Why chance feels wrong
After five heads in a row, tails FEELS due. It is not: the coin has no memory.
Brains expect random things to LOOK mixed up, so a streak feels broken and a mix feels right.
That feeling makes people bet against streaks and trust patterns that are not there.
Knowing the trap by name is most of the defence: every exact sequence is equally likely.
Then and now
The 1972 lab findings survived four decades of testing and are now the backbone of behavioural economics and a Nobel prize.
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. (1972)
Where it began“Subjective probability: A judgment of representativeness”
Cognitive Psychology, 3, 430-454
People judge how likely something is by how typical it looks, which produces systematic, predictable errors about chance.
Kahneman, D. (2011)
State of the art“Thinking, Fast and Slow”
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (book)
Four decades of heuristics research consolidated: representativeness and its cousins are systematic, predictable, and trainable to notice.
What we do and do not claim
This teaches how chance works and how feelings mislead. It is the opposite of gambling: it is the vaccine.