麻豆淫院

Researchers explore the human tendency to look to the past to predict the future鈥攅ven when people rationally know outcomes are completely random. A fair coin flip is the prototypically random-outcome event. The findings are in the journal PNAS Nexus.

Russell Roberts and colleagues asked 12,000 people to predict coin flip outcomes in a sequence of five fair coin tosses鈥攕ome in person, some online. With such a large number of participants, they were able to analyze subsets of people who鈥攂y chance鈥攎ade a series of successful or unsuccessful guesses without any deception or manipulation of the results. The authors then asked participants to rate their expectations of success at guessing the outcomes of future coin flips and also asked participants to bet on their own future success in guessing the outcomes of coin flips.

The more successful guesses a participant made, on average, the higher they rated their chances of further success鈥攁nd the more they were willing to bet on that success. The reverse pattern was also true: unlucky guesses led to more pessimistic predictions about future performance and this negative effect was stronger than the positive effect. Knowledge about probability did not eliminate the effect.

According to the authors, humans have a tendency to use prior experience as a predictor of future performance, even if they know the outcome is random. In particular, pessimism about future outcomes following unlucky failure may be an underappreciated psychological driver of human behavior.