Effects Of Cognitive Style,Prior Probability And Outcome Valence On Undergraduates’ Illusion Of Control

Illusion of control refers to a perceived bias about one’s actual control in chance or skill situation. Questionnaire and experimentation are two main research methods, while control heuristic and self-regulation theory are often used to explain the formation mechanism. Not only situational factors like task type, outcome valence and frequency of reinforcement but also individual factors such as mood, motive for control and personality can make a difference about this phenomenon. The illusion of control affects personal behavior differently in activities like health-promoting, investment managing, risk-taking and so on.Then, on the basis of Alloy and Abramson’s (1979) lighting task, and taking advantage of the most daily traffic signal lamp model, this study combines the method of questionnaire and cognitive behavior experiment, part 1 is a survey about undergraduates’gender and cognitive style with the illusion of control, and part 2 is a 2×2 completely random designed experiment which concerns the effects of prior probability and outcome valence on undergraduates’illusion of control in chance situation. From these two parts, the research will not only measure the difference between undergraduates’individual factors and illusion of control, but also explore the effects of situational factors on undergraduates’illusion of control in chance situation. In total, there were 17 male and 19 female undergraduates participated in study 1, a third of them are field dependent. Study 2 also got another 19 female and 32 undergraduates altogether. Analyze data with E-prime 2.0 and SPSS 17.0 software.According to the analysis of 36 and 32 copies of valid data about undergraduates’illusion of control from part 1 and 2 in chance situation, main conclusions of this research were:1. Undergraduates showed an illusion of control in totally chance situation, what’s more, this kind of tendency is universal.2. The two individual factors of undergraduates’gender and cognitive style have no significant difference with the illusion of control.3. Prior probability and outcome valence both have significant effects on undergraduates’illusion of control. Specifically, a high prior probability of 0.75 or positive outcome valence makes it easier for undergraduates to overestimate their real control than the other side of the factor to show an illusion of control. But there was no significant interaction between the two situational factors.4. During the experiment, participants always do their best to maximize personal benefits through changing the behavior strategy trail by trail based on the experience of act-outcome.