The retrospective gambler’s fallacy: Unlikely events, constructing the past, and multiple universes

By Daniel M. Oppenheimer, Benoît Monin. Judgment and Decision Making, 2009

60 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b6db73daf3333884098a21930f82e7874e40eecd

Citations in the corpus

• Investigating Variation in Replicability: A “Many Labs” Replication Project (2022, unknown): “Oppenheimer and Monin (2009) investigated whether the rarity of an independent, chance observation influenced beliefs about what occurred before that event.”