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" In Schwarz and Clore’s seminal study on the phenomenon they term “mood as information,” they called people in various zip codes to ask them how satisfied they were with their life—a simple question rather than an elaborate decision task. The zip codes were chosen alongside weather reports. Some people were experiencing a sunny day, and others a rainy day. On average, people expressed higher life satisfaction when the sun was out. But the effect disappeared when the experimenter drew their attention to the weather, by asking, “How’s the weather down there?” In other words, if our attention is drawn to the actual cause of our mood, it stops having an effect. Schwarz and Clore’s findings have been replicated in multiple settings. Stock market returns have been found to be lower on days with greater cloud cover—and higher when a favorite sports team wins. Over and over, incidental events affect decisions they shouldn’t actually influence, simply because they affect how we’re feeling. Tell people what’s going on, though, and they can often overcome it. Which is great news for dealing with tilt "
― Maria Konnikova , The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
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" In the classic demonstration of the illusion of control, the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer had students guess the outcome of a coin toss, heads or tails. They were then told whether they were correct or not in their guesses. In three separate setups, the outcomes were predetermined in a specific order: they could be distributed in an intuitively random pattern, there could be more correct guesses clustered near the beginning, or there could be more correct guesses clustered near the end. In each case, the absolute numbers were the same. The only difference was the order. But the results couldn’t have been more different. After the guesses concluded, Langer asked each participant a series of questions: Did they feel they could improve on this task? Did they feel they were particularly talented at it? Did they need more time to get better? Would they be better with limited distraction? And so on. In each case, the obvious answer is no: to answer otherwise is to classify something that is the outcome of chance (a coin toss) as being in the realm of skill. But the obvious answer is not the answer she got. When students had a random progression or one where the accuracy clustered near the end, they did indeed answer in the negative. But when the correct answers were clustered up front, they developed a sudden myopia. Why yes, they said, they are quite good at this, and yes, they would improve with time. Success led to an abject failure of objectivity: suddenly, they were in the throes of the illusion of control. They thought that they could actually predict the results of a coin toss. If we lose early, we have a shot at objectivity. But when we win at the start, that’s when we see the illusion of control playing out in full swing. As Langer titled her paper: “Tails, I Win. Heads, It’s Chance. "
― Maria Konnikova , The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win
