People appear ready to follow leads of others whom they consider lucky.
Michael J. A. Wohl and Michael E. Enzle report that college participants in a series of experimental studies were more likely to allow another person to either pick their lottery ticket or in other ways gamble for them, if they perceived the confederate to be personally lucky.
As predicted, participants were more likely to allow a gambling partner (a confederate) to spin a roulette wheel, and bet more money on the outcome of the spin when they were made to believe their partner was lucky.
Researchers call this phenomenon the illusion of control by proxy. That is, by choosing when to allow a “lucky” person to act as their proxy.
I wonder how this illusion of control affects people’s decisions to use Tablet and other mobile PCs as learning tools in schools?
Do decision makers hold off purchasing, because they do not consider use of education software sufficiently lucky to yield control to it?
I wonder if this is too far of a reach: Do teachers consider administrators unlucky and therefore unworthy of their trust? Would this account for part of the teacher turnover during the first five years of service?
These questions appear, on first blush, reasonable, doable dissertation topics or research programs for venture educators.
Illusion of control by proxy: Placing one’s fate in the hands of another
I deleted spam. DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK left by the spam.