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The gambler's fallacy in penalty shootouts

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 25; Issue: 14 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2015.05.007

1879-0445

Sebastian Braun, Ulrich Schmidt,

Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics

A well-known bias in subjective perceptions of chance is the gambler's fallacy: people typically believe that a streak generated by a series of independent random draws, such as a coin toss, becomes increasingly more likely to break when the streak becomes longer [1Tversky A. Kahneman D. Belief in the law of small numbers.Psychol. Bull. 1971; 76: 105-110Crossref Scopus (1643) Google Scholar]. In a fascinating study, Misirlisoy and Haggard [2Misirlisoy E. Haggard P. Asymmetric predictability and cognitive competition in football penalty shootouts.Curr. Biol. 2014; 25: 1918-1922Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (20) Google Scholar] analysed sequential behavior of kickers and goalkeepers in penalty shootouts. They report that goalkeepers are prone to the gambler's fallacy: after a series of three kicks in the same direction, goalkeepers are more likely to dive in the opposite direction at the next kick. Here we argue, first, that a binomial test is more appropriate for testing gambler's fallacy than the tests employed by Misirlisoy and Haggard [2Misirlisoy E. Haggard P. Asymmetric predictability and cognitive competition in football penalty shootouts.Curr. Biol. 2014; 25: 1918-1922Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (20) Google Scholar], and second, that penalty shootouts may not be well-suited to analyze the gambler's fallacy. Using a binomial test, we neither find statistically significant evidence for gambler’s fallacy in Misirlisoy and Haggard’s [2Misirlisoy E. Haggard P. Asymmetric predictability and cognitive competition in football penalty shootouts.Curr. Biol. 2014; 25: 1918-1922Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (20) Google Scholar] original data, nor in extended data, nor in data from an idealised laboratory experiment that we ran to address the second point. In line with Misirlisoy and Haggard’s [2Misirlisoy E. Haggard P. Asymmetric predictability and cognitive competition in football penalty shootouts.Curr. Biol. 2014; 25: 1918-1922Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (20) Google Scholar] original result, we do, however, find evidence for a systematic pattern of goalkeeper's behavior that kickers could exploit.