Grouping and gambling: a Gestalt approach to understanding the gambler's fallacy.

Full Abstract

The gambler's fallacy was examined in terms of grouping processes. The gambler's fallacy is the tendency to erroneously believe that for independent events, recent or repeated instances of an outcome (e.g., a series of "heads" when flipping a coin) will make that outcome less likely on an upcoming trial. Grouping was manipulated such that a critical trial following a run of heads or tails was grouped together with previous trials (i.e., the last trial of "Block 1") or was the first trial of another group (the first trial of "Block 2"). As predicted, the gambler's fallacy was evident when the critical trial was grouped with the previous trials, but not when it was arbitrarily grouped with the next block of trials. Discussion centres on the processes underlying the gambler's fallacy and practical implications of these findings.

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Author information

Author/s: Roney, Christopher J R (CJ); Trick, Lana M (LM);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Kings College, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. croney@julian.uwo.ca

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Clinical Trial; Journal Article; Randomized Controlled Trial

Journal: Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale (Can J Exp Psychol), published in Canada. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Jun; vol 57 (issue 2) : pp 69-75

Dates: Created 2003/06/25; Completed 2003/08/04; Revised 2004/11/17;

PMID: 12822837, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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