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gambler's fallacy

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Also known as Monte Carlo fallacy, fallacy of the maturity of chances

mistaken belief that more frequent chance events will lead to less frequent chance events, or vice versa, to balance out

Described at

Your logical fallacy is the gambler's fallacy

You said that 'runs' occur to statistically independent phenomena such as roulette wheel spins.

yourlogicalfallacyis.com →

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Wikidata facts

Instance of
cognitive bias
Show 3 more facts
opposite of
hot-hand fallacy
Commons category
Gambler's fallacy
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Encyclopedic overview

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). The fallacy is commonly associated with gambling, where it may be mistakenly believed, for example, that the next dice roll is more likely to give '4' because there have recently been fewer '4's than expected, when in reality the probability of the next outcome being '4' is always 1/6, for each dice roll is an independent event.

The term "Monte Carlo fallacy" originates from an example of the phenomenon, in which the roulette wheel spun black 26 times in succession at the Monte Carlo Casino in 1913.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “gambler's fallacy” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.