Michael E. Enzle

The Deployment of Personal Luck: Sympathetic Magic and Illusory Control in Games of Pure Chance

In three studies, the authors expand on Langer’s (1975) illusion of control model to include perceptions of personal luck as a potential source of misperceived skillful influence over non-controllable events. In an initial study, it was predicted and found that having choice in a game of chance heightened both perceived personal luck and perceived chance of winning. In additional studies, hypotheses were tested based on the proposition that luck perceived as a personal quality follows the laws of sympathetic magic. The results showed that participants acted as though luck could be transmitted from themselves to a wheel of fortune and thereby positively affect their perceived chance of winning. Results are discussed both in terms of the previously unexamined connection between illusory control and beliefs in sympathetic magic and as an extension of the illusory control model.

Increasing and decreasing intrinsic interest with contingent rewards: A test of cognitive evaluation theory ☆

The study examined Decis (Deci, E. L. Intrinsic motivation. New York: Plenum Press, 1975) hypotheses regarding the effects of contingent rewards on intrinsic task interest. Seventy-two male university students worked on a series of puzzles and were given either a high value reward (

The effects of near wins and near losses on self-perceived personal luck and subsequent gambling behavior

1.50) or a low value reward (

Effects of Perceived Extrinsic Versus Intrinsic Teacher Motivation on Student Reactions to Skill Acquisition

.45). The money was given either contingent upon the simple execution of the task (task-contingent), contingent upon the ostensible attainment of a performance criterion level (criterion-contingent), or noncontingent and unexpected (control). Compared to the high payment control subjects, subjects who received the task-contingent high reward rated the task as less interesting, while subjects who received the criterion-contingent high reward rated it as more interesting. Also, subjects expressed less interest in the task after receiving the high task-contingent reward than the low task-contingent reward, but indicated greater interest after receiving the high criterion-contingent reward than the low criterion-contingent reward. It was concluded that substantial support was obtained for Decis (1975) cognitive evaluation theory.

Instigation of Attribution Processes by Attributional Questions

Which person would be most likely to continue gambling? A person who has just experienced a big win or a person who has just experienced a big loss? The answer appears often to be whichever gambler feels personally luckier. Two experiments investigated how perceptions of luck, understood as a personal quality, are affected by near, but unrealized outcomes during a game of chance. In Experiment 1, a near big loss at a gambling game heightened perceptions of personal luck relative to a near big win, even though all participants actually won the same modest amount. In addition, participants who experienced a near big loss generated significantly more downward counterfactuals than did those participants in the near big win condition. Most importantly, differences in self-perceived luck influenced future gambling behavior. Participants who experienced a near big loss on a wheel-of-fortune wagered significantly more on the outcome of a subsequent game of roulette than did those participants who experienced a near big win. Experiment 2 extended these results by testing the possible influence of a different type of near outcome and by including a control group. The discussion focuses on the emerging picture of how people understand luck.

Implicit role obligations versus social responsibility in constituency representation

Musically naive students were taught a piano lesson. In a paid teaching condition, the teacher was portrayed as being extrinsically motivated by a

Self-Versus Other-Referent Processing at Encoding and Retrieval

25 payment. In a second condition, the teacher was portrayed as an intrinsically motivated volunteer The confederate teacher was blind to conditions and gave the same standardized lesson to all students. Students in the volunteer condition perceived the teacher as exhibiting greater enjoy-mast, enthusiasm, and innovation relative to those in the paid condition hey also enjoyed the lesson more, reported a more positive mood, and were more interested in further learning. During a free-play interval, students in the volunteer condition exhibited greater exploratory activity than those in the paid condition

Illusion of control by proxy: Placing one's fate in the hands of another

Subjects received help from a confederate that either was or was not situationally facilitated. Half of the subjects then rated the confederates prosocial dispositional qualities, while the other half did not. Subsequent ratings of the confed- erate revealed attributional mediation of perceived attractive- ness only for subjects who had been asked attribution questions.

Self-versus other-reward administration and intrinsic motivation

The widely accepted conclusion that constituency representation in itself produces inflexible and ineffective competition was critiqued. A new model was proposed that predicts enhanced bargaining flexibility and outcome effectiveness as a consequence of constituency representation. Two experiments were conducted with adult Ss.

Effects of Retaliation Latency and Provocation Level on Judged Blameworthiness for Retaliatory Aggression

The interactive roles of encoding and retrieval processes were examined in relation to self-versus other-referencing in an incidental recognition-memory experiment. At encoding, subjects made either a self-or other-referent judgment about each of a large number of traits. At test, retrieval cues were varied by having subjects make a self-referent judgment, an other-referent judgment, or no judgment about each original trait plus an equal number of new traits. The trait words were more accurately recognized when retrieval cueing reinstated the original encoding context (whether self-or other-referent) than when it instated the other context. In addition, although self-referent encoding yielded better memory than other-referent encoding in the self-referent and no-cue retrieval conditions, other-referent encoding yielded equally good memory in the other-referent retrieval condition. Although self-referent trait judgments were more consistent than other-referent judgments, consistency did not mediate the memory effects. It was suggested that the greater efficacy of self-referent encoding may stem in part from the interactive roles of encoding and retrieval operations in conjunction with a habitual tendency to process trait information with reference to the self