The Illusion of Control in Online Slot Machine Gambling: A Conceptual Extension of Langer and Roth (1975) Study 2
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study is a follow-up to our prior study testing the replicability of the illusion of control effect using an online slot machine task. We previously found that the temporal pattern of winning outcomes influences participants’ perceived control, using items adapted from Langer and Roth (1975) and Eben et al. (2022). Specifically, participants exposed to a descending outcome sequence (i.e. early wins) scored higher on these items than participants in the ascending or flat conditions. The current study extends this work, keeping the same overall win/loss ratio and sequences, but introducing variable win sizes, i.e. different slot symbol combinations such as 3 cherries vs 3 melons are assigned different credit values. This factor is informed by prior work showing that high reward values within a distribution of wins command memory benefits (Bowen & Madan, 2024). We expect to replicate the effect of the descending condition in this new task, and in qualitative comparison of the data from Study 1 and Study 2, we expect to see a stronger between-condition effects with the variable win magnitude. Participants will again be assigned to one of three outcome sequences and complete 30 spins. After the task, they will complete an expanded set of questions assessing beliefs about skill, luck, expectations, and perceived performance, including the items adapted from Langer and Roth (1975). We will also test two behavioural measures: bet size and spin initiation latency, and we will assess trait-level gambling cognitions using the Gambling Related Cognitions Scale (GRCS). This study aims to further clarify how structural features of slot machines and outcome sequences interact to influence cognitive distortions and behaviour.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".