Gambler's Fallacy Essay

As a shameless science geek, I spend the better half of my time browsing the inter-web. It was during one of these instances that I found myself scrolling through an article relating to a phenomenon, or rather a mistaken belief, known as the Gambler’s fallacy. And true to my inner geek, I continued to read about it in-depth, to get to its statistical and psychological roots.
The Gambler’s fallacy is the belief that if an event has occurred more than normal during some period, it will happen less frequently in the future or that if said event occurs lesser than usual during a given period then it will occur more frequently in the future. Essentially, the thought process indicates towards some sort of balance. Taking the classic and evergreen, albeit, overused example of a coin toss. A person subject to gambler’s fallacy
Nonetheless, studies have shown that the older one gets, the less susceptible they are to the Gambler’s fallacy. Another solution is the Roney and Trick experiment wherein they observed that when a person considers the outcomes to be independent, the fallacy is diminished. Hence, they concluded that instead of teaching the individuals about abstract concepts like randomness, training people to treat each event as independent of past events would result in decrease of Gambler’s fallacy. They felt that this was a constructive idea that would help prevent people from gambling when they’re losing under the false delusion that their chances of winning are yet to increase.
Overall, the fallacy is a very interesting read and brings to light the inner workings of the human mind. It is an appealing topic for all aspiring statisticians and psychologists alike, which goes to show how interlinked each discipline is. And I’m sure that even the gamblers amongst us found this post rather intriguing and would re-evaluate their strategies. Statistics, for the