Judgment under Uncertainty: A. Tversky, D. Kahneman

Misconceptions of chance:

People ex­pect that a sequence of events generated by a random process will represent the essential characteristics of that process even when the sequence is short. In considering tosses of a coin for heads or tails, for example, people regard the sequence H-T-H-T-T-H to be more likely than the sequence H-H-H-T-T-T, which does not appear random, and also more likely than the sequence H-H-H-H-T-H, which does not represent the fairness of the coin. Thus, people expect that the essential characteristics of the process will be represented, not only globally in the entire sequence, but also locally in each of its parts. A locally representative sequence, how­ever, deviates systematically from chance expectation: it contains too many al­ternations and too few runs. Another consequence of the belief in local rep­resentativeness is the well-known gam­bler’s fallacy. After observing a long run of red on the roulette wheel, for example, most people erroneously be­lieve that black is now due, presumably because the occurrence of black will result in a more representative sequence than the occurrence of an additional red. Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a devia­tion in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not “corrected” as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.

Article

Resources >> Kahneman
(Photo: P. Casablanca)