The illusion of control gives us security

The future tortures us and the past chains us. That is why the present escapes us.

Our brain is an anticipating machine. Throughout the evolutionary process, man has gradually increased his ability to predict, using analogies with the accumulated knowledge of previous experiences, both own and of the ancestors. According to the writer and philosopher José Antonio Marina, There is no more fearful species than human. It is the tribute that we have to pay for our privileged intelligence.

We cannot control the future

The illusion of control is the tendency of human beings to believe that they can control, or at least influence, the results in which they clearly have no influence, such as random events.

Years ago the psychologists Jenkins & Ward (1965) conducted an experiment related to this fact. Two lights were installed on a marker, which could be turned on and off independently. The people of the experiment should try to control which of the two lights would ignite at all times. Two buttons were presented to press and they had to decide in each turn to press or not press, depending on whether they were going to turn on or not. The connections were arranged for each action to light a light with a given probability, so people had no control over them. The subjects were told that there could not be a relationship between their actions and the lights. Subsequently, people were asked how much control they thought about the lights. Even when there was no difference in what they chose, people conferenced surely that they exercised some control over the lights.

Of Somehow we all try to make sense of life by building a coherent story based on cause and effect relationships. We tell ourselves, and we tell others, that something happened because we did this or that; But unfortunately the link between cause and effect is usually more dim than we like to think and each event can have countless causes.

A very entrenched belief is the one that drives us to think that if we behave well, if we eat the right and in moderation, if we exercise regularly, etc., We will be rewarded with a long and healthy life. However, it is not necessarily like that. We constantly make plans that never come out as we had planned. As an old saying goes "if you want to make God laugh, tell you your plans". They need to put us in perspective.

In search of our dreams

Since childhood we have been educated and prepared to mark objectives, I stop working on the actions that lead to these objectives, however, how many times do we fail to achieve our goals? How many times are we trying to control a future that we cannot predict? How many things do not come out as we had thought they would come out?

So, if we don't know the future, much less can we control it. We like to think that we do it, but it is not true. And yet we continue to believe in the illusion of control. We face a chaotic and complex world and try to control it in all possible ways.

But we do not control as much as we would like, neither from the outside world nor of our internal jurisdiction. And yet, we live as if everything depended on us ... Thus, we have a tendency to feel guilty when things do not go well, to disappoint us when our expectations are not met, to break our heads investigating the things of things, when all this is hide in the inscrutable designs of chance. Indeed, we know many things, but we have an innate tendency to think that we know a little more than we really know, If we were more humble about our control capacity, we would suffer less.

The usefulness of anticipating

On the one hand, this faculty to be predictors constitutes invaluable help for survival, since it allows to avoid danger even before it manifests. It is also a resource to learn, as well as to plan projects and create means to achieve future goals. But this ability also causes any of our most obvious failures.

For some, precisely the ability to anticipate is what catches many in vicious circles of concern. By living between memory and imagination, between the ghosts of the past and the future, old dangers are revived or new threats are invented. It is easy then to confuse fantasy with reality and suffer terribly due to the uncertainty of what may happen.

The Forer effect, when we believe what we want to believe