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. Blanco and Matute (2015; doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000280) demonstrated that the density bias depends on participants’ instructed intention to either produce an outcome associated with a monetary reward, or to prevent an outcome associated with a monetary punishment.
Our study extends the Blanco and Matute (2015) findings by showing that valence of outcomes (laughing vs. frowning smileys) and intention (i.e., the instruction to learn to prevent or to produce outcomes by pressing a key, irrespective of valence) both affect the density bias: More subjective control over frequent outcomes was only observed for positive events and for produce instructions. For prevent intentions and negative outcomes the density bias was reversed.