The Illusion Of The Control In A Virtual Setting

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For this essay I chose to write on the article, The Illusion of the Control in a Virtual Setting. The article was collaborated on by: David S. Kreine, Christian N. Hobbs, Matthew W. Honeycutt, Ryan M. Hinds, and Callie J. Brockman at the University of Central Missouri and was originally published in 2010 in the North American Journal of Psychology. The paper is focused around the concept of illusion of control or the perception that events or situations that are uncontrollable are somehow able to be controlled, that we covered in the third chapter of the textbook. More specifically the authors wanted to see if it were in fact plausible to convince people to think they are in control, when they are truly not. There are three main processes involved in the concept of illusion of control. Those consist of priority, consistency, and exclusivity. Priority refers to the idea that the individual at hand must have thought about the action before it occurred. Consistency says that what actually ends up happening has to be consistent with what the individual thought about or planned. And last but not least, exclusivity refers to the idea that there must be no other potential causes present in order for the individual to believe they are the sole cause of the event. Only when all pieces come into play, will the individual believe they are in control of the situation at hand Virtual reality or VR has been around long enough that most have seen it or experienced it before. For VR to be truly effective and believable it must convince the user that they are the ones in control of whatever is going on, whether it be walking through a virtual city or behind the wheel of a sports car. If it were not believable that the participant is present in ... ... middle of paper ... ...nteract with our society. If we relate that back to an elevator and the experiment, when the individuals who were told nothing of what the controls for the elevator do and they still had a high rating of perceived control, it is almost obvious to me that they would think that way. They participated in an experiment in which they walked in knowing nothing, pressed a button that they assumed would take them where they needed to go, and getting there was the reward. They couldn’t see behind the scenes and didn’t know that the experimenter was moving the elevator for them. All they knew is they pressed the button and got the reward. They put in there quarter and they got there gumball. As far as they could perceive in the situation, they “knew” they were in control, having been conditioned their entire lives just like us, that when we “push a button”, we get “rewarded”.

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