Humans experience themselves as causing events in the outside world when these events follow their actions in a contingent and contiguous manner. Sometimes, they even experience control over the consequences of action when actual control is missing. One such illusion of control is the outcome density bias: Participants often judge to have more control over non-contingent action outcomes when the overall frequency of outcomes is high rather than low. In our study we investigated whether the size of the density bias depends on instructed goal focus. To this end, we either instructed participants to remove an aversive stimulus (negative reinforcement condition) or to produce an appetitive stimulus (positive reinforcement condition) in a setting that was otherwise identical: for all participants an aversive stimulus stopped and was replaced by a positive stimulus either frequently or rarely, independent of action, whereas the aversive stimulus continued in the remaining trials. First results indicate a more pronounced sense of control in the negative than in the positive reinforcement condition, suggesting that negative reinforcement may be particularly effective in fostering superstitious behaviors.