Gambler's fallacies and reasoning blunders: Why Amos Tversky, maestro of the irrational, deserved this year's Nobel Prize in economics
Specifically, he noted, people have a tendency to expect the overall odds of a chance process (say, the 50 percent distribution of heads on a flipped coin, or the 46 percent accuracy of Toney's field-goal shooting) to apply to each and every segment of the process. For instance, when flipping a coin 20 times, it's not uncommon to see a string of four heads in a row. Yet when people are paying attention to a shorter sequence of the 20 coin flips, they are inclined to regard a string of four heads as nonrandom - as a hot streak - even though a strict back-and-forth of heads and tails throughout the 20 flips would be far less likely.
Specifically, he noted, people have a tendency to expect the overall odds of a chance process (say, the 50 percent distribution of heads on a flipped coin, or the 46 percent accuracy of Toney's field-goal shooting) to apply to each and every segment of the process. For instance, when flipping a coin 20 times, it's not uncommon to see a string of four heads in a row. Yet when people are paying attention to a shorter sequence of the 20 coin flips, they are inclined to regard a string of four heads as nonrandom - as a hot streak - even though a strict back-and-forth of heads and tails throughout the 20 flips would be far less likely.
