Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 214

Say you bought a lottery ticket for a $1, and on the day of the lottery are given a chance to sell that ticket. How much would you sell it for? Since it is only worth $1, shouldn’t that be your asking price? Well, according to a study by Ellen Langer (1975), it depends on whether or not you personally chose your lottery ticket. Langer found that individuals who had picked their own ticket requested four times as much money as did others who had not selected their own ticket. Individuals in this and other studies exhibited what Langer termed an illusion of control, which is a false belief that one can control or influence random or chance events (Langer, 1975, 1977; Thompson, Armstrong, & Thomas, 1998; Thompson & Schlehofer, 2008; Yarritu, Matute, & Vadillo, 2014). Here they believed that they were more likely to win the lottery because they had selected their ticket versus if the ticket had been randomly selected for them. The idea that they can somehow beat the odds and win more than they lose keeps casino slot machine players returning again and again, despite the fact that slot machines keep about 90% of the money put into them (which means that they rake in nine times more money than they return to customers) (Witts, Loudermilk, & Kosel, 2014).