The Gambler's Fallacy and the Illusion of Control

After a run of the same result, most people feel the opposite is due. That is the gambler's fallacy. Its companion is the illusion of control: the sense that having a hand in the choice improves the odds. Both are misjudgements.

The gambler's fallacy: treating independent events as if they remember

Each spin of a roulette wheel, each roll of the dice and each freshly shuffled hand is unrelated to the one before. People nevertheless expect short runs to look balanced, so after five reds in a row intuition insists that black is next.

The example quoted most often is the Monte Carlo casino in 1913, when black is reported to have come up twenty-six times in a row. Many players kept raising their bets on red, reasoning that black could not possibly appear again.

The illusion of control: acting feels like influencing

In a series of experiments published in 1975, the psychologist Ellen Langer showed that in situations decided purely by chance, adding elements such as personal choice, physical involvement or the appearance of competition leads people to overestimate their chances. She named the effect the illusion of control.

In modern games this is picking your own numbers, pressing the stop button yourself, or choosing when to reveal a card. These actions feel like participation. Where the outcome is set by probability, they do not change it.

Telling skill from chance

• Ask whether choosing at random would change the long-run result. If not, the game is pure chance.
• Reading past results is looking backwards. It is not prediction.
• The only things truly under your control are whether you play, how much, and for how long.