Outcome sequences and illusion of control – part II: the effect on post-loss speeding

ABSTRACT

When gambling, people tend to speed up after losses. This ’post-loss speeding’ is in contrast with ’post-error slowing’, which is often observed in behavioral tasks in experimental psychology. Importantly, participants can control the outcome in most behavioral tasks, but not in gambling tasks. To test whether perceived controllability over the outcome influences response speed after negative outcomes when gambling, we ran two online studies in which we created an illusion of control without changing the nature of the chance-determined gamble. Using the manipulation by Langer and Roth (1975), whose effect is replicated in Part I, we presented three groups of healthy participants (N = 600 per experiment, crowdsourced samples) with three different sequences of outcomes in a coin-tossing task. We replicated that participants presented with more wins at the beginning of a sequence estimated their ability to predict the outcome of a coin-toss higher than participants presented with more losses at the beginning, or those presented with a random sequence. Additionally, participants generally responded more quickly after a loss than after a win. However, the illusion of control did not influence post-loss speeding. This result is not consistent with several theoretical accounts for changes in response speed after sub-optimal outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Control beliefs
• illusion of control
• gambling
• replication
• post-loss speeding

Disclosure statement

This work was supported by an ERC Consolidator grant awarded to FV (European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No 769595).

There are not constraints on publishing.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Ethical approval

Ethical committee at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Science of Ghent University No 2019/86.

Preregistration statement

The pre-registrations associated with the experiment can be found on OSF: https://osf.io/qm2a8/registrations.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of these studies are openly available on OSF (https://osf.io/qm2a8/) at DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/QM2A8 in the folder Langer & Roth replication.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/qm2a8/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Eben

Charlotte Eben is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Ghent University. Her research focuses on behavioral responses to sub-optimal outcomes, action control and impulsivity.

Zhang Chen

Zhang Chen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University. His research focuses on the interrelationships between different aspects of impulsivity (motor and choice impulsivity), how such impulsive behaviours arise and how they may be effectively regulated.

Joël Billieux

Joel Billieux is an Associate Professor of clinical psychology, psychopathology, and psychological assessment. His areas of research include: psychological factors involved in the etiology of addictive behaviors, with a particular focus on self-regulation-related processes; conceptualization and diagnosis of behavioral addictions, and effects of technologies on human behaviour.

Frederick Verbruggen

Frederick Verbruggen is a Full Professor in Experimental Psychology. He examines how humans and non-human animals withhold or suppress inappropriate or risky actions, adjust behaviour after bad outcomes, and more generally, adapt to dynamic environments. He also studies how (avian) cognitive abilities develop in different ecological contexts.