> One of my favorite genres of psychology experiment is called something like: “the study is probably bullshit but the effect is probably real”. At the top of that heap is The Illusion of Control, a classic from 1975 and a favorite of Psych 101 classes everywhere. Usually, this study gets summarized as “people value their lottery tickets more when you let them pick the numbers vs. when you pick the numbers for them.” It’s as if people think that the mere act of picking imbues their ticket with a bit of juju, which makes them less willing to part with it.

> That would be a beautiful study, but it wasn’t the study that was actually conducted. The “lottery tickets” in question were in fact football cards, each one with a picture of a player, their team, etc. Some participants were given the opportunity to choose their football card and some had a card handed to them. Later, just before the drawing, all of the participants were asked how much it would take to buy their card back. On average, the pickers asked for $8.67, while the not-pickers said $1.86.4

> I’m sure you can see the obvious and less exciting explanation for these results: when people were given the chance, they picked their favorite players. The people who didn’t get to pick ended up with a card they liked less. This “illusion of control” effect is merely a “reality of people having preferences and acting on them” effect.5

Alternatively, people who are knowledgeable of a subject will have selfishly biased opinions about it, which they value more than unknowledgeable people will value an arbitrary stance on the subject. From experience, this seems to affect things beyond situations of chance like lotteries, and infests collaborations like businesses in ways such as Not Invented Here Syndrome or generally poor management choices that fail to consider situational factors (e.g. overarching decrees that are ineffective in certain situations/locations/applications).