The Illusion of Control makes the case that people waste an inordinate amount of energy trying to control events and people that they have little or no control over.

Exploring illusions of control in a wide variety of domains, the authors posit a practical way to minimize negative consequences.

In the absence of an objective contingency, psychological studies have shown that people nevertheless attribute outcomes to their own actions. Thus, by wrongly inferring control in chance situations people appear to hold false beliefs concerning their agency, and are said to succumb to an illusion of control (IoC). In the current article, we challenge traditional conceptualizations of the illusion by examining the thesis that the IoC reflects rational and adaptive decision making. Firstly, we propose that the (...) IoC is a by-product of a rational uncertain judgment (“the likelihood that I have control over a particular outcome”). We adopt a Bayesian perspective to demonstrate that, given their past experience, people should be prone to ascribing skill to chance outcomes in certain situations where objectively control does not exist. Moreover, existing empirical evidence from the IoC literature is shown to support such an account. Secondly, from a decision-theoretic perspective, in many consequential situations, underestimating the chance of controlling a situation carries more costs than overestimating that chance. Thus, situations will arise in which people will incorrectly assign control to events in which outcomes result from chance, but the attribution is based on rational processes. (shrink)

This paper examines the 'taking back control' over immigration arguments offered for Brexit and for reinforcing the Southern border of the United States. According to these arguments, Brexit and increased border enforcement were needed to ensure collective self-governance for the peoples of Britain and the United States. I argue that 1. In fact these policies did little to enhance collective self-governance properly understood, and 2. They actually thwarted collective self-governance due their racially exclusionary effects on people of color in (...) Britain and the United States. (shrink)

I explore the role of nature in the agrifood system and how attempts to fit food production into a large-scale manufacturing model has lead to widespread outbreaks of food borne illness. I illustrate how industrial processing of leafy greens is related to the outbreak of E. coli 0157:H7 associated with spinach in the fall of 2006. I also use this example to show how industry attempts to create the illusion of control while failing to address weaknesses in current (...) processing systems. The leafy greens industry has focused efforts on sterilizing the growing environment and adopting new technologies, while neglecting to change the concentrated structure of processing systems. Repeated breakdowns in these systems illustrate a widening fault line between attempted and failed control of nature in industrial food production. (shrink)

A distinction between the self and its superstructure, the ego, supports Mele's conclusions. The dynamics of the limbic system generates the self through behavior that is subject to societal observation. The rest of the brain contributes awareness that, by ingenious back-dating and rationalization, gives the ultimate in self-deception: the illusion of control of the self by its own derivative.

This essay examines control discourse in and out of educational settings, arguing that illusions of control are among the means by which governance is accomplished in domains far from schools. The tactical productivity of such illusions in non-school settings "necessitates" and explicates their prevalence in education. The first installment of this essay identifies some assumptions undergirding dominant control and management discourse; analyzes discussions of control in fields other education; and briefly examines the role that social location (...) plays in fostering specific understandings of control. A later installment will focus more narrowly on education, music education specifically. The author maintains that recognizing the limits of governmentality, bankrupting illusions of control, and uncoupling associations between uncertainty and terror, are powerful political disruptions. Acknowledging that classroom control may be neither achievable nor desirable may open the door to different understandings of classroom power relations and to re-articulations of the purposes of schooling. (shrink)

In the final installment of her two-part essay, Julia Eklund Koza analyzes prevalent control and management discourse in education, specifically, music education. Arguing that dominant understandings are hierarchical, gendered, illusory, and integrally related to projects and practices largely unrelated to schooling, she invites teachers and teacher educators to explore the possibilities created when different assumptions about teaching and control are applied. Koza maintains that recognizing the limits of governmentality, bankrupting illusions of control, and uncoupling associations between uncertainty (...) and terror are powerful political disruptions. Acknowledging that classroom control may be neither achievable nor desirable may open the door to different understandings of classroom power relations and to re-articulations of the purposes of schooling. Koza calls for the use of different metaphors and frames as a first step in achieving different educational outcomes. (shrink)

In the final installment of her two-part essay, Julia Eklund Koza analyzes prevalent control and management discourse in education, specifically, music education. Arguing that dominant understandings are hierarchical, gendered, illusory, and integrally related to projects and practices largely unrelated to schooling, she invites teachers and teacher educators to explore the possibilities created when different assumptions about teaching and control are applied. Koza maintains that recognizing the limits of governmentality, bankrupting illusions of control, and uncoupling associations between uncertainty (...) and terror are powerful political disruptions. Acknowledging that classroom control may be neither achievable nor desirable may open the door to different understandings of classroom power relations and to re-articulations of the purposes of schooling. Koza calls for the use of different metaphors and frames as a first step in achieving different educational outcomes. (shrink)

It is widely held that when you are deliberating about whether to believe some proposition p, only considerations relevant to the truth of p can be taken into account as reasons bearing on whether to believe p and motivate you accordingly. This thesis of exclusivity has significance for debates about the nature of belief, about control of belief, and about certain forms of evidentialism. In this paper I distinguish a strong and a weak version of exclusivity. I provide reason (...) to think that strong exclusivity is an illusion and that weak exclusivity may also be an illusion. I describe a number of cases in which exclusivity seems not to hold, and I show how an illusion of exclusivity may be generated by a rather different feature of doxastic deliberation, which I call demandingness. (shrink)

Several aspects of Glover's planning–control model (PCM) appear incompatible with existing data. Moreover, there is no logical reason to suppose that separate visual representations should be required for the “planning” and “control” of actions in the first place. Although intuitively appealing, the PCM appears to lack strong empirical support.

This article makes the case that our digital devices create illusions of agency. There are times when users feel as if they are in control when in fact they are merely responding to stimuli on the screen in predictable ways. After the introduction, the second section of the article offers examples of illusions of agency that do not involve human–computer interaction in order to show that such illusions are possible and not terribly uncommon. The third and fourth sections of (...) the article cover relevant work from empirical psychology, including the cues that are known to generate the sense of agency. The fifth section of the article shows that our devices are designed to deliver precisely those cues. In the sixth section, the argument is completed with evidence that users frequently use their smartphones without the sort of intentional supervision involved in genuine agency. This sixth section includes the introduction of Digital Environmental Dependency Syndrome (DEDS) as a possible way of characterizing extended use of the smartphone without genuine agency. In the final section of the article, there is a discussion of questions raised by the main claim, including suggestions for reducing occurrences of illusions of agency through software design. (shrink)

Having direct doxastic control would not be particularly desirable if exercising it required a failure of epistemic rationality. With that thought in mind, recent writers have invoked the view that epistemic rationality gives us options to defend the possibility of a significant form of direct doxastic control. Specifically, they suggest that when the evidence for p is sufficient but not conclusive, it would be epistemically rational either to believe p or to be agnostic on p, and they argue (...) that we can in these cases effectively decide to form either attitude without irrationality. This paper argues against the version of epistemic permissivism invoked by these writers and shows that other plausible versions of permissivism do not support their cause. It concludes that if we can exercise direct doxastic control without irrationality, it is not because epistemic rationality gives us options. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The illusion of explanatory depth, which has been identified by cognitive psychologists, may play a prominent role in encouraging regulatory action. This special type of overconfidence would logically lead regulators to believe that they are aware of the relevant causes and consequences of the activities they might regulate, and of the unintended side effects of the regulatory actions they are contemplating. So, as with other cognitive biases, the illusion of explanatory depth is likely to lead to mistakes. (...) And unlike the biases that have been the focus of so much behavioral economics, the illusion of explanatory depth is uniquely resistant to correction by those who are aware of it as a general problem and rigorously attempt to keep it under control. (shrink)

It is a common assumption among both philosophers and psychologists that having accurate beliefs about ourselves and the world around us is always the epistemic gold standard. However, there is gathering data from social psychology that suggest that illusions are quite prevalent in our everyday thinking and that some of these illusions may even be conducive to our overall well being. In this paper, we explore the relevance of these so-called 'positive illusions' to the free will debate. More specifically, we (...) use the literature on positive illusions as a springboard for examining Saul Smilansky 's so-called 'free will illusionism '. At the end of the day, we will use data from both social and developmental psychology concerning perceived control to try to show that his view is on shaky empirical footing. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a pervasive problem in our society that has only recently come to be acknowledged in public discussion. Though many see it as a social and political problem grounded in unequal gender roles, this level of analysis fails to explain adequately why many battered women return to their abusers despite intense suffering and the certainty of more physical violence. The Illusion of Love challenges the prevailing model, which views the victim of abuse as a normal woman who (...) is unable to escape from her batterer due to the effects of terror and psychological collapse. Instead, David Celani offers a new answer--that women who are battered have a fundamental attraction to partners who are abusive. Based on his years of clinical experience treating battered women, Celani applies object relations theory and case examples from his own practice to show that many women--and indeed some men--are unconsciously drawn to abusive partners because of personality disorders caused by childhood abuse and neglect. He argues that any effective treatment for battered women must help unravel futile and self-defeating patterns, such as ones that spring from fears of abandonment and fascination with men who produce exaggerated promises of love followed by extreme rejecting behaviors. _The Illusion of Love_ examines the personalities of abusers as well, many of whom suffer from narcissism, a disorder that is also often associated with childhood abuse and neglect. Narcissistic men lash out violently in an attempt to control their own fears or abandonment and to compensate for unsatisfied emotional needs. Celani concludes that domestic violence is often the tragic result of a union between individuals with complementary personality disorders. His findings fly in the face of the politically correct refusal to examine the behavior of the victim of abuse, a strategy that has led to a severe misunderstanding of the dynamics of the battering scenario. _The Illusion of Love_ calls for primary prevention of neglectful parenting to stem the tide of abuse in the future, offering tangible hope for the treatment of victims of abuse as they attempt to extricate themselves from unhealthy, damaging relationships. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a pervasive problem in our society that has only recently come to be acknowledged in public discussion. Though many see it as a social and political problem grounded in unequal gender roles, this level of analysis fails to explain adequately why many battered women return to their abusers despite intense suffering and the certainty of more physical violence. The Illusion of Love challenges the prevailing model, which views the victim of abuse as a normal woman who (...) is unable to escape from her batterer due to the effects of terror and psychological collapse. Instead, David Celani offers a new answer--that women who are battered have a fundamental attraction to partners who are abusive. Based on his years of clinical experience treating battered women, Celani applies object relations theory and case examples from his own practice to show that many women--and indeed some men--are unconsciously drawn to abusive partners because of personality disorders caused by childhood abuse and neglect. He argues that any effective treatment for battered women must help unravel futile and self-defeating patterns, such as ones that spring from fears of abandonment and fascination with men who produce exaggerated promises of love followed by extreme rejecting behaviors. _The Illusion of Love_ examines the personalities of abusers as well, many of whom suffer from narcissism, a disorder that is also often associated with childhood abuse and neglect. Narcissistic men lash out violently in an attempt to control their own fears or abandonment and to compensate for unsatisfied emotional needs. Celani concludes that domestic violence is often the tragic result of a union between individuals with complementary personality disorders. His findings fly in the face of the politically correct refusal to examine the behavior of the victim of abuse, a strategy that has led to a severe misunderstanding of the dynamics of the battering scenario. _The Illusion of Love_ calls for primary prevention of neglectful parenting to stem the tide of abuse in the future, offering tangible hope for the treatment of victims of abuse as they attempt to extricate themselves from unhealthy, damaging relationships. (shrink)

Anand Vaidya, Sean Smith, and Mark Siderits have presented thoughtful comments and provocative challenges to my article “What Kind of an Illusion is the Illusion of Self?” Their challenges raise significant questions about the nature of illusion, whether Buddhism is denying the self in all senses of the term, whether there could be a self that exists for some limited duration of time and has at least some measure of control, whether there is a phenomenal (...) class='Hi'>illusion of self, whether the neuropsychological assumptions embedded in Thomas Metzinger’s Phenomenal Self Model is consistent with Buddhist metaphysics, the usefulness of evolutionary psychology in explaining why we have the illusion of self, whether the I-sense is a result of natural selection or cultural selection, vipassanā meditation as a form of verification and its usefulness for extinguishing the I-sense. The discussion here is my response to these criticisms through which I further clarify and develop my arguments and, in some ways, amend my position. (shrink)

Part One: The lottery of birth: 1. Luck 2. Punishment 3. Reward -- Part Two: The illusion of consent: 4. Control 5. Elections 6. Markets 7. Media -- Part Three: The fight for our freedom: 8. Creativity 9. Knowledge 10. Power 11. Survival 12. Empathy.

Many mental phenomena involve thinking about people who do not exist. Imagined characters appear in planning, dreams, fantasizing, imaginary companions, bereavement hallucinations, auditory verbal hallucinations, and as characters created in fictional narratives by authors. Sometimes these imagined persons are felt to be completely under our control, as when one fantasizes about having a great time at a party. Other times, characters feel as though they are outside of our conscious control. Dream characters, for example, are experienced by dreamers (...) as autonomous entities, and often do things that frighten and surprise dreamers. Some imagined persons, such as characters in fiction, start off under conscious control of the author, but over time, can appear to gain an illusion of independent agency. I propose an explanation for different autonomy attributions: characters are by default non-autonomous, unless their personalities are well-practiced. Characters become autonomous because modeling their thinking has become automatized, like many other well-practiced activities. (shrink)

The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we are doing things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome, dissociative identity disorder, and (...) schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also illustrate anomalies of will – cases when actions occur without will or will occurs without action. This book brings these cases together with research evidence from laboratories in psychology to explore a theory of apparent mental causation. According to this theory, when a thought appears in consciousness just prior to an action, is consistent with the action, and appears exclusive of salient alternative causes of the action, we experience conscious will and ascribe authorship to ourselves for the action. Experiences of conscious will thus arise from processes whereby the mind interprets itself – not from processes whereby mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence by which the action was produced. Key Words: apparent mental causation; automatism; conscious will; determinism; free will; perceived control. (shrink)

The experience of conscious will is the feeling that we are doing things. This feeling occurs for many things we do, conveying to us again and again the sense that we consciously cause our actions. But the feeling may not be a true reading of what is happening in our minds, brains, and bodies as our actions are produced. The feeling of conscious will can be fooled. This happens in clinical disorders such as alien hand syndrome, dissociative identity disorder, and (...) schizophrenic auditory hallucinations. And in people without disorders, phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, Ouija board spelling, water dowsing, facilitated communication, speaking in tongues, spirit possession, and trance channeling also illustrate anomalies of will not from processes whereby mind creates action. Conscious will, in this view, is an indication that we think we have caused an action, not a revelation of the causal sequence by which the action was produced. (shrink)

Is the welfare state neutral to personal morality?1 In today's welfare states one can find numerous life-styles existing side by side. These indicate a wide scope for 'personal moralities'2, but do not prove that the welfare state is 'neutral' to them. Welfare states interfere in more or less onerous ways with the business of (private) life with police checks, administrative controls and a vast arsenal of regulatory, penal and/or fiscal regimes. Some of the regulations may be more or less reasonable (...) attempts to minimise the risk of one person inflicting irreparable damage on others or their property, but a great many are not. It is not too difficult to see the hand of special (economic, ideological, even sectarian) interests in the bulk of the rules and regulations on the books.3 The state's non-neutrality is often an unintended outcome, but not always. Officials introduce new regulations with proud declarations of their intention to enforce particular 'moral choices', to treat one thing as a 'merit good' and another as an evil. They also justify intrusive policies with blatantly paternalistic arguments—remember their promise, or was it threat, to take care of us "from the cradle to the grave"—, with self-congratulatory references to an unspecified 'responsibility of the government'. There is no more direct negation of the role of private morality than the claim that one discharges one's own responsibility by depriving others of the opportunity to exercise theirs. As far as protection against onerous interference is concerned, the presumption of innocence—which is the linchpin of the rule of law—counts for very little. One delinquent person or business entity is often enough to let loose the regulatory juggernaut on everybody in the same group or category. In short, the question, whether the welfare state is neutral to personal morality, is largely rhetorical and academic. Behind the question there is the presupposition that the welfare state should be neutral to personal morality.. (shrink)

In a paper presented at a symposium on structuralism at the Johns Hopkins University in 1968, the historian Charles Morazé analyzed the issue of invention largely with reference to mathematics and the theory of Henri Poincare.1 Poincare, along with the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was the first to put forward a theory of scientific discovery as occurring in discrete phases. In 1926, Joseph Wallas generalized this theory to apply to all creativity, positing phrases which closely resemble those of Morazé. While (...) both Poincare and Wallas use a four-phrase model of invention, Morazé reduces his to three phrases: information, cogitation, and intellection. In information, the inventor becomes familiar with the sign systems and knowledge, the "collective contributions of society," relevant to his field of problems. Cogitation assembles these materials and concentrates them until "a certain moment" when "a light breaks through." This "sudden illumination...forces us to insist upon the neurological character" of the inventive moment. Finally, in intellection, the inventor rationally evaluates the utility of his invention and thus, in a sense, steps outside of himself and rejoins society. The distinction which organizes Morazé 's entire account, as well as most of the discussion that followed his presentation, is between the "collective" support and control of the inventor and his own individual, or "neurological," act of synthesis or creation. · 1. See Charles Morazé 's "Literary Invention," in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, pp. 22-55. Loy D. Martin is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He has written The Language of Invention, a study of Robert Browning and the genesis of the dramatic monologue. "A Reply to Carl Pletsch and Richard Schiff" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

It is reasonable to consider and trust that information taken from us about our medical health and history will be protected by rules on confidentiality and consent. Apart from very rare cases, perhaps of major public interest or for public health reasons, this information will not be shared with others without our consent. However, both a number of reforms in National Health Service patient data management policy and developments in the general law on privacy challenge this traditional view of our (...) control and choice over our medical information, as this article will show. In doing so, it analyses the question as to whether in spite of the rhetoric do any of us now really have choice over the access to and use of our medical data? In reality, our choices are limited and in any relationship of trust and shared decision making this ought to be transparent. (shrink)

Rachlin introduces a new theory before exhausting its predecessor. His earlier model of future-discounting may be developed by integrating over the duration of extended rewards and punishers. The difference in value of an event within a pattern over the event in isolation derives from the deprivation provided by the pattern; yet the pattern attracts because acute rewards are more potent than incremental deprivations.

Reestablishing feelings of control after experiencing uncertainty has long been considered a fundamental motive for human behavior. We propose that rituals (i.e., socially stipulated, causally opaque practices) provide a means for coping with the aversive feelings associated with randomness due to the perception of a connection between ritual action and a desired outcome. Two experiments were conducted (one in Brazil [n = 40] and another in the United States [n = 94]) to evaluate how the perceived efficacy of rituals (...) is affected by feelings of randomness. In a between-subjects design, the Scramble Sentence Task was used as a priming procedure in three conditions (i.e., randomness, negativity, and neutral) and participants were then asked to rate the efficacy of rituals used for problem-solving purposes. The results demonstrate that priming randomness increased participants' perception of ritual efficacy relative to negativity and neutral conditions. Implications for increasing our understanding of the relationship between perceived control and ritualistic behavior are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we review the conventional analyses of management control systems, to conclude, first, that the illusion of control can mislead managers into believing that everything can be controlled and monitored, and, second, that no incentive system based only on extrinsic rewards can motivate individuals properly. Then, we investigate the philosophical foundations of the basic assumptions that, implicitly or explicitly, are made about the nature of the acting person. Based on personalist phenomenology, we show how the (...) development of technical and moral values is crucial to the long-run survival of organizations. We end by offering some guidelines as to what control systems should be like in order to be compatible with the nature of human persons. (shrink)

Some data concerning visual illusions are hardly compatible with the perception–action model, assuming that only the perception system is influenced by visual context. The planning–control dichotomy offers an alternative that better accounts for some controversy in experimental data. We tested the two models by submitting the patient I. G. to the induced Roelofs effect. The similitude of the results of I. G. and control subjects favoured Glover's model, which, however, presents a paradox that needs to be clarified.

The study aimed to investigate the impact of behavioral biases on herding for Islamic financial products with the mediation of shariah literacy. An adopted questionnaire from several published studies was used to collect data. The data were collected from 410 respondents and were analyzed with SmartPLS. The results for the direct impact showed that self-attribution, illusion of control, and information availability have a positive and significant impact on herding for Islamic financial products while shariah literacy showed an insignificant (...) impact on herding. The results for mediation showed that previously significant and positive impact turned to insignificant when shariah literacy was introduced as mediating variable between the illusion of control, self-attribution, information availability, and herding. From a theoretical perspective, this study would contribute to the existing body of knowledge of financial decision making from shariah literacy point-out. On the other hand, the findings of this study may be useful for investors to avoid herding in the Islamic financial markets. The authors synthesize the contribution made by behavioral finance studies in extending the knowledge of herding behavior in Islamic financial products with a mediating role of shariah literacy. The key limitation of the study includes data that were collected from three districts of Punjab, Pakistan. (shrink)

This paper addresses the rift between the teacher’s sense of self as a causal agent and the experience of being in lack of control in the classroom, by way of Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if.’ It is argued that understanding agential control in terms of a valuable educational fiction—a practical (ethical) fiction in Vaihinger’s vocabulary—can offer a way of bridging this rift and can help teachers make sense of the tension between their felt need to strive for (...) control and their experience of suffering from lack of control. A fiction, it is argued, is different from an illusion in that fictions can be affirmed without being believed. Unlike illusions, valuable fictions can be recognized as fictions and still retain some of their affective power over us, thereby allowing us to act ‘as if.’ In education, this is helpful as it means that we can make use of valuable fictions without assuming that these have to be protected from the critical gaze of non-believers. In fact, we can openly acknowledge that we rely on fictions as this is part and parcel of being a human being with a limited cognitive ability. (shrink)

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as caused by one’s own action, whereas in the case of a mismatch it will be attributed to an external cause rather than to the (...) self. In a subliminal priming paradigm we show that participants overestimated how much control they had over objectively uncontrollable stimuli, which appeared after free- or forced-choice actions, when a masked prime activated a representation of the stimuli immediately before each action. This prime-induced control-illusion was independent from whether primes were consciously perceived. Results indicate that the conscious experience of control is modulated by unconscious anticipations of action-effects. (shrink)

This is a preprint draft. Please cite published version (DOI: 10.1111/mila.12385). The aim of this paper is to provide a novel analysis of anorexia nervosa (AN) in the context of the sense of agency literature. I first show that two accounts of anorexia nervosa that we ought to take seriously— i.e., the first personal reports of those who have experienced it firsthand as well as the research that seeks to explain anorexic behavior from an empirical perspective— appear to be thoroughly (...) in tension with one another in their descriptions of anorexic actions. Rather than proceeding at this point by way of disregarding anorexic testimony as meaningless or insincere, I instead offer a positive account of the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa that renders these two depictions compatible. The resultant picture of anorexic behavior is one that accommodates current empirical findings while also providing valuable insight into how it is that anorexics can sincerely report feeling fully in control over their food restriction. (shrink)

This paper addresses the rift between the teacher’s sense of self as a causal agent and the experience of being in lack of control in the classroom, by way of Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if.’ It is argued that understanding agential control in terms of a valuable educational fiction—a practical (ethical) fiction in Vaihinger’s vocabulary—can offer a way of bridging this rift and can help teachers make sense of the tension between their felt need to strive for (...) control and their experience of suffering from lack of control. A fiction, it is argued, is different from an illusion in that fictions can be affirmed without being believed. Unlike illusions, valuable fictions can be recognized as fictions and still retain some of their affective power over us, thereby allowing us to act ‘as if.’ In education, this is helpful as it means that we can make use of valuable fictions without assuming that these have to be protected from the critical gaze of non-believers. In fact, we can openly acknowledge that we rely on fictions as this is part and parcel of being a human being with a limited cognitive ability. (shrink)

In the reported, experiment participants hit a ball to aim at the vertex of a Müller–Lyer configuration. This configuration either remained stable, changed its shaft length or the orientation of the tails during movement execution. A significant illusion bias was observed in all perturbation conditions, but not in the stationary condition. The illusion bias emerged for perturbations shortly after movement onset and for perturbations during execution, the latter of which allowed only a minimum of time for making adjustments (...) . These findings indicate that allocentric information is exploited for online control when people make rapid adjustments in response to a sudden change in the environment and not when people guide their limb movements to interact with a stable environment. (shrink)

This work is focused on the rise of institutionalized information control exercised by governments in times of the Covid-19 crisis and the systematic removal or demonetization of content that contradicts or challenges the defined official narrative on influencial platforms like YouTube. With national authorities fragmenting reality into contradicitng national narratives of confinement/no confinement, masks/no masks, ibuprofen/no ibuprofen, chloroquin/no chloroquin etc. the illusion of objective reality in the perpection of the world and even in the context of scientific discourse (...) become more and more evident. Do viruses and medical drugs differentiate between the nationalities of their hosting organisms? The systematic suppression of information that contradicts the respective national narrative as defined by institutionalized authorities lead to a situation in which influencial platforms like YouTube silence everybody that challenges these narratives. (shrink)