The gambler's fallacy is the mistaken belief that if a particular random event has occurred more frequently than usual in the past, it is less likely to happen in the future, or vice versa, even though the events are actually statistically independent. The name comes from a famous instance at a Monte Carlo casino in 1913, when the roulette ball landed on black twenty six times in a row, and gamblers lost large sums betting increasingly heavily on red, wrongly reasoning that the streak made a red outcome overdue. The fallacy arises from a misapplication of the law of large numbers to a small number of trials, since although outcomes even out over a very large number of repetitions, no such correction operates on any individual independent event.
Facts
Core ClaimThe fallacy rests on treating a sequence of independent chance events as if each outcome must balance out prior ones, when in fact each event's probability is unaffected by what came before; the 1913 Monte Carlo roulette run is the canonical illustration, not the fallacy's origin. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Connections
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Gambler's fallacy
Wikimedia Foundationlead paragraph, definition
The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that an independent and equally probable outcome which happened less frequently than expected is more likely to happen in the future (or vice versa).
lead section, defining sentence
The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that an independent and equally probable outcome which happened less frequently than expected is more likely to happen in the future (or vice versa).
History section, Laplace paragraph, opening sentence
In 1796, Pierre-Simon Laplace described in A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities the ways in which men calculated their probability of having sons
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The gambler's fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the belief that an independent and equally probable outcome which happened less frequently than expected is more likely to happen in the future (or vice versa).
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