- The need for control
- The Influence of personal choice
- Dangerous information and near misses
Guarding Against the Dangers of Superstition
The Need for Control
Humans are inherently inclined to seek connections, often perceiving patterns where none exist, and facing challenges in accepting randomness. Our ancestors, grappling with a harsh and unpredictable environment, attempted to discern patterns or causality in events that were either random or beyond their comprehension. This led to the development of superstitions and rituals as means to attain some semblance of control over their circumstances, practices that persist in modern times.
The animal kingdom provides numerous examples of this behavior, notably illustrated by an experiment conducted by Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner in 1948.
Skinner's experiment involved automatically dispensing food to pigeons at set intervals. Regardless of the pigeons' actions at the time of food delivery—be it head nodding or turning—they began to associate their actions with the food's arrival, developing unique rituals they believed triggered the reward.
This tendency towards associating control with specific behaviors is not exclusive to animals. Humans exhibit similar patterns, evident in behaviors like avoiding black cats or not walking under ladders, and even among city traders who feel they can exert control over random outcomes.
Skinner coined the term Operant Conditioning to describe behaviors reinforced, punished, or unaffected by outcomes. This concept is vividly demonstrated in casino gaming, where the illusion of control is often heightened by personal choice.
The Influence of Personal Choice
Despite the randomness inherent in most casino games, players often harbor a false belief in their ability to influence game outcomes through personal choices.
We seem to be hard-wired to seek causality - finding correlations where there are none- and struggle to see events as independent. This illusion of control is showcased by players betting more heavily when they physically roll the dice in Craps or spin the roulette wheel themselves. In these instances, players mistakenly believe in their ability to affect the game's outcome through their actions. This phenomenon extends to bettors who follow the wagers of someone on a winning streak, mistakenly perceiving this person to have greater control over the outcomes.
The same false perception applies to lottery players who prefer selecting their numbers over random machine picks, despite identical odds of winning. Interestingly, choosing random numbers could potentially increase winnings due to the common practice of using birth dates, which limits number selection to 1 through 31 and increases the chance of sharing prizes.
In casinos, actions leading to success or failure are respectively reinforced or discouraged, influencing future behavior. However, the complexity of life and gambling means that defining clear successes and failures—and the behaviors leading to them—is not straightforward, leading to irrational reinforcement of certain behaviors.
Dangerous Information and Near Misses
The adage "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" holds especially true in gambling. A modicum of knowledge about a team, sport, or event can lead to an overestimation of one's predictive capabilities.
Successes, even those unexpected, lead bettors to retroactively justify their decisions, reinforcing their perceived control over the outcomes. This phenomenon is also evident in "near misses," where bettors see almost winning as validation of their strategy, ignoring the likely absence of any real correlation.
To counteract these biases, it's advisable to recognize the randomness of certain outcomes, test hypotheses individually, scrutinize betting advice critically, and learn to distinguish between meaningful patterns and mere noise.
Like superstition, the erroneous correlation between betting outcomes and specific behaviors is a difficult tendency to overcome, being deeply ingrained in human psychology. For gamblers, maintaining discipline in analyzing betting patterns and reserving "lucky charms" for social events, not betting strategies, is key.
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