Examining the illusion of control via outcome sequences in online slot machine gambling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The illusion of control is a cognitive bias where individuals overestimate their personal influence over random events. Prior research indicates that the sequence of outcomes can shape this illusion, with early wins (a ‘Descending’ sequence) strengthening the illusion of control more than late wins (an ‘Ascending’ sequence) or evenly distributed (‘Flat’) wins.Method Over two pre-registered experiments, we tested how outcome sequences affected peoples’ perceptions of control in an online slot machine task, hypothesizing that a Descending win sequence would create the strongest perceived control ratings, increased bet size, and faster spin initiation. In Study 1, the wins and losses were uniform, while in Study 2, different symbol combinations were associated with different win sizes.Results In Study 1, the Descending condition was associated with significantly higher perceived control total scores than the Ascending condition. Higher perceived control ratings were associated with higher bet sizes, but not with faster spin initiation. In Study 2, there were no differences on the perceived control total score across conditions, nor was perceived control associated with bet size, but the Descending condition was associated with higher perceived control ratings on the two specific items that were sensitive in Study 1.Conclusions The findings of Study 1 extend prior research on outcome sequences using simple coin-toss tasks to perceived control in an online slot machine setting. Contrary to our expectations, this effect was only partially supported when the size of the wins varied in Study 2.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".