many times
Speaker 1: as possible. So people will be trying to figure out
Speaker 1: if there's some pattern like pressing the button or not,
Speaker 1: you know, pressing it or not in what sequence, et
Speaker 1: cetera that'll make the green exes appear. Actually, once again,
Speaker 1: the button has no relation whatsoever to whether the symbols
Speaker 1: appear on the screen. The button doesn't do anything. And
Speaker 1: you can vary what percentage of each symbol the subjects get.
Speaker 1: At the end of the test, you have them rate,
Speaker 1: on a scale of zero to one hundred how much
Speaker 1: control they think they had over what appeared on the screen.
Speaker 1: People who got the green X seventy five percent of
Speaker 1: their random screens believed that they had a lot of
Speaker 1: control over the display.
Speaker 2: This is also interesting to think of in terms of
Speaker 2: the sample we discussed in the last episode about as
Speaker 2: a child thinking you had control over a video game. Yeah,
Speaker 2: maybe this doesn't play out. I'd be interested to hear
Speaker 2: from folks much younger than me. But looking back on
Speaker 2: the video games that I was doing this on, like
Speaker 2: these were the old school arcade games, where it was
Speaker 2: maybe a little more directly comparable to just pressing a
Speaker 2: button and seeing a random O or an AX on
Speaker 2: the screen, Like, there is a lot more room to
Speaker 2: ask the question, am I controlling it? I have fifty
Speaker 2: percent chance I am.
Speaker 1: In a way, I'm almost nostalgic for that mindset, Like
Speaker 1: there's something kind of beautiful about the ambiguity of wondering
Speaker 1: if you're controlling what's happening on the screen. I feel
Speaker 1: like maybe I'm wrong about this. I feel like I
Speaker 1: wouldn't fall for that now, but I kind of wish
Speaker 1: I could, because it suggests a more I don't know,
Speaker 1: just kind of like totally radically opened state of mind
Speaker 1: in which anything is possible, a more magical way of
Speaker 1: relating to the world.
Speaker 2: It's a cheaper way to go about going to the arcade.
Speaker 2: You know, I wonder what they would think if there
Speaker 2: was an adult who regularly came into the arcade and
Speaker 2: they're like, oh, man, he never spends anything. He just
Speaker 2: stands at the machines and pretends to play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just toggling the joystick at the demo.
Speaker 2: It's great. You gotta sell this guy's nachos or something.
Speaker 1: Okay, anyway, that's approach number two, these very tightly controlled
Speaker 1: laboratory experiments. Approach number three is different. Once again, you
Speaker 1: get people to report their judgments of control in real
Speaker 1: life scenarios. An example here is a study by McKenna
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety three. Not that McKenna different, Chaya, I
Speaker 1: think this is Frank P.
Speaker 2: McKenna.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Ask participants to rate the likelihood that, compared to
Speaker 1: other drivers, they would experience an auto collision, and they
Speaker 1: were asked to judge this when imagining themself as the
Speaker 1: driver versus imagining themselves as the passenger. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most
Speaker 1: people thought that accidents would be relatively less likely if
Speaker 1: they were the driver.
Speaker 2: This absolutely matches up with my experience. You know, even
Speaker 2: when I'm in the car with a driver that I
Speaker 2: definitely trust and even know that they are a better
Speaker 2: driver than me. You know, maybe they have more experience
Speaker 2: or they've undergone training. They're still like that gut feeling
Speaker 2: of like I'm not actually in control. I can't hit
Speaker 2: the brake when I see the brake lights ahead getting closer,
Speaker 2: and therefore I feel like a little more anxious about
Speaker 2: the whole scenario oftentimes, like realizing that this is irrational,
Speaker 2: but feeling it.
Speaker 1: Nonetheless, I totally relate to that. I feel that too,
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's not like I actually think this
Speaker 1: other person is a more dangerous driver than me. I
Speaker 1: just it's just hard to get over that feeling.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the second study in this mckinna paper, participants were
Speaker 1: asked about specific types of collisions, those that would seem
Speaker 1: to involve either more or less driver control. So they
Speaker 1: were talking about like rear ending someone versus being rear
Speaker 1: ended versus having a tire blowout, And the idea was
Speaker 1: rear ending someone is generally thought to be largely subject
Speaker 1: to driver control. Of course, we know that there are
Speaker 1: factors that other factors that can intervene breaks could fail whatever,
Speaker 1: whereas getting rear ended seems to be out of the
Speaker 1: driver's hands, and people were highly likely to say that
Speaker 1: they were less likely to have the type of collision
Speaker 1: in which the driver was in control. Has high control,
Speaker 1: So I am much less likely than other people to
Speaker 1: rear end someone. Whether it's me or someone else, makes
Speaker 1: less difference in getting rear ended. Quote. Thus, people show
Speaker 1: illusory control over avoiding an accident by assuming that they
Speaker 1: will be able to exert control that others cannot.
Speaker 2: And I guess this is what's in play when you
Speaker 2: see drivers, so many drivers just riding bumpers through terrifyingly
Speaker 2: fast traffic all the time, like they just maybe they
Speaker 2: have just heightened control over things. I would tend to
Speaker 2: doubt it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would be dangerous if someone else did it,
Speaker 1: But I can handle it.
Speaker 2: I alone can weave in and out of traffic and
Speaker 2: make it to my destination two minutes ahead of schedule.
Speaker 1: So this type of experiment is taken to show that
Speaker 1: people have an illusion of control when they consider themselves
Speaker 1: relative to other people. A driver has some degree of
Speaker 1: control over whether they end up in a collision. On average,
Speaker 1: people think that they are better able to avoid that
Speaker 1: outcome than other people are, and so looking back over
Speaker 1: these three methodologies, Thompson says, you know, each of them
Speaker 1: have strengths and weaknesses. So approach number one kind of
Speaker 1: the Langer approach. The pros are that it uses realistic
Speaker 1: situations that people engage in every day, like lottery drawings
Speaker 1: and games and stuff. And also it has the pro
Speaker 1: that the indirect measure can help detect an illusory belief
Speaker 1: in control that does in reality guide behavior, but which
Speaker 1: people might resist admits if they were asked directly, and
Speaker 1: that does seem big to me. It helps avoid like
Speaker 1: people tailoring their answers to avoid embarrassment. Cons on the
Speaker 1: other hand, are it's indirect, so it doesn't test whether
Speaker 1: control is really the deciding factor. You kind of have
Speaker 1: to infer that and wonder if other factors could be
Speaker 1: contributing as well. Approach number two the laboratory experiments like
Speaker 1: Alloy and Abramson with like you know, the light coming
Speaker 1: on or the greenexes and red o's on the computer screen.
Speaker 1: The pros of that are that the dependent variable is
Speaker 1: definitely judgment of control, like it's a very tightly controlled experiment.
Speaker 1: Cons would be that these tasks do not have what
Speaker 1: psychologists call external validity, So they're like weird tasks with
Speaker 1: no close analogy in our day to day lives, so
Speaker 1: they might not be telling us how people would actually
Speaker 1: behave in reality. They might just be like producing a
Speaker 1: weird kind of behavior that's specific to the lab task.
Speaker 1: Approach Number three the self reporting of control judgments about
Speaker 1: everyday activities like driving. Ala McKenna pros this does have
Speaker 1: external validity cons are it relies on reflective self reporting,
Speaker 1: which can be subject to all kinds of biases you
Speaker 1: know when you're trying to when you ask people to
Speaker 1: self report on their own judgments about their lives. However,
Speaker 1: Thompson says that a strength of illusion of control research
Speaker 1: is that even though these methodologies all have their strengths
Speaker 1: and weaknesses, they mostly point to a similar conclusion, which
Speaker 1: is the fact that on average, people believe we have
Speaker 1: more control over outcomes than we actually do. And there
Speaker 1: do seem to be some doubts about in exactly what
Speaker 1: scenarios this applies and what causes it, but the core
Speaker 1: finding seems fairly robust. Though I'm going to talk about
Speaker 1: one paper later in this episode that has some theoretical
Speaker 1: criticisms of how this research and how the experimental findings
Speaker 1: are framed. So it seems there probably is an illusion
Speaker 1: of control, especially for outcomes that we have very little
Speaker 1: control over. But it would be very surprising if people
Speaker 1: showed an illusory belief in control over all variables in
Speaker 1: all situations equally. So there has to be some more
Speaker 1: granular research on like when illusions of control happen, Like
Speaker 1: what are the kinds of things that we think we
Speaker 1: have more control of than others, more illusory control over
Speaker 1: than others, And what kind of situations or states can
Speaker 1: we be in that heighten this illusion? And to continue
Speaker 1: with Thompson's overview, Thompson highlights seven variables that have been
Speaker 1: studied and found to affect the illusion of control. This
Speaker 1: list does not mean that these are the only factors
Speaker 1: influencing it. It's just that these have been studied well
Speaker 1: enough to discuss in this book chapter. So the first
Speaker 1: one is skill related factors. Now, this was a major
Speaker 1: part of the original nineteen seventy five paper by Langer.
Speaker 1: A lot of studies have found that if a situation
Speaker 1: has features we associate with with dependence on skill, we're
Speaker 1: more likely to experience an illusion of control and Examples
Speaker 1: of these features could include quote, familiarity, making choices, active
Speaker 1: engagement with the material, competition, and four knowledge. So we
Speaker 1: talked about several of these in the previous episode. For example, familiarity,
Speaker 1: you know you might be more inclined to think you
Speaker 1: have control over the outcome of a chance game if
Speaker 1: you are familiar with the game, or if there are
Speaker 1: elements of the game that are familiar to you. And
Speaker 1: this is generally true of skill based games, but wouldn't
Speaker 1: affect chance based games. One of these variables though, Actually
Speaker 1: there was a twenty twenty one paper that casts some
Speaker 1: doubt over whether it affects illusions of control, and that
Speaker 1: variable is choice. So the original idea is that if
Speaker 1: you have a choice to make that gives you illusions
Speaker 1: of control. An example would be a lottery type game.
Speaker 1: So imagine a game where you buy a lottery ticket.
Speaker 1: The ticket has a random series of numbers on it,
Speaker 1: and you win a prize if the winning number matches
Speaker 1: your ticket. Now consider the same game, except you get
Speaker 1: to pick your ticket numbers. Maybe you can use your
Speaker 1: lucky number, which of course is the ISBN. For the
Speaker 1: novelization of Halloween three season of the Witch by Jack Martin.
Speaker 2: To your number, that's the one you play.
Speaker 1: It's got to be what could be a luckier number? Happy,
Speaker 1: Happy Halloween. Now, of course, in a fair lottery like,
Speaker 1: whatever the number is, it makes no difference whatsoever to
Speaker 1: your chance of winning. Winning numbers are selected randomly. No
Speaker 1: number has a higher chance of victory than any other.
Speaker 1: And yet the fact that you get to choose your
Speaker 1: number might make it seem like there's some element of
Speaker 1: skill involved in this game, and thus increases your illution
Speaker 1: of control. Langer did find this kind of result in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy five paper. However, Thompson mentions that this
Speaker 1: particular metric of choice specifically has been contradicted by recent research,
Speaker 1: a paper by Klousowski at All in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: which found that choice did not reliably cause an illusion
Speaker 1: of control.
Speaker 2: Okay, Like the scenario I'm instantly thinking of would be
Speaker 2: like the classic magician game of Like, Okay, draw a
Speaker 2: card from this deck, and now I'm going to guess it.
Speaker 2: Assuming in this case that you are the magician, but
Speaker 2: you have actually absolutely no magic up your sleeve, no trick.
Speaker 2: You're just going completely off of chance. You know, you
Speaker 2: have a certain percentage chance of guessing it right because
Speaker 2: there are only so many cards in that deck versus, Okay,
Speaker 2: you draw a card at random from this deck. I'll
Speaker 2: draw a card at random from this deck. Do you
Speaker 2: think we're going to have the same card like by
Speaker 2: being able to pick a car by saying I believe
Speaker 2: you have the Ace of Spades in your hand when
Speaker 2: it's just completely random, would you feel confident in making
Speaker 2: that choice now? I feel like you would be more
Speaker 2: confident in making that choice if the other person picked
Speaker 2: their card, because then you can potentially overestimate your ability
Speaker 2: to guess the mind of the individual. Okay, this is
Speaker 2: the kind of person's going to choose a king or
Speaker 2: a queen, or they can try and outsmart me by,
Speaker 2: you know, choosing a two or three something that isn't
Speaker 2: superficially interesting.
Speaker 1: I guess that would introduce other elements because it would introduce, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if the other person picking a card
Speaker 1: in the scenario is technically a competitor. But we did
Speaker 1: talk last time about how like competition in some experiments
Speaker 1: seem to increase the illusion of control. And I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting scenario because it adds these other variables too.
Speaker 1: My intuition is that that would increase illusions of control.
Speaker 1: It feels like it would for me, it would it
Speaker 1: would falsely increase my belief that I could control the
Speaker 1: outcome even though I can't. And just to go again
Speaker 1: on my intuitions, it would seem to me that the
Speaker 1: choices could increase illusions of control, like if I get
Speaker 1: to pick the lottery numbers, it would feel more likely
Speaker 1: like I had a better chance of winning. But again,
Speaker 1: this twenty twenty one study found that in some circumstances, no,
Speaker 1: that's not the case. So it might It might have
Speaker 1: to do with just like how people are primed to
Speaker 1: think about the task they're about to do, you know,
Speaker 1: like you say, as we talked about earlier, like, are
Speaker 1: you given some kind of hint of remembering how probabilities
Speaker 1: actually work as you're engaging in the task.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I don't know.
Speaker 1: But anyway, So to come back to more factors that
Speaker 1: can apparently influence it. According to experiments, one factor is
Speaker 1: success or failure emphasis. This is the second thing Thompson lists.
Speaker 1: So does the task or the context highlight the idea
Speaker 1: of success or failure? One example, here would be early
Speaker 1: streaks in a game where you repeatedly guess or draw something.
Speaker 1: So experiments have found if you let somebody gamble on
Speaker 1: calling coin tosses again, coin tosses something that in reality
Speaker 1: might not be truly perfectly random, it is close enough
Speaker 1: to random. It's basically random, so you should not have
Speaker 1: any skill at calling a coin toss. But if people
Speaker 1: are gambling on coin tosses and they have an early
Speaker 1: string of successes at making the right call, this will
Speaker 1: apparently increase the illusion of control relative to subjects who
Speaker 1: have an early string of failures. So if you lose
Speaker 1: a lot at the beginning, outcomes feel random. If you
Speaker 1: win a lot at the beginning, you think I'm doing this.
Speaker 1: In reality, it's equally random either way. But we can
Speaker 1: get tricked into thinking that we have control because we've
Speaker 1: been winning and it just seems like winning is happening,
Speaker 1: so somehow I must be making it happen.
Speaker 2: See feel rather opposite in Dungeons and Dragons. If like
Speaker 2: the first couple of D twenty rolls of the night
Speaker 2: are really high for me, or or heaven forbid their
Speaker 2: natural twenties on things that don't matter, I have this
Speaker 2: sinking suspicion that I'm just doomed when we get to
Speaker 2: actual combat because that's when the ones are going to
Speaker 2: come out.
Speaker 1: That is really funny. I've had the same feeling before.
Speaker 1: It's almost as bad as like rolling a critical fail
Speaker 1: on something important is rolling a critical success on something
Speaker 1: that doesn't matter at all? Ye feel like I've wasted it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, decks, check to see if you can pick up
Speaker 2: a stick and it's a natural twenty. It's like, all right,
Speaker 2: I needed to get like a three on that probably.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So on the other hand, though, in this success
Speaker 1: failure thing, failure apparently sometimes neutralizes illusory beliefs of control.
Speaker 1: So in some studies they have found this is only
Speaker 1: true if failure is clear and explicit. If there's like
Speaker 1: ambiguity and the feedback and it's not one hundred percent
Speaker 1: clear whether you have failed or not, the illusion of
Speaker 1: control can persist.
Speaker 2: All right, Yeah, a natural one on your D twenty
Speaker 2: row Definitely, I think we'll knock that illusion out of place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay. Third factor that seems to influence it
Speaker 1: need or desire for outcome. So evidence shows that how
Speaker 1: much you want an outcome can increase the illusion of
Speaker 1: control over the process of getting it. So an example
Speaker 1: would be in a computer screen on set task. So
Speaker 1: we talked about that earlier. That's the one with the
Speaker 1: green exes and the red o's where people are pressing
Speaker 1: a button trying to figure out if they can control
Speaker 1: making the green exes appear on the screen. In this
Speaker 1: kind of experiment, people believed that they had more They
Speaker 1: had significantly more control if they received cash payments proportional
Speaker 1: to the number of greenexes that appeared compared to people
Speaker 1: who did the same task but did not get a
Speaker 1: cash reward. There was no cash involve And remember in
Speaker 1: this experiment either way, subjects have zero control at all.
Speaker 1: A study by Buyer at All in nineteen ninety five
Speaker 1: found a similar kind of thing that the illusion of
Speaker 1: control was increased for a random lottery with a food
Speaker 1: reward if people getting a hamburger if the subject was hungry,
Speaker 1: compared to subjects who were not hungry. So like, if
Speaker 1: the reward is food and you are currently hungry, you
Speaker 1: have more illusions of control over a chance outcome than
Speaker 1: if you're not hungry.
Speaker 2: All right, well, that makes sense. I mean the scenario,
Speaker 2: I mean the outcome, not so much the Hamburger lottery.
Speaker 2: I don't think I've encountered one of those in real life.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the more desirable the outcome, the more acceptable
Speaker 2: the gambling risk becomes, the more confident you are that
Speaker 2: you can pull it off. I think I've felt this
Speaker 2: way in the past, regarding things like DVD giveaways and all,
Speaker 2: you know, where it's like, oh, I'd like to win that. Sure,
Speaker 2: it's worth worth my time to go ahead and and enter,
Speaker 2: because uh yeah, I can imagine that on my shelf.
Speaker 1: Do you have a specific disc in mind here?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I uh. Ages ago, I entered a contest
Speaker 2: and won DVD copies of The Fly and The Fly Too,
Speaker 2: and and it was like and it was it was
Speaker 2: like magic, you know, because I'm like, yeah, I would
Speaker 2: mind winning that, and bam I won it. And in
Speaker 2: a way it kind of like ruined it. It ruined
Speaker 2: things for me moving forward because then anytime there's like
Speaker 2: a DVD giveaway, I'm like, well, I won this, I
Speaker 2: won this once before it could happen again. I'm good
Speaker 2: at this. Apparently.
Speaker 1: Oh so you apparently had an early success that increased
Speaker 1: the success salience of that kind of lottery for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a similar scenario happened with my son.
Speaker 2: I took him to local bowling alleys for years and
Speaker 2: years ago when he was much younger. And you know
Speaker 2: the claw machines. We've talked about claw machines before. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: the show. You know, they're they're they're tricky if you're predatory,
Speaker 2: if you want to describe them as such. You know,
Speaker 2: it seems like an easy thing. You just put in
Speaker 2: a quarter of claw grabs a toy, you get the toy,
Speaker 2: but there are a number of additional tricks in play
Speaker 2: that that enable the house to win. And you know,
Speaker 2: of course he was interested in trying out his claw machine,
Speaker 2: and I was like, well, this is a teaching moment.
Speaker 2: I'd say, tell him, all right, I'm going to give you,
Speaker 2: give you one quarter or whatever it took to use
Speaker 2: the machine, but I want you to know that these
Speaker 2: machines are tricky. They are made to trick you. You're
Speaker 2: not going to win anything. And then then I'm like,
Speaker 2: go forth and lose, you know, learn this lesson immediate jackpot.
Speaker 2: He got some stuffy out of that, and I think
Speaker 2: he still has that stuffy that I occasionally see in
Speaker 2: his room. And it mocks me because I'm like, you
Speaker 2: were never supposed to come out of that machine, and
Speaker 2: you you gave him too much confidence in these claw machines.
Speaker 1: Oh that's terrible, though, I would say at least the
Speaker 1: claw machine is not a slot machine because there is
Speaker 1: some minor amount of skill involved.
Speaker 2: Minor, yes, and if memory serves like we'd have to
Speaker 2: go deeper in. But I believe there's some some additional
Speaker 2: Shenanigan's going on with those machines that enable occasional win
Speaker 2: because that's the thing. People need to occasionally win those
Speaker 2: toys out of those machines. Otherwise people will realized that, Okay,
Speaker 2: there's just a bunch of dust covered stuff. He's in there.
Speaker 2: Nobody's getting anything out of there.
Speaker 1: I'm very sorry your son had an early success emphasis
Speaker 1: on claw machines. That is an unfortunate fate.
Speaker 2: Well, I let him have a number of failures after
Speaker 2: that on other visits, so I think the lesson finally
Speaker 2: hammered him. Oh.
Speaker 1: But the flip side of the success failure emphasis is
Speaker 1: that research has also found that there are increased illusions
Speaker 1: of control in a situation where somebody is trying to
Speaker 1: avoid an outcome they find extremely undesirable. Don't worry, these
Speaker 1: experiments didn't have actual torture or anything. The really undesirable
Speaker 1: conditions things like having to speak in front of a group,
Speaker 1: which is a very terrifying prospect to many of us,
Speaker 1: including myself, even though I speak into a microphone for
Speaker 1: a living. So let that be a comfort to you
Speaker 1: out there who have this same fear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's a different scenario, to be sure.
Speaker 1: Another one was like having to put your hand in
Speaker 1: cold water. That's another common thing tested here. So people
Speaker 1: who strongly wanted to avoid these outcomes mistakenly believed they
Speaker 1: had more agency in the task that determined whether they
Speaker 1: would have to do.
Speaker 2: Them or not.
Speaker 1: So it's just a flip side of the thing, like,
Speaker 1: if you really want that hamburger, you have more illusion
Speaker 1: of control over the chance process of getting it. If
Speaker 1: you really want to avoid speaking in front of a group,
Speaker 1: apparently you have more illusions of control in avoiding that fade.
Speaker 1: Another interesting thing noted here is that some studies have
Speaker 1: found a greater illusion of control when people are experiencing
Speaker 1: heightened stress. I thought that was interesting. Fourth factor is mood.
Speaker 1: This is pretty straightforward, But studies have found on average,
Speaker 1: people experience more illusory control when they're in a better mood,
Speaker 1: and people with a negative mood showed less illusions of
Speaker 1: control on average. Of course, this is probably not a
Speaker 1: reason to try to be in a bad mood. But
Speaker 1: you know, one advantage if you're currently feeling down is
Speaker 1: that in this state of being in a bad mood,
Speaker 1: you might be less likely to think you can control
Speaker 1: things you can.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, though, of course, like we've been saying, it's
Speaker 2: complex anything human psyche's doing. So on the flip side,
Speaker 2: you might find yourself more inclined to go after a
Speaker 2: quick dopamine hit of initiating a gamble if you're in
Speaker 2: a bad mood. So you know a lot going on there.
Speaker 1: Okay, fifth factor We sort of already alluded to this one,
Speaker 1: but this is what Thompson calls the intrusion of reality.
Speaker 1: This basically means giving people a reality check. Illusion of
Speaker 1: control is one type of cognitive illusion that seems pretty
Speaker 1: easy to overcome in the moment by simply reminding people
Speaker 1: what the probabilities actually are. So if you remind people
Speaker 1: of the objective probability of winning a gambling task before
Speaker 1: they place their bets. The illusion of control can be
Speaker 1: significantly reduced or neutralized completely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you see this a lot with coverage of
Speaker 2: lottery odds, you know, the advertisements for the lottery and
Speaker 2: like general buzz for the lottery make it seem like
Speaker 2: anything is possible. You know, the winning ticket might be
Speaker 2: you know, it might have been sold to the gas
Speaker 2: station down the street. But then oftentimes news reporting on
Speaker 2: these situations will often drive home like, no, you have
Speaker 2: like this astronomically small chance of winning if you enter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's your reality check. And it seems like with
Speaker 1: illusions of control, a simple reality check is quite useful
Speaker 1: to people. Next factor I thought was quite interesting Thompson
Speaker 1: mentions power. Apparently, people in positions of power and authority.
Speaker 1: Of course, they do have more actual control over many situations.
Speaker 1: That's what power means. But it seems power also correlates
Speaker 1: with increased illusions of control. So if you like, do
Speaker 1: an experiment where you assign someone a position of power
Speaker 1: over others in the experiment, or you prime them to
Speaker 1: remember times in their life when they were in a
Speaker 1: position of power, this seems to come with an increased
Speaker 1: tendency toward the illusion of control. And that seemed very
Speaker 1: interesting to me because you might imagine that it would
Speaker 1: work the opposite way that you know, it's when you
Speaker 1: feel disempowered that you dream of having more control. Maybe,
Speaker 1: But the way this is framed actually does gel with
Speaker 1: my experience. Like people who get to be the boss
Speaker 1: or get to be the leader in some way seem
Speaker 1: more susceptible than regular people to thinking they can, like
Speaker 1: magically will a dice roll to come out the way
Speaker 1: they wanted.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's easy to apply this to various like
Speaker 2: you well known scenarios contemporary and historic. You know, you
Speaker 2: look to some person in a position of power who
Speaker 2: ends up in a situation where like clearly the odds
Speaker 2: are stacked against them, but they they continue on with
Speaker 2: like a seeming overconfidence that we we often just attribute
Speaker 2: to you just to pure ego and so forth. But yeah,
Speaker 2: the illusion of control could also play a huge part
Speaker 2: in it.
Speaker 1: I wonder if there's actually some overlap with the idea
Speaker 1: of success emphasis here, because like, if you are in
Speaker 1: a position of power, you've had some reinforcement already of
Speaker 1: like in some scenario where you didn't know what the
Speaker 1: outcome was like you got what you wanted, Like you've
Speaker 1: got you know, promotion or increased status or whatever, and
Speaker 1: you're in this position of power now, so you've sort
Speaker 1: of been trained to think like, oh, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: make things happen for me, and that could be that
Speaker 1: could lead to illusions that you can do that in
Speaker 1: scenarios when you can't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Another thing Thompson mentions that can affect it is what
Speaker 1: she calls regulatory focus. This basically hinges on a theory
Speaker 1: of motivation that distinguishes between situations where you have a
Speaker 1: focus on getting an outcome you do want, versus situations
Speaker 1: where you have a focus on avoiding an outcome you
Speaker 1: don't want. And research by Langans in two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven found that when you're in the mindset of getting
Speaker 1: an outcome you do want, that was more associated with
Speaker 1: illusions of control than the other mindset.
Speaker 2: That's interesting, But I guess, on the other hand, like
Speaker 2: we shouldn't then desire a life where we're just focusing
Speaker 2: on avoiding negative outcomes, because right that sounds pretty dreadful.
Speaker 2: I guess in reality, you'd want some sort of healthy
Speaker 2: balance of the two without too much tendency towards either
Speaker 2: illusion exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean in the same way that you might be
Speaker 1: less prone to illusions of control if you're in a
Speaker 1: negative mood, but that probably shouldn't make you want to
Speaker 1: be in a negative mood. Another one I just happened
Speaker 1: to come across. This is not on Thompson's list, but
Speaker 1: another paper mentioned it, so I thought i'd take a look.
Speaker 1: Is the idea of what's called deliberative versus implemental mindset.
Speaker 1: So this is the effect of what kind of frame
Speaker 1: of mind you're in when approaching a control judgment. So
Speaker 1: this was a paper by Galwitzer and Kinney in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty nine called Effects of Deliberative and Implemental mindsets on
Speaker 1: the Illusion of control. This is a paper that used
Speaker 1: a light onset experiment like the kinds we've talked about before,
Speaker 1: where you know you're trying to turn on a light
Speaker 1: by figuring out, you know, if pressing a button turns
Speaker 1: it on or not. And this experiment had two different
Speaker 1: experimental groups doing the same task, but they were separated
Speaker 1: by the independent variable of a mental exercise. Before making
Speaker 1: their judgments, one group was asked to quote deliberate on
Speaker 1: an unresolved personal problem, so you know, thinking about a
Speaker 1: problem considering various solutions. The other group was asked to
Speaker 1: plan the implementation of a personal goal, so you come
Speaker 1: up with the plan of action to get what you want.
Speaker 1: And this study found that the deliberation group experienced less
Speaker 1: illusory control on the unrelated light onset task. So quote
Speaker 1: overall finding suggests that people who are trying to make
Speaker 1: decisions develop a deliberative mindset that allows for a realistic
Speaker 1: view of action outcome expectancies, whereas people who try to
Speaker 1: act on a decision develop an implemental mindset that promotes
Speaker 1: illusory optimism. And that was to the extent that this
Speaker 1: is a valid finding that that was illuminating to me
Speaker 1: because it's like, Okay, if you're more just sort of
Speaker 1: exploring ideas, thinking about different contingencies and all that, you
Speaker 1: apparently might be more realistic about how much control you have.
Speaker 1: But once you get into thinking about how to get
Speaker 1: something done, then you're more prone to illusions of control,
Speaker 1: which might actually be useful even though it's just as
Speaker 1: we said last time, the illusion of control could be
Speaker 1: useful even though it generates false beliefs, because maybe it
Speaker 1: maybe those false beliefs could be motivating, could help you,
Speaker 1: you know, spur you to action.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, I mean you're working on something that's going
Speaker 2: to be entered in a contest. Let's say, you know,
Speaker 2: your chances of actually winning that contest may be too
Speaker 2: small due to you know, various various factors that have
Speaker 2: nothing to do with the quality of the work. But
Speaker 2: you may be inspired to put more work into that,
Speaker 2: into into the quality, you know, to put more effort
Speaker 2: into the creation of whatever it is you're making. And
Speaker 2: you know, you know, we knew that that first prize ribbon,
Speaker 2: but it could result in a better product overall.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about
Speaker 1: in this part of our series is I mentioned there
Speaker 1: are some criticisms of the concept of the illusion of control. Uh.
Speaker 1: There is one really interesting compleating result I found concerning
Speaker 1: when the illusion of control manifests, and that was in
Speaker 1: a paper by Francesca Gino, Zachariah Sharrek, and Don A.
Speaker 1: Moore published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven. The paper was called keeping the Illusion of
Speaker 1: control under control, Ceilings, floors and imperfect Calibration and So
Speaker 1: this paper offers a critique of illusion of control research
Speaker 1: by suggesting that maybe it's better to think about this
Speaker 1: as a general tendency to make incorrect estimates of our
Speaker 1: level of control over things, and this would include both
Speaker 1: overestimating and underestimating our level of control in situations where
Speaker 1: the evidence is somewhat ambiguous. So, according to these authors,
Speaker 1: the literature appears to support a general overestimation of control
Speaker 1: merely because so many of these studies focus on games
Speaker 1: of chance and other purely random outcomes, things that we
Speaker 1: have zero control over, and thus belief in any amount
Speaker 1: of control in these experiments will be factually mistaken. But
Speaker 1: the authors of this paper basically they accept that pattern
Speaker 1: is valid. But they also say, if you give people
Speaker 1: tasks where they have a high level of control, sometimes
Speaker 1: you should expect to see subjects systematically underestimate how much
Speaker 1: control they have on those things. So the authors performed
Speaker 1: several experiments to test this, and they found that across
Speaker 1: three experiments, indeed, there is a corresponding illusory lack of
Speaker 1: control in some cases where people have a high degree
Speaker 1: of control over outcomes. So I want to describe just
Speaker 1: one example of the kinds of experiments they did. Subjects
Speaker 1: would be asked to do a kind of word search
Speaker 1: puzzle on computer screens. They're looking for like patterns of
Speaker 1: repeating letters in a jumble of letters, and occasionally, at
Speaker 1: random time intervals, the background of the screens they're looking
Speaker 1: at would change color, maybe making it harder to pick
Speaker 1: out the letters and solve the puzzle. Participants could press
Speaker 1: a button to make the background revert to its original
Speaker 1: color and make the game easier again. And so the
Speaker 1: independent variable here was how responsive the background was to
Speaker 1: presses of the button. The button could be set to
Speaker 1: zero percent control, fifteen percent, fifty percent, and eighty five percent.
Speaker 1: And then after this puzzle search game was over, subjects
Speaker 1: were asked what level of control they thought they had
Speaker 1: over the background color with the button, And as predicted
Speaker 1: in this experiment, the authors found in the low control conditions,
Speaker 1: like if you have zero percent or fifteen percent of
Speaker 1: control over the background, there was an illusion of control,
Speaker 1: same kind of thing you would expect based on these
Speaker 1: previous experiments. But in the high control conditions, where players
Speaker 1: had like eighty five percent control over the background, they
Speaker 1: thought they had less control than they actually did, so
Speaker 1: they did three experiments in total, and in the end,
Speaker 1: the authors here say that this raises doubts about whether
Speaker 1: people actually do systematically overestimate their control, and instead, what
Speaker 1: might be more accurate to say is that people overestimate
Speaker 1: their control when they have little and underestimate their control
Speaker 1: when they have much. And so they they offer this
Speaker 1: as a critique of the sort of theoretical framework of
Speaker 1: the illusion of control, because they say, really that that's
Speaker 1: only half of the picture, and that it's more accurate
Speaker 1: probably to say that we have a general tendency to
Speaker 1: make mistaken judgments about the level of control we have
Speaker 1: over events, and that goes both ways.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of various discussions
Speaker 2: we've had about occasional, occasionally beneficial errors in cognition. You know,
Speaker 2: sometimes overconfidence pays off, like we were just saying, sometimes
Speaker 2: overconfidence just gives you confidence you need to do something,
Speaker 2: and sometimes an abundance of caution pays off. And then,
Speaker 2: of course, in either case, sometimes it doesn't work out
Speaker 2: well for the individual. Either. Overconfidence can screw you up,
Speaker 2: and so can being too cautious, And I guess you
Speaker 2: need to some degree a little bit of both to
Speaker 2: sort of balance out these illusions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is it all right to have one type of
Speaker 1: illusion pretty consistently if you have like a compensating illusion
Speaker 1: that sort of like steers you toward the middle.
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe. I mean I feel like a
Speaker 2: lot of our world views are kind of arranged like this.
Speaker 2: There are the things that we are unreasonably anxious about
Speaker 2: and unreasonably cautious about perhaps or at least have a
Speaker 2: heightened level of caution, and then there are other areas
Speaker 2: where we may kind of have blinders on and we're
Speaker 2: just kind of like babes in the woods with those
Speaker 2: particular threats. And yeah, at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: like you can't be over confident about everything. You can
Speaker 2: get plowed over on the butt. You've got to do
Speaker 2: things like leave the house, So you have to have
Speaker 2: some level of confidence, even in cases where the confidence
Speaker 2: is outpacing the actual chances a little bit.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, I think maybe we should call it
Speaker 1: there for part two on the illusion of control.
Speaker 2: Yeah, obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there
Speaker 2: if you have feedback personal experience on anything we discussed here.
Speaker 2: As usual, remind everybody that's Seftable Your Mind is primarily
Speaker 2: a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 2: we have listener mail. On Mondays, we have one of
Speaker 2: about three different varieties of short form episodes on Wednesday,
Speaker 2: and then on Friday, we set aside most serious concerns
Speaker 2: to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 1: you can email us at con tact at Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com.
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