The gambler’s fallacy in retrospect: A supplementary comment on Oppenheimer and Monin (2009)
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2010, Vol 5, Issue 2
Abstract
Oppenheimer and Monin (2009) recently found that subjectively rare events are taken to indicate a longer preceding sequence of unobserved trials than subjectively common events, an effect which they refer to as the retrospective gambler’s fallacy. The current paper extends this idea to the situation where participants judge the likelihood of streak continuation. Participants were told about a streak produced by a random process (coin flips) or human performance (basketball shots), and either predicted the next outcome or inferred the immediately preceding outcome. For the coin scenarios, participants tended to expect streak termination – the gambler’s fallacy — and this effect was the same for predictions and retrospective inferences. In the basketball scenarios, no overall bias was found in either prospective or retrospective judgments. The results support Oppenheimer and Monin’s suggestion that reconstruction of the past entails the same heuristics as prediction of the future; they also support the idea that the nature of the data-generating process is a key determinant of whether people fall into the gambler’s fallacy. It is suggested that the term retrospective gambler’s fallacy be used to describe situations where a streak is taken to indicate that the preceding unobserved outcome was of the opposite type, and that the phenomenon discovered by Oppenheimer and Monin be referred to as retrospective representativeness, or a retrospective belief in the law of small numbers.
Authors and Affiliations
William J. Matthews
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677729
- DOI -
- Views 152
- Downloads 0
Lay intuitions about overall evaluations of experiences
Previous research has identified important determinants of overall evaluations for experiences lived across time. By means of a novel guessing task, I study what decision-makers themselves consider important. As Informan...
Exploring the time-saving bias: How drivers misestimate time saved when increasing speed
According to the time-saving bias, drivers underestimate the time saved when increasing from a low speed and overestimate the time saved when increasing from a relatively high speed. Previous research used a specific typ...
Salient nutrition labels increase the integration of health attributes in food decision-making
Every day, people struggle to make healthy eating decisions. Nutrition labels have been used to help people properly balance the tradeoff between healthiness and taste, but research suggests that these labels vary in the...
Survey of time preference, delay discounting models
The paper surveys over twenty models of delay discounting (also known as temporal discounting, time preference, time discounting), that psychologists and economists have put forward to explain the way people actually tra...
The effects of anticipated regret on risk preferences of social and problem gamblers
Anticipated regret is an important determinant in risky decision making, however only a few studies have explored its role in problem gambling. This study tested for differences in the anticipation of regret among social...