ABSTRACT
When people make judgments relating to chance occurrences they often rely upon mental ‘short cuts’. And whether it’s tossing a coin, choosing the lottery numbers or betting on the spin of a roulette wheel, gut feeling is a commonly-used, sometimes daring and cognitively undemanding short-cut way of making a decision. As a test of your ‘gambler’s intuition’ which one of the sequences of coin tosses in Figures 6.1a and 6.1b do you feel is more likely, Pattern A or Pattern B? Often, when called on to make judgements based on random sequences, research suggests that more people feel that Pattern A is more likely, and that the run of heads in Pattern C is more likely to be followed by a tail than by a head on the seventh toss. ‘Pattern A’ and a ‘tail’ seem intuitively to make sense as the more likely alternatives.
