Probably around the late 70s or early 80s, at either TU oder FU Berlin, they ran experiments where they had people stare at a screen with a cursor moving either pseudo-randomly or on a preprogrammed path. Participants were asked to try and mind-control the cursor movement and to later report how successful they thought they'd been, and most reported some success. Very useful information about the potential of causality illusion in the age of proliferating generative AI. I saw footage of this in a documentary a long time ago and cannot find documentary nor study. Grateful for any pointers!
Don't know anything about that particular study. However, Clayton Lewis of the University of Colorado once did some very interesting work on the perception of causality in HCI. Do not have a citation for that unfortunately.
You are probably referring to the "I Spy" study. Follow :
- Wegner et al., "Apparent Mental causation - Sources of the Experience of Will", 1999 - http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/wegner%20(1999)%20apparent%20mental%20causation.%20sources%20of%20the%20experience%20of%20will.pdf
Although interesting, this study has been controversial:
- R. Reimer, "Against the Illusory Will Hypothesis - A Reinterpretation of the Test Results in Danial Wegner and Thalia Wheatley’s I Spy Experiment", 2020 - https://philarchive.org/archive/REIATI
- R. di Letizia, "Commentary on 'The Illusion of Conscious Will' by Daniel M. Wegner, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2002", - https://www.academia.edu/1270447/The_Illusion_of_Conscious_Will
Some other recent references of interest on the subject:
- Matute et al., "Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced", 2015 -
Article Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking ...
- Moreno-Fernandez et al., "Recent advances in the study of the illusion of causality: theory, methods, and practical implications", 2023 - https://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/305957/8/Moreno-Fernandez_2023_FINAL.pdf
- M. Madary, "The Illusion of Agency in Human–Computer Interaction", 2022 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12152-022-09491-1.pdf
- Xiong et al., "Illusion of Causality in Visualized Data", 2019 -
Preprint Illusion of Causality in Visualized Data
- Martinez et al., "A large-scale study and six-month follow-up of an intervention to reduce causal illusions in high school students", 2024 -
Article A large-scale study and six-month follow-up of an interventi...
jointly with https://royalsociety.org/blog/2025/02/reduce-causal-illusions-through-high-schools/
These studies are all the more relevant at a time when the personification of AI is tending to become the norm. A concrete example from today: "Is ChatGPT causing delusion, or merely holding up a mirror?" - https://medium.com/blog/is-chatgpt-causing-delusion-or-merely-holding-up-a-mirror-3949bb41249a
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