The retrospective gambler’s fallacy: Unlikely events, constructing the past, and multiple universes
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2009, Vol 4, Issue 5
Abstract
The gambler’s fallacy (Tune, 1964) refers to the belief that a streak is more likely to end than chance would dictate. In three studies, participants exhibited a retrospective gambler’s fallacy (RGF) in which an event that seems rare appears to come from a longer sequence than an event that seems more common. Study 1 demonstrates this bias for streaks, while Study 2 does so with single rare events and shows that the appearance of rarity is more important than actual rarity. Study 3 extends these findings from abstract gambling domains into real world domains to demonstrate the generalizability of the effects. The RGF follows from the law of small numbers (Tversky & Kahneman, 1971) and has many applications, from perceptions of the social world to philosophical debates about the existence of multiple universes.
Authors and Affiliations
Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Benoit Monin
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677690
- DOI -
- Views 166
- Downloads 0
Goal center width, how to count sequences, and the gambler’s fallacy in goal penalty shootouts
Previous research has reported that the gambler’s fallacy could be detected in goalkeepers’ behavior during penalty shootouts. Following repeated kicks in the same direction, goalkeepers were more likely to dive in the o...
Cross-cultural support for a link between analytic thinking and disbelief in God: Evidence from India and the United Kingdom
A substantial body of evidence suggests that favoring reason over intuition (employing an analytic cognitive style) is associated with reduced belief in God. In the current work, we address outstanding issues in this lit...
The role of process data in the development and testing of process models of judgment and decision making
The aim of this article is to evaluate the contribution of process tracing data to the development and testing of models of judgment and decision making (JDM). We draw on our experience of editing the “Handbook of proces...
Thinking dynamics and individual differences: Mouse-tracking analysis of the denominator neglect task
Most decision-making models describing individual differences in heuristics and biases tasks build on the assumption that reasoners produce a first incorrect answer in a quick, automatic way which they may or may not ove...
Predicting soccer matches: A reassessment of the benefit of unconscious thinking
We evaluate Dijksterhuis, Bos, van der Leij, & van Baaren (2009), Psychological Science, on the benefit of unconscious thinking in predicting the outcomes of soccer matches. We conclude that the evidence that unconscious...